All the papers have reached me--3 separate packets (with the handwriting on them that makes my heart give a glad bound). I look through them full of interest & curiosity, wanting to realize as I do, in things small as well as things large, my Land of Promise--the land where I hope to plant down my children--so strong in the faith that they, & perhaps still more those that come after them will bless me for that (consciously or unconsciously, it doesn't matter which) I should set out with a cheerful heart on that errand if I knew the first breath I drew on American soil would be my last in life. I searched hopeful for a few words telling of improvement in your health in the last paper. But perhaps it does not follow from there being no much mention that there is no progress. May you be steadily though ever so slowly gaining ground, my Darling! Now that I understand the nature of the malady (a deficient flow of blood to the brain, if it has been rightly explained to me) I realize that recovery must be very gradual: as the coming on of it must have been slow & insidious. And perhaps that, & also even from before the war time with its tremendous strain, emotional & physical, is part of the price paid for the greatness of the Poems & for their immortal destiny--the rapt exaltation the intensity of joy & sorrow & struggle--all that went to give them their life-giving power. For I have felt many times in reading them as if the light and heat of their sacred fire must needs have consumed the vital energies of him in whose breast it was generated, faster then even the most splendid physique could renew itself. For our sakes, for humanity's sake, you suffer now, I do not doubt it, every bit as much as the soldier's wounds are for his country's sake. The more precious, the more tenderly cherished, the more drawing the hearts that understand with ineffable yearnings, for this.