Your wild and ravening commands were received; but cannot be obeyed. And anyway, I do assure you I am getting better every day; and if the weather would but turn, I should soon be observed to walk in hornpipes. Truly I am on the mend. I am still very careful. I have the new dictionary; a joy, a thing of beauty, and—bulk. I shall be raked i’ the mools before it’s finished; that is the only pity; but meanwhile I sing. I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of _Brashiana_ and other works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare to make a first start at trying to understand my profession. O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such oceans! Could one get out of sight of land—all in the blue? Alas not, being anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic being still about us. But what a great space and a great air there is in these small shallows where alone we venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love—to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art. I _am_ not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely. And yet I produce nothing, am the author of _Brashiana_ and other works: tiddy-iddity—as if the works one wrote were anything but ‘prentice’s experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks, the real works and all the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see. Sursum Corda: Heave ahead: Here’s luck. Art and Blue Heaven, April and God’s Larks. Green reeds and the sky-scattering river. A stately music. Enter God! R. L. S. Ay, but you know, until a man can write that ‘Enter God,’ he has made no art! None! Come, let us take counsel together and make some! TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude_, _Hyères_ [_Summer_ 1883]. DEAR LAD,—Glad you like _Fontainebleau_. I am going to be the means, under heaven, of aërating or liberating your pages. The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong tack is _triste_ but widespread. Thus Hokusai will be really a gossip on convention, or in great part. And the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures: else it’s bosh. . . .