Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/486

 This it is that prevents me from subjecting myself to any undue excitement, and which has for some years caused me to absent myself from all public functions. The recital of our ailments is tedious, but you will pardon me for touching upon mine that I may justify what would otherwise seem ungratefulness.

Some years ago, after a too prolonged siege of visiting, I was suddenly stricken with heart failure, neurasthenia, and all its ills following, and for some years thereafter my life was despaired of, attacks of heart failure making it seem that the end might come at any time. All exciting causes were avoided. And out of consideration for my delicate health, Franklin and Marshall did me the honor to give me Litt.D. in absentio. Only last year I had an invitation from a professor at Yale who was authorized to speak for the faculty in inviting me to talk to one of the classes upon poetry, quite informally, if I wished, they were good enough to say—yet I knew I should not be able to go through the ordeal and had to give up the alluring idea.

Indeed, I could no more undertake to undergo a reception (you can see I unconsciously use the word “undergo” as if one expected a surgeon's operation) than I could climb Pike's Peak, for each might prove fatal to the weak heart.

I have been told that my mother was one of the most frail of women, and that it was not unusual for her to faint day after day, and I often think that some of my lack of robustness comes to me from her, but then one loves to inherit even a defect from his mother.

It is the strain that does the injury, and nothing can eliminate the strain. By avoiding events which might be injurious I have been enabled to do a little work, such as it is, now and then, and to remain among the living.

You surely do not wish to exterminate me! And yet a reception might do it. Such things have happened. A live poet at a reception might pass muster, but I ask you, my dear Governor, what you would do with a collapsed poet?

I fear the strain, and so do my doctors, and under the circumstances I feel that you will surely understand my inability to be present, much as I should enjoy the honor which would accrue.

It is so unhandsome in one to refuse such a distinction and such proffers of wide hospitality, for I am conscious that there would be assembled many men eminent in literature, law and the liberal arts and sciences, that I feel oppressed by my own inability to accept your kind invitation. But I beg you will at least believe 466