DEAR MADAM:

The news of MacDowell's serious illness has deeply affected me.
Permit me therefore to express to you my own and my wife's
sincerest sympathy for you. I am a great admirer of MacDowell's
Muse, and would regard it as a severe blow if his best creative
period should be so hastily broken off. From all that I hear of
your husband, his qualities as a man are as remarkable as his
qualities as an artist. He is a complete Personality, with an
unusually sympathetic and sensitive nervous system. Such a
temperament gives one the capacity not only for moods of the
highest transport, but for an unspeakable sorrow tenfold more
profound. This is the unsolvable riddle. An artist so ideally
endowed [_ein so ideal angelegter Künstler_] as MacDowell must ask
himself: Why have I received from nature this delicately strung
lyre, if I were better off without it? So unmerciful is Life that
every artist must ask himself this question. The only consolation
is: Work--yes, even the severest labours. ... _But_: the artist is
an optimist. Otherwise he would be no artist. He believes and
hopes in the triumph of the good and the beautiful. He trusts in
his lucky star till his last breath. And you, the wife of a highly
gifted artist, will not and must not lose hope! In similar cases,
happily, one often witnesses a seemingly inexplicable recovery. If
it can give MacDowell a moment's cheer, say to him that he has in
distant Norway a warm and understanding friend who feels for him,
and wishes from his heart that for him, as for you, better times
may soon come.

With best greeting to you both,