Another Detour: The Lord Chandos Letter (Ein Brief)

So many great "bits" that the whole letter should be inserted here. I'll resist (plus the sharing app is giving me a problem). This is only the last few paragraphs and "sign off" (unformatted).

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You were kind enough to express your regret that no more books by me have been arriving “to make up for the loss of our companionship.” When I read that, I knew—not without a pang—that I would write no books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the years after that, or in all the years of this life of mine. There is only one reason for this, a strange and embarrassing one; I leave it to your infinite intellectual superiority to give it a place among what to your clear eyes is an orderly array of mental and physical phenomena. It is that the language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself someday when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge. I had wanted, had it only been permitted me, to squeeze into the closing words of this, the last letter I expect I will write to Francis Bacon, all the love and gratitude, all the boundless admiration which I bear in my heart for the one who has done the most for my spirit—the foremost Englishman of my time—and which I will continue to bear in my heart until death bursts it. August 22, AD 1603 Phi. Chandos (1902)