May I, here is this old Africa & very unhappy send a message to you in America who are helping me to bear my sorrow.
This dry month loc.03246.002_large.jpg I
suffered the greatest loss that a young man can suffer by the death of the girl I
loved, the girl who was to have been my wife. She loved your poems dearly: she
taught me who loved them too to understand them as I had never understood them
before. They were among the last things we ever read together but a few weeks ago in
England when my life seemed so happy & there seemed to be no shadow of the
implacable
loc.03246.003_large.jpg
Death. I am reading your poems now again alone & in the bitterness of my heart
in this place to which I have come to struggle with my sorrow. They are helping me,
they are strengthening me & I wish to send you these few words of thanks &
gratitude for the sake of my dead love & my living grief. Camerado, will you
give me your hand across the sea.
Correspondent:
Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859–1936) was an
Irish novelist and politician. He served as a member of Parliament from 1884 to
1892.