to Miss Morse

Vailima, Samoan Islands, October 7th, 1892.

DEAR MADAM,—I have a great diffidence in answering your valued letter.  It would be difficult for me to express the feelings with which I read it—and am now trying to re-read it as I dictate this.

You ask me to forgive what you say ‘must seem a liberty,’ and I find that I cannot thank you sufficiently or even find a word with which to qualify your letter.  Dear Madam, such a communication even the vainest man would think a sufficient reward for a lifetime of labour.  That I should have been able to give so much help and pleasure to your sister is the subject of my grateful wonder.

That she, being dead, and speaking with your pen, should be able to repay the debt with such a liberal interest, is one of those things that reconcile us with the world and make us take hope again.  I do not know what I have done to deserve so beautiful and touching a compliment; and I feel there is but one thing fit for me to say here, that I will try with renewed courage to go on in the same path, and to deserve, if not to receive, a similar return from others.

You apologise for speaking so much about yourselves.  Dear Madam, I thought you did so too little.  I should have wished to have known more of those who were so sympathetic as to find a consolation in my work, and so graceful and so tactful as to acknowledge it in such a letter as was yours.

Will you offer to your mother the expression of a sympathy which (coming from a stranger) must seem very airy, but which yet is genuine; and accept for yourself my gratitude for the thought which inspired you to write to me and the words which you found to express it.

Robert Louis Stevenson.