I fully understand your great aversion to letters and other off-writing. You have done a perfectly Herculean amount of the most difficult productive work, and I believe you to be much more tired than you probably yourself suppose or know. Both mentally and physically, I imagine that a long vacation, in other scenes, with no sense of duty, would do you a world of good. I don't say the full fifteen months--for I imagine that one summer and one academic half-year would perhaps do the business better--you could preserve the relaxed and desultory condition as long as that probably, whilst later you'd begin to chafe, and _then_ you'd better be back in your own library. If _my_ continuing abroad is hindering this, my sorrow will be extreme. Of course I must some time come to a definite decision about my own relations to the College, but I am reserving that till the end of 1900, when I shall write to Eliot in full. There is still a therapeutic card to play, of which I will say nothing just now, and I don't want to commit myself before that has been tried. You say nothing of the second course of Aberdeen lectures, nor do you speak at all of the Dublin course. Strange omissions, like your not sending me your Ingersoll lecture! I assume that the publication of [your] Gifford Volume II will not be very long delayed. I am eager to read them. I can read philosophy now, and have just read the first three _Lieferungen_ of K. Fischer's "Hegel." I must say I prefer the original text. Fischer's paraphrases always flatten and dry things out; and he gives no rich sauce of his own to compensate. I have been sorry to hear from Palmer that he also has been very tired. One can't keep going forever! P. has been like an archangel in his letters to me, and I am inexpressibly grateful. Well! everybody has been kinder than I deserve.... _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ ROME, _Dec. 25, 1900_.