I am grieved to hear that you have been so unwell and can only trust that your physician is a true prophet, and that you will recover and be as well as ever. I have myself known a case of cerebral anæmia in a young lady living near me. She lost her mind and no one who saw her believed she could live; but under the superintendence of a good doctor she has perfectly recovered and looks plumper and fresher than ever she did before.
This is the first letter I have written for weeks, and I am afraid I write rather obscurely, for my hand and arm have been crippled with rheumatism (I hope it is not gout), and I am not yet perfectly recovered.
I was beholden to you for your Democratic Vistas, and if I did not answer and acknowledge them I regret to have done so; but if you knew how great the mass of my correspondence is, and how much I dislike letter-writing, I doubt not, you would forgive me easily.
When I next hear of or from you may the news be that you are fully re-established in your old vigor and body: Meanwhile believe me
Yours ever A Tennyson