But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to provoke you to recrimination in your next letter. Let it be as substantial and succulent as the last, with its hollow hyperbolic expression of esteem, was the opposite, and I assure you that the past shall be forgotten.--I am, as you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck," bodily. I left home without telling anyone about it, because, hoping I might get well, I wanted to keep it a secret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I thought of telling you "in confidence," but refrained, partly because walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because of the habit of secrecy that had grown on me in six months. I dare say Harry has kept you supplied with information respecting my history up to the present time, and perhaps read you portions of my letters. My history, internal and external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally uneventful. The external, with the exception of three R. R. voyages (to and from Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles that of a sea anemone; and the internal, notwithstanding the stimulus of a new language and country, has contracted the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to be the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and solitude; and when the bodily condition is such that muscular and cerebral activity not only remain _unexcited_, but are _solicited_, by an idiotic hope of recovery, to crass indolence, the "elasticity" of one's spirits can't be expected to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired Harry's pluck more and more. _Pain_, however intense, is light and life, compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct, and where your "conscience," in the form of an aspiration towards recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced "must be felt to be appreciated."