find some way to make this thing a little easier, but I can
not. When you read this letter I shall be dead. There is
nothing that I can tell you about it that you will not read in
the papers I send you. It is simply that I was born to be an
artist, and that as anything else I can not live. The burden
that has been laid upon me I can not bear another day. I have
told the whole story of it in this book--I have kept myself
alive for months, sick and weeping with agony, in order that I
might tear it out of my heart and get it written. It has been
my last prayer that the struggle my life has been may somehow
not be useless. There will come others after me--others perhaps
keener than I--and oh, the world must not kill them all!

You will take this manuscript, please, and go over it, and cut
out what you like to make it printable, and write a few words
to make people understand about it. And then see if any one
will publish it. You know more about all these things than I
do. If it should sell, keep part of the money for your own
work and give the rest to poor Ellen. As to The Captive--I
all but burned it, as you will read; but keep it, sealed as
I have sealed it, for two years, and then offer it to some
publishers--to others than the nine who have already rejected
it. If you can not find any one to take it, then burn it, or
keep it for love, I do not care which.

I am writing this on Thursday night, and I am almost dead. I
mean to get some money to-morrow, and then to buy a ticket for
as far up the Hudson as I can go. In the evening I mean to find
a steep bank, and, with a heavy dumb-bell I have bought, and
a strong rope, I think I can find the peace that I have been