ENPages
Cherbourg, France July 25. 1893
My dearest Helen : I have to begin my letters with excuses for no news, for in the way of personal experience I have nothing to record beyond confinement to the cabin & a sorrowful failure to get any letters from home. My last date is still the 7th, others have them up the 14th and I am at a loss to account for it. It will be two weeks I'd have - now that I have not been out of the cabin - but the doctors think I have really progressed very far, and to day for the first my leg is not in splint. I myself recognise a very decided improvement and hope to be around pretty freely in a week. We left Kingstown Sunday morning early, and arrived here at 11 p.m. last night, having had a very
pleasant passage with a minimum of fog, the great drawback to the English Channel. It is thirty years this summer since I was last here, in the old sailing ship Macedonian, of which Adm. Luce was then Captain; and it is a quaint feeling to see still the same old ??illegible?? with its fortifications which will doubtless be here thirty years hence when I shall likely have gone the way of all mankind. I have little association with the place although I was also here in 1858. I only landed in /63 to go to Paris and thence by land to Cadiz. The countryside as I see it from the ports is lovely. "The pleasant land of France" - never were truer words written. We will remain till Saturday or Monday and then to Southampton From the latter place the Adml. tells me he means to cross to Havre, remain there till about Sept 1 - then to Lisbon - Gibraltar then end of September, and Nice in Oct-
ober. Then he will tie up for the winter.
I am greatly interested in your poetry - for I cannot but think than an intel- ligent, reading of it will tend to develop you all round. I would like you for instance to compare the following sonnets 9, 18, 217 which have all the same motive, and are in my judgment pitched upon a false key, because a half truth the impermanence of the deepest love between man and woman. Study then, so as fully to apprehend their meaning, and then contrast them with two ^three^ others 57, 190, 247 whose theme is fidelity and constancy. See which rings truest to your truest self. Compare with these again in the Golden Treasury, 194; and again the words on the enclosed slip, written by an English lady over two hundred years ago to her husband, a woman who was mother to the most charming woman of her generation and who had been twenty years married when she wrote. To my mind, despite the 20 years of married life it is the sweetest love letter I ever read. Where I am truth lie with the first three - exquisite as they are - or with the sentiment that inspired the others. I have been very much struck with the way study upon this volume of Sonnets repay - for in truth it is not the new things that feed the soul, but those which often reading has made familiar friends
Tell mamma that I have read and dispatched the proofs of the article for the Atlantic and I find that between you you have avoided any mistakes. I had to make more than my usual corrections, due I think to the disturbance amid which I wrote. Home is well forward I hope I may finish this week before coming off the list or reaching the distractions of race week as Cowes. With dearest love for our sweet mamma and very much for yourself and Nell and Lyle
Your dearest father A. T. Mahan
x x x x x x
Mr. Seladine comes in with your letter, whom I am engaged to entertain a little; besides it is supper time, or else I should bestow one side of this paper in making love to you! and since I may with modesty express it, I will say that if it be love to think on you sleeping and waking, to discourse of nothing with pleasure but what concerns you, to wish myself every hour with you, and to pray for you with as much devotion as for my own soul - then certainly it may be said that I am in love; and this is all that you shall at this time hear from your
D. Leycester
Kiss my boy Algernon for me, who sent me a very prettie French letter.
[pencil: July 25 1893] [postmark: CHERBOURG MANCHE 7ct 25 JUL 93]
Miss Helen Evans Mahan Quogue Long Island N. Y.
Etats-Unis d'Amerique