University of Virginia Library

Dear Henderson:—You need feel no hesitancy about accepting
in full every advantage in the position I propose
to you, since you may find it weighted with disadvantages
and incumbrances you do not dream of. In short, I shall
ask of you services for which no money can pay, and till
I knew you there was no man in the world of whom I had
dared to ask them. I want a friend, courageous, calm, and
true, capable of thinking broadly and justly, one superior
to ordinary prejudices, who may be to me another, and in
some hours a stronger, self.

I can fancy your surprise at this language, and yet I have
not read you aright if you are not one of a thousand on
whom I may rest this hope.

You often rally me on my lack of enterprise and ambition,
on my hermit habits. The truth is, Henderson, I am
a strained and unseaworthy craft, for whom the harbor
and shore are the safest quarters. I have lost trust in
myself, and dare not put out to sea without feeling the
strong hand of a friend with me.

I suppose no young fellow ever entered the course of

life with more self-confidence. I had splendid health, high
spirits, great power of application, and great social powers.
I lived freely and carelessly on the abundance of my physical
resources. I could ride, and row, and wrestle with the
best. I could lead in all social gaieties, yet keep the head
of my class, as I did the first two years of my college life.
It seems hardly fair to us human beings that we should be
so buoyed up with ignorant hope and confidence in the beginning
of our life, and that we should be left in our ignorance
to make mistakes which no after years can retrieve.
I thought I was perfectly sure of myself; I thought my
health and strength were inexhaustible, and that I could
carry weights that no man else could. The drain of my
wide-awake exhausing life upon my nervous system I made
up by the insidious use of stimulants. I was like a man
habitually overdrawing his capital, and ignorant to what
extent. In my third college year this began to tell perceptibly
on my nerves. I was losing self-control, losing my
way in life; I was excitable, irritable, impatient of guidance
or reproof, and at times horribly depressed. I sought
refuge from this depression in social exhilaration, and
having lost control of myself became a marked man among
the college authorities; in short, I was overtaken in a convivial
row, brought under college discipline, and suspended.

It was at this time that I went into your neighborhood to
study and teach. I found no difficulty in getting the highest
recommendations as to scholarship from some of the
college officers who were for giving me a chance to recover
myself; and for the rest I was thoroughly sobered and
determined on a new course. Here commenced my acquaintance
with your cousin, and there followed a few
months remembered ever since as the purest happiness of
my life. I loved her with all there was in me,—heart, soul,
mind and strength,—with a love which can never die. She
also loved me, more perhaps than she dared to say, for she
was young, hardly come to full consciousness of herself.
She was then scarcely sixteen, ignorant of her own nature,

ignorant of life, and almost frightened at the intensity of
the feeling which she excited in me, yet she loved me. But
before we could arrive at anything like a calm understanding,
her father came between us. He was a trustee of the
Academy, and a dispute arose between him and me in which
he treated me with an overbearing haughtiness which aroused
the spirit of opposition in me. I was in the right and
knew I was, and I defended my course before the other
trustees in a manner which won them over to my way of
thinking—a victory which he never forgave.

Previously to this encounter I had been in the habit of
visiting in his family quite intimately. Caroline and I
enjoyed that kind of unwatched freedom which the customs
of New England allow to young people. I always attended
her home from the singing-school and the weekly lectures,
and the evening after my encounter with the trustees I did
the same. At the door of his house he met us, and as Caroline
passed in he stopped me, and briefly saying that my
visits there would no longer be permitted, closed the door
in my face. I tried to obtain an interview soon after, when
he sternly upbraided me as one that had stolen into the
village and won their confidence on false pretences, adding
that if he and the trustees had known the full history of
my college life I should never have been permitted to teach
in their village or have access to their families. It was in
vain to attempt a defense to a man determined to take the
very worst view of facts which I did not pretend to deny.
I knew that I had been irreproachable as to my record in
the school, that I had been faithful in my duties, that the
majority of parents and pupils were on my side; but I could
not deny the harsh facts which he had been enabled to
obtain from some secret enemy, and which he thought justified
him in saying that he would rather see his daughter
in her grave than to see her my wife. The next day Caroline
did not appear in school. Her father, with prompt
energy, took her immediately to an academy fifty miles
away.

I did not attempt to follow her or write to her; a profound
sense of discouragement came over me, and I looked
on my acquaintance with her with a sort of remorse.
The truth bitterly told by an enemy with a vivid power
of statement is a tonic oftentimes too strong for one's power
of endurance. I never reflected so seriously on the
responsibility which a man assumes, in awakening the
slumbering feelings of a woman, and fixing them on himself.
Under the reproaches of Caroline's father I could
but regard this as a wrong I had done, and which could be
expiated only by leaving her to peace in forgetfulness.

I resolved that I would never let her hear from me again,
till I had fully proved myself to be possessed of such
powers of self-control as would warrant me in offering to
be the guardian of her happiness.

But when I set myself to the work, I found what many
another does, that I had reckoned without my host. The
man who has begun to live and work by artificial stimulant,
never knows where he stands, and can never count
upon himself with any certainty. He lets into his castle a
servant who becomes the most tyrannical of masters. He
may resolve to turn him out, but will find himself reduced
to the condition in which he can neither do with nor without
him.

In short, the use of stimulant to the brain-power brings on
a disease, in whose paroxysms a man is no more his own
master than in the ravings of fever, a disease that few have
the knowledge to understand, and for whose manifestations
the world has no pity.

I cannot tell you the dire despair that came upon me,
when after repeated falls, bringing remorse and self-up-braiding
to me, and drawing upon me the severest reproaches
of my friends, the idea at last flashed upon me that I had
indeed become the victim of a sort of periodical insanity
in which the power of the will was overwhelmed by a wild
unreasoning impulse. I remember when a boy reading an
account of a bridal party sailing gaily on the coast of Norway

who were insidiously drawn into the resistless outer
whirl of the great Maelström. The horror of the situation
was the moment when the shipmaster learned that the
ship no longer obeyed the rudder; the cruelty of it was the
gradual manner in which the resistless doom came upon
them. The sun still shone, the sky was still blue. The
shore, with its green trees and free birds and blooming
flowers, was near and visible as they went round and round
in dizzy whirls, past the church with its peaceful spire,
past the home cottages, past the dwelling of friends and
neighbors, past parents, brothers, and sisters who stood on
the shore warning and shrieking and entreating; helpless,
hopeless, with bitterness in their souls, with all that made
life lovely so near in sight, and yet cut off from it by the
swirl of that tremendous fate!

There have been just such hours to me, in which I have
seen the hopes of manhood, the love of woman, the possession
of a home, the opportunities for acquisition of name,
and position, and property, all within sight, within grasp,
yet all made impossible by my knowledge and consciousness
of the deadly drift and suction of that invisible
whirlpool.

The more of manliness there yet is left in man in these
circumstances, the more torture. The more sense of honor,
love of reputation, love of friends, conscience in duty,
the more anguish. I read once a frightful story of a woman
whose right hand was changed to a serpent, which at
intervals was roused to flendish activity and demanded
of her the blood of her nearest and dearest friends. The
hideous curse was inappeasable, and the doomed victim
spell-bound, powerless to resist. Even so the man who has
lost the control of his will is driven to torture those he
loves, while he shivers with horror and anguish at the
sight.

I have seen the time when I gave earnest thanks that
no woman loved me, that I had no power to poison the
life of a wife with the fear, and terror, and lingering agony
of watching the slow fulfillment of such a doom.

It is enough to say that with every advantage—of friends,
patronage, position—I lost all.

The world is exigéant. It demands above everything that
every man shall keep step. He who cannot, falls to the rear,
and is gradually left behind as the army moves on.

The only profession left to me was one which could avail
itself of my lucid intervals.

The power of clothing thought with language is in our
day growing to be a species of talent for which men are
willing to pay, and I have been able by this to make myself
a name and a place in the world; and what is more, I hope
to do some good in it.

I have reflected upon my own temptation, endeavoring
to divest myself of the horror with which my sense of the
suffering and disappointment I have caused my friends
inspires me. I have settled in my own mind the limits of
human responsibility on this subject, and have come to
the conclusion that it is to be regarded precisely as Mary
Lamb and Charles Lamb regarded the incursion of the mania
which destroyed the peace of their life. A man who
undertakes to comprehend, and cure himself, has to fight
his way back alone. Nobody understands, nobody sympathizes
with him, nobody helps him—not because the world
is unfeeling, but because it is ignorant of the laws which
govern this species of insanity.

It took me, therefore, a great while to form my system of
self-cure. I still hope for this. I, the sane and sound, I
hope to provide for the insane and unsound intervals of my
life. And my theory is, briefly, a total and eternal relinquishment
of the poisonous influence, so that nature may
have power to organize new and healthy brain-matter, and
to remove that which is diseased. Nature will do this, in
the end, for she is ever merciful; there is always “forgiveness
with her, that she may be feared.” Since you
have known me, you have seen that I live the life of an anchorite—that
my hours are regular, that I avoid exciting
society, that I labor with uniformity, and that I never
touch any stimulating drink. It is a peculiarity of cases

like mine that for lengths of time the morbid disease
leaves us, and we feel the utmost aversion to any thing of
the kind. But there is always a danger lying behind this
subtle calm. Three or four drops of alcohol, such as form
the basis of a tincture which a doctor will order without
scruple, will bring back the madness. One five-minutes
inadvertence will upset the painful work of years, and carry
one away as with a flood. When I did not know this, I was
constantly falling. Society through all its parts is full of
traps and pitfalls for such as I, and the only refuge is in
flight.

It has been part of my rule of life to avoid all responsibilities
that might involve others in my liability to failure.
It is now a very long time since I have felt any abnormal
symptoms, and if I had not so often been thrown down after
such a period of apparent calm, I might fancy my dangers
over, and myself a sound man.

The younger Hestermann was a class-mate and chum of
mine in college, and one whose friendship for me has held
on through thick and thin. He has a trust in me that imposes
on me a painful sense of responsibility. I would not
fail him for a thousand worlds, yet if one of my hours of
darkness should come I should fail ignominiously.

Only one motive determined me to take their offer—it gave
me a chance to provide for you and for Caroline.

I dare do it only through trusting you for a friendship
beyond that of the common; in short, for a brotherly kindness
such as Charles Lamb showed to Mary, his sister. If
the curse returns upon me, you must not let me ruin myself
and you; you must take me to an asylum till I recover.

In asking this of you, I am glad to be able to offer what will
be to you an independent position, and give you that home
and fireside which I may not dare to hope for myself.

In the end, I expect to conquer, either here or hereafter.
I believe in the Fatherhood of God, and that He has a
purpose even in letting us blindly stumble through life
as we do; and through all my weakness and unworthiness I

still hold his hand. I know that the whole temptation is one
of brain and nerves, and when He chooses he can release
me. The poor brain will be cold and still for good and all
some day, and I shall be free and able to see, I trust, why I
have been suffered thus to struggle. After all, immortality
opens a large hope, that may overpay the most unspeakable
bitterness of life.

Meanwhile, you can see why I do not wish to be brought
into personal relations with the only woman I have ever
loved, or ever can love, and whose happiness I fear to put
in peril. It is an unspeakable delight and relief to have
this power of doing for her, but she must not know of it.

Also, let me tell you that you are to me more transparent
than you think. It requires only the penetration of
friendship to see that you are in love, and that you hesitate
and hang back because of an unwillingness to match
your fortunes with hers.

Let me suggest, do you not owe it as a matter of justice,
after so much intimacy as has existed, to give her the opportunity
to choose between a man and circumstances? If the
arrangement between us goes into effect, you will have a
definite position and a settled income. Go to her like a
man and lay it before her, and if she is worthy of you she
will come to you.

God grant you a home and fireside, Harry, and I will be
the indulgent uncle in the chimney-corner.