to Edmund Gosse

San Francisco, Cal., April 16 [1880].

MY DEAR GOSSE,—You have not answered my last; and I know you will repent when you hear how near I have been to another world.  For about six weeks I have been in utter doubt; it was a toss-up for life or death all that time; but I won the toss, sir, and Hades went off once more discomfited.  This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that I have a friendly game with that gentleman.  I know he will end by cleaning me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit of that sort of gambling seems to be a part of my nature; it was, I suspect, too much indulged in youth; break your children of this tendency, my dear Gosse, from the first.  It is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than opium—I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool.  I have been very very sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease; and I have cause to bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford (a name the Muse repels), that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once more upon a little hilltop, with a fair prospect of life and some new desire of living.  Yet I did not wish to die, neither; only I felt unable to go on farther with that rough horseplay of human life: a man must be pretty well to take the business in good part.  Yet I felt all the time that I had done nothing to entitle me to an honourable discharge; that I had taken up many obligations and begun many friendships which I had no right to put away from me; and that for me to die was to play the cur and slinking sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the decisive fight.  Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and here you can triumph.  I have been reduced to writing verses for amusement.  A fact.  The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after all.  But I’ll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the heart to burn them while I live.  Do write.  I shall go to the mountains as soon as the weather clears; on the way thither, I marry myself; then I set up my family altar among the pinewoods, 3000 feet, sir, from the disputatious sea.—I am, dear Weg, most truly yours,

R. L. S.