_To H.S. Boyd_
1 Beacon Terrace, Torquay:
Wednesday, November 27, 1839.

If you can forgive me, my ever dear friend, for a silence which has
not been intended, there will be another reason for being thankful to
you, in addition to the many. To do myself justice, one of my earliest
impulses on seeing my beloved Arabel, and recurring to the kindness
with which you desired that happiness for me long before I possessed
it, was to write and tell you how happy I felt. But she had promised,
she said, to write herself, and moreover she and only she was to send
you the ballad--in expectation of your dread judgment upon which I
delayed my own writing. It came in the first letter we received in our
new house, on the first of last October. An hour after reading it, I
was upon my bed; was attacked by fever in the night, and from that
bed have never even been lifted since--to these last days of
November--except for one hour a day to the sofa at two yards'
distance. I am very much better now, and have been so for some time;
but my physician is so persuaded, he says, that it is easier to do
me harm than good, that he will neither permit any present attempt at
further exertion, nor hint at the time when it may be advisable for
him to permit it. Under the circumstances it has of course been more
difficult than usual for me to write. Pray believe, my dear and kind
friend, in the face of all circumstances and appearances, that I never
forget you, nor am reluctant (oh, how could that be?) to write to you;
and that you shall often have to pay 'a penny for my thoughts' under
the new Postage Act--if it be in God's wisdom and mercy to spare me
through the winter. Under the new act I shall not mind writing ten
words and then stopping. As it is, they would scarcely be worth eleven
pennies.