[Postmark: June 24, 1846]
Tuesday.
Ever tenderest, kindest and most beloved, I thank you
from the quick of my heart, where the thought of you lives
constantly ! In this world full of sadness, of which I have
had my part . . full of sadness and bitterness and wrong
. . full of most ghastly contrasts of life and death, strength
and weakness side by side . . it is too much, to have you
to hold by, as the river rushes on . . too much good, too
much grace for such as I, .. as I feel always, and cannot
cease to feel !
Oh yes – it has shocked me, -this dreadful news of poor
Mr. Haydon – it chilled the blood in my veins when I heard
it from Alfred, who, seeing the Times at the Great Western
Terminus, wrote out the bare extract and sent it to me
by the post. He just thought that the Chronicle did not
mention it, . . and that I had not seen Mr. Haydon . . he
did not perhaps think how it would shock me.
For, this I cannot help thinking. Could anyone –
could my own hand even . . have averted what has happened”?
My head and heart have ached to-day over the inactive
hand ! But, for the moment, it was out of my power, with-
out an application where it would have been useless and
then, I never fancied this case to be more than a piece of a
continuous case . . of a habit fixed. Two years ago he sent
me boxes and pictures precisely so, and took them back
again poor, poor Haydon ! – as he will not this time. And
he said last week that Peel had sent him fifty pounds . .
adding . . ‘ I do not however want charity, but employ-
ment.’ Also, I have been told again and again (oh, never
by you my beloved ! ) that to give money there, was to drop
it into a hole of the ground.
But if to have dropped it so, dust to dust, would have
saved a living man – what then?
Yet of the three notes I had from him last week, the
first was written so lightly, that the second came to desire
me not to attribute to him a ‘ want of feeling.’ And who
could thjnk . . contemplate . . this calamity ? May God
have mercy on the strongest of us, for we are weak. Oh,
that a man so high hearted and highly endowed . . a bold
man, who has thrown down gauntlet after gauntlet in the
face of the world – that such a man should go mad for a
few paltry pounds ! For he was mad if he killed himself !
of that I am as sure as if I knew it. If he killed himself,
he was mad first. .
Some day, when I have the heart to look for it, you
shall see his last note. I understand now that there are
touches in it of a desperate pathos – but never could he
have meditated self-destruction while writing that note.
He said he should write six sets, of lectures more . . six
more volumes. He said he was painting a new background
to a picture, which made him ‘ feel as if his soul had wings.’
And then he hoped his brain would not turn. And he
‘ gloried ‘ in the naval dangers of his son at sea. And he
repeated an old phrase of his, which I had heard from him
often before, and which now rings hollowly to the ears of
my memory . . that he couldrit and wouldn’t die. Strange
and dreadful !
It is nearly two years since we had a correspondence of
some few months – from which at last I receded, notwith-
standing the individuality and spirit of his letters, and my
admiration for a certain fervour and magnanimity of genius,
no one could deny to him. His very faults partook of that
nobleness. But for a year and a half or more perhaps, I
scarcely have written or heard from him – until last week
when he wrote to ask for a shelter for his boxes and pictures.
If you had enquired of me the week before, I might have
answered that I did not wish to renew the intercourse –
yet who could help being shocked and saddened ? Would
it have availed, to have dropped something into that ‘ hole
in the ground ? ‘ Oh, to imagine that \ Yet a little would
have been but as nothing ! – and he did not ask even for a
little and I should have been ashamed to have offered
but a little. Yet I cannot turn the thought away – that
I did not offer.
Henry went to the house as I begged him. His son
came to the door, and to a general enquiry ‘after the
family,’ said that ‘Mr. Haydon was dead and that his
family were quite as well as could be expected.’ That
horrible banality is all I know more than you know.
Yesterday at Rogers’s, Mrs. Jameson led me to his
picture of Napoleon at St. Helena. At the moment we
looked at it, his hand was scarcely cold, perhaps. Surely
it was not made of the commonest clay of men – that
hand !
I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest dearest, as if it
were right rather to think of doing myself that good and
relief, than of you who have to read all. But you spoil me
into an excess of liberty, by your tenderness. Best in the
world ! Oh – you help me to live – I am better and lighter
since I have drawn near to you even on this paper – already
I am better and lighter. And now I am going to dream of
you . . to meet you on some mystical landing place . . in
order to be quite well to-morrow. Oh – we are so selfish
on this earth, that nothing grieves us very long, let it be
ever so grievous, unless we are touched in ourselves . . in
the apple of our eye . . in the quick of our heart . . in
what you are, and where you are . . my own dearest
beloved ! So you need not be afraid for me ! We all look
to our own, as I to you ; the thunderbolts may strike the
tops of the cedars, and, except in the first start, none of us
be moved. True it is of me – not of you perhaps – certainly
you are better than I, in all things. Best in the world, you
are ! – no one is like you. Can you read what I have
written ? Do not love me less ! Do you think that I
cannot feel you love me, through all this distance? If you
loved me less, I should know, without a word or a sign.
Because I live by your loving me ! I am your
BA.