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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Englishwoman's Love-Letters, by Anonymous
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Englishwoman's Love-Letters
+
+Author: Anonymous
+
+Release Date: May 30, 2005 [EBook #15941]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S LOVE-LETTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Cally Soukup and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+AN
+ENGLISHWOMAN'S
+LOVE-LETTERS
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+THE MERSHON COMPANY
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S LOVE-LETTERS.
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+
+It need hardly be said that the woman by whom these letter were written
+had no thought that they would be read by anyone but the person to whom
+they were addressed. But a request, conveyed under circumstances which
+the writer herself would have regarded as all-commanding, urges that
+they should now be given to the world; and, so far as is possible with a
+due regard to the claims of privacy, what is here printed presents the
+letters as they were first written in their complete form and sequence.
+
+Very little has been omitted which in any way bears upon the devotion of
+which they are a record. A few names of persons and localities have been
+changed; and several short notes (not above twenty in all), together
+with some passages bearing too intimately upon events which might be
+recognized, have been left out without indication of their omission.
+
+It was a necessary condition to the present publication that the
+authorship of these letters should remain unstated. Those who know will
+keep silence; those who do not, will not find here any data likely to
+guide them to the truth.
+
+The story which darkens these pages cannot be more fully indicated while
+the feelings of some who are still living have to be consulted; nor will
+the reader find the root of the tragedy explained in the letters
+themselves. But one thing at least may be said as regards the principal
+actors--that to the memory of neither of them does any blame belong.
+They were equally the victims of circumstances, which came whole out of
+the hands of fate and remained, so far as one of the two was concerned,
+a mystery to the day of her death.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+
+Beloved: This is your first letter from me: yet it is not the first I have
+written to you. There are letters to you lying at love's dead-letter
+office in this same writing--so many, my memory has lost count of them!
+
+This is my confession: I told you I had one to make, and you laughed:--you
+did not know how serious it was--for to be in love with you long before
+you were in love with me--nothing can be more serious than that!
+
+You deny that I was: yet I know when you first really loved me. All at
+once, one day something about me came upon you as a surprise: and how,
+except on the road to love, can there be surprises? And in the surprise
+came love. You did not _know_ me before. Before then, it was only the
+other nine entanglements which take hold of the male heart and occupy it
+till the tenth is ready to make one knot of them all.
+
+In the letter written that day, I said, "You love me." I could never
+have said it before; though I had written twelve letters to my love for
+you, I had not once been able to write of your love for me. Was not
+_that_ serious?
+
+Now I have confessed! I thought to discover myself all blushes, but my
+face is cool: you have kissed all my blushes away! Can I ever be ashamed
+in your eyes now, or grow rosy because of anything _you_ or _I_ think?
+So!--you have robbed me of one of my charms: I am brazen. Can you love
+me still?
+
+You love me, you love me; you are wonderful! we are both wonderful, you
+and I.
+
+Well, it is good for you to know I have waited and wished, long before
+the thing came true. But to see _you_ waiting and wishing, when the
+thing _was_ true all the time:--oh! that was the trial! How not suddenly
+to throw my arms round you and cry, "Look, see! O blind mouth, why are
+you famished?"
+
+And you never knew? Dearest, I love you for it, you never knew! I believe
+a man, when he finds he has won, thinks he has taken the city by assault:
+he does not guess how to the insiders it has been a weary siege, with
+flags of surrender fluttering themselves to rags from every wall and
+window! No: in love it is the women who are the strategists: and they have
+at last to fall into the ambush they know of with a good grace.
+
+You must let me praise myself a little for the past, since I can never
+praise myself again. You must do that for me now! There is not a battle
+left for me to win. You and peace hold me so much a prisoner, have so
+caught me from my own way of living, that I seem to hear a pin drop
+twenty years ahead of me: it seems an event! Dearest, a thousand times,
+I would not have it be otherwise: I am only too willing to drop out of
+existence altogether and find myself in your arms instead. Giving you my
+love, I can so easily give you my life. Ah, my dear, I am yours so
+utterly, so gladly! Will you ever find it out, you who took so long to
+discover anything?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+
+Dearest: Your name woke me this morning: I found my lips piping their song
+before I was well back into my body out of dreams. I wonder if the rogues
+babble when my spirit is nesting? Last night you were a high tree and I
+was in it, the wind blowing us both; but I forget the rest,--whatever, it
+was enough to make me wake happy.
+
+There are dreams that go out like candle-light directly one opens the
+shutters: they illumine the walls no longer; the daylight is too strong
+for them. So, now, I can hardly remember anything of my dreams:
+daylight, with you in it, floods them out.
+
+Oh, how are you? Awake? Up? Have you breakfasted? I ask you a thousand
+things. You are thinking of me, I know: but what are you thinking? I am
+devoured by curiosity about myself--none at all about you, whom I have all
+by heart! If I might only know how happy I make you, and just _which_
+thing I said yesterday is making you laugh to-day--I could cry with joy
+over being the person I am.
+
+It is you who make me think so much about myself, trying to find myself
+out. I used to be most self-possessed, and regarded it as the crowning
+virtue: and now--your possession of me sweeps it away, and I stand crying
+to be let into a secret that is no longer mine. Shall I ever know _why_
+you love me? It is my religious difficulty; but it never rises into a
+doubt. You _do_ love me, I know. _Why_, I don't think I ever can know.
+
+You ask me the same question about yourself, and it becomes absurd,
+because I altogether belong to you. If I hold my breath for a moment
+wickedly (for I can't do it breathing), and try to look at the world
+with you out of it, I seem to have fallen over a precipice; or rather,
+the solid earth has slipped from under my feet, and I am off into
+vacuum. Then, as I take breath again for fear, my star swims up and
+clasps me, and shows me your face. O happy star this that I was born
+under, that moved with me and winked quiet prophecies at me all through
+my childhood, I not knowing what it meant:--the dear radiant thing
+naming to me my lover!
+
+As a child, now and then, and for no reason, I used to be sublimely
+happy: real wings took hold of me. Sometimes a field became fairyland
+as I walked through it; or a tree poured out a scent that its blossoms
+never had before or after. I think now that those must have been moments
+when you too were in like contact with earth,--had your feet in grass
+which felt a faint ripple of wind, or stood under a lilac in a drench of
+fragrance that had grown double after rain.
+
+When I asked you about the places of your youth, I had some fear of
+finding that we might once have met, and that I had not remembered it as
+the summing up of my happiness in being young. Far off I see something
+undiscovered waiting us, something I could not have guessed at
+before--the happiness of being old. Will it not be something like the
+evening before last when we were sitting together, your hand in mine,
+and one by one, as the twilight drew about us, the stars came and took
+up their stations overhead? They seemed to me then to be following out
+some quiet train of thought in the universal mind: the heavens were
+remembering the stars back into their places:--the Ancient of Days
+drawing upon the infinite treasures of memory in his great lifetime.
+Will not Love's old age be the same to us both--a starry place of
+memories?
+
+Your dear letter is with me while I write: how shortly you are able to
+say everything! To-morrow you will come. What more do I want--except
+to-morrow itself, with more promises of the same thing?
+
+You are at my heart, dearest: nothing in the world can be nearer to me
+than you!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+
+Dearest and rightly Beloved: You cannot tell how your gift has pleased me;
+or rather you _can_, for it shows you have a long memory back to our first
+meeting: though at the time I was the one who thought most of it.
+
+It is quite true; you have the most beautifully shaped memory in
+Christendom: these are the very books in the very edition I have long
+wanted, and have been too humble to afford myself. And now I cannot stop
+to read one, for joy of looking at them all in a row. I will kiss you
+for them all, and for more besides: indeed it is the "besides" which
+brings you my kisses at all.
+
+Now that you have chosen so perfectly to my mind, I may proffer a
+request which, before, I was shy of making. It seems now beneficently
+anticipated. It is that you will not ever let your gifts take the form
+of jewelry, not after the ring which you are bringing me: _that_, you
+know, I both welcome and wish for. But, as to the rest, the world has
+supplied me with a feeling against jewelry as a love-symbol. Look
+abroad and you will see: it is too possessive, too much like "chains of
+office"--the fair one is to wear her radiant harness before the world,
+that other women may be envious and the desire of her master's eye be
+satisfied! Ah, no!
+
+I am yours, dear, utterly; and nothing you give me would have that sense:
+I know you too well to think it. But in the face of the present fashion
+(and to flout it), which expects the lover to give in this sort, and the
+beloved to show herself a dazzling captive, let me cherish my ritual of
+opposition which would have no meaning if we were in a world of our own,
+and no place in my thoughts, dearest;--as it has not now, so far as you
+are concerned. But I am conscious I shall be looked at as your chosen; and
+I would choose my own way of how to look back most proudly.
+
+And so for the books more thanks and more,--that they are what I would
+most wish, and not anything else: which, had they been, they would still
+have given me pleasure, since from you they could come only with a good
+meaning: and--diamonds even--I could have put up with them!
+
+To-morrow you come for your ring, and bring me my own? Yours is here
+waiting. I have it on my finger, very loose, with another standing
+sentry over it to keep it from running away.
+
+A mouse came out of my wainscot last night, and plunged me in horrible
+dilemma: for I am equally idiotic over the idea of the creature trapped
+or free, and I saw sleepless nights ahead of me till I had secured a
+change of locality for him.
+
+To startle him back into hiding would have only deferred my getting
+truly rid of him, so I was most tiptoe and diplomatic in my doings.
+Finally, a paper bag, put into a likely nook with some sentimentally
+preserved wedding-cake crumbled into it, crackled to me of his arrival.
+In a brave moment I noosed the little beast, bag and all, and lowered
+him from the window by string, till the shrubs took from me the burden
+of responsibility.
+
+I visited the bag this morning: he had eaten his way out, crumbs and
+all: and has, I suppose, become a fieldmouse, for the hay smells
+invitingly, and it is only a short run over the lawn and a jump over the
+ha-ha to be in it. Poor morsels, I prefer them so much undomesticated!
+
+Now this mouse is no allegory, and the paper bag is _not_ a diamond
+necklace, in spite of the wedding-cake sprinkled over it! So don't say
+that this letter is too hard for your understanding, or you will
+frighten me from telling you anything foolish again. Brains are like
+jewels in this, difference of surface has nothing to do with the size
+and value of them. Yours is a beautiful smooth round, like a pearl, and
+mine all facets and flashes like cut glass. And yours so much the
+bigger, and I love it so much the best! The trap which caught me was
+baited with one great pearl. So the mouse comes in with a meaning tied
+to its tail after all!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+
+In all the world, dearest, what is more unequal than love between a man
+and a woman? I have been spending an amorous morning and want to share it
+with you: but lo, the task of bringing that bit of my life into your
+vision is altogether beyond me.
+
+What have I been doing? Dear man, I have been dressmaking! and dress,
+when one is in the toils, is but a love-letter writ large. You will see
+and admire the finished thing, but you will take no interest in the
+composition. Therefore I say your love is unequal to mine.
+
+For think how ravished I would be if you brought me a coat and told me
+it was all your own making! One day you had thrown down a mere
+tailor-made thing in the hall, and yet I kissed it as I went by. And
+that was at a time when we were only at the handshaking stage, the
+palsied beginnings of love:--_you_, I mean!
+
+But oh, to get you interested in the dress I was making to you
+to-day!--the beautiful flowing opening,--not too flowing: the elaborate
+central composition where the heart of me has to come, and the wind-up
+of the skirt, a long reluctant tailing-off, full of commas and colons of
+ribbon to make it seem longer, and insertions everywhere. I dreamed
+myself in it, retiring through the door after having bidden you
+good-night, and you watching the long disappearing eloquence of that
+tail, still saying to you as it vanished, "Good-by, good-by. I love you
+so! see me, how slowly I am going!"
+
+Well, that is a bit of my dress-making, a very corporate part of my
+affection for you; and you are not a bit interested, for I have shown
+you none of the seamy side; it is that which interests you male
+creatures, Zolaites, every one of you.
+
+And what have you to show similar, of the thought of me entering into
+all your masculine pursuits? Do you go out rabbit-shooting for the love
+of me? If so, I trust you make a miss of it every time! That you are a
+sportsman is one of the very hardest things in life that I have to bear.
+
+Last night Peterkins came up with me to keep guard against any further
+intrusion of mice. I put her to sleep on the couch: but she discarded
+the red shawl I had prepared for her at the bottom, and lay at the top
+most uncomfortably in a parcel of millinery into which from one end I
+had already made excavations, so that it formed a large bag. Into the
+further end of this bag Turks crept and snuggled down: but every time
+she turned in the night (and it seemed very often) the brown paper
+crackled and woke me up. So at last I took it up and shook out its
+contents; and Pippins slept soundly on red flannel till Nan-nan brought
+the tea.
+
+You will notice that in this small narrative Peterkins gets three names:
+it is a fashion that runs through the household, beginning with the
+Mother-Aunt, who on some days speaks of Nan-nan as "the old lady," and
+sometimes as "that girl," all according to the two tempers she has about
+Nan-nan's privileged position in regard to me.
+
+You were only here yesterday, and already I want you again so much, so
+much!
+
+    Your never satisfied but always loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+
+Most Beloved: I have been thinking, staring at this blank piece of paper,
+and wondering how _there_ am I ever to say what I have in me here--not
+wishing to say anything at all, but just to be! I feel that I am living
+now only because you love me: and that my life will have run out, like
+this penful of ink, when that use in me is past. Not yet, Beloved, oh, not
+yet! Nothing is finished that we have to do and be:--hardly begun! I will
+not call even this "midsummer," however much it seems so: it is still only
+spring.
+
+Every day your love binds me more deeply than I knew the day before: so
+that no day is the same now, but each one a little happier than the last.
+My own, you are my very own! And yet, true as that is, it is not so true
+as that I am _your_ own. It is less absolute, I mean; and must be so,
+because I cannot very well _take_ possession of anything when I am given
+over heart and soul out of my own possession: there isn't enough identity
+left in me, I am yours so much, so much! All this is useless to say, yet
+what can I say else, if I have to begin saying anything?
+
+Could I truly be your "star and goddess," as you call me, Beloved, I
+would do you the service of Thetis at least (who did it for a greater
+than herself)--
+
+    "Bid Heaven and Earth combine their charms,
+       And round you early, round you late,
+     Briareus fold his hundred arms
+      To guard you from your single fate."
+
+But I haven't got power over an eight-armed octopus even: so am merely a
+very helpless loving nonentity which merges itself most happily in you,
+and begs to be lifted to no pedestal at all, at all.
+
+If you love me in a manner that is at all possible, you will see that
+"goddess" does not suit me. "Star" I would I were now, with a wide eye
+to carry my looks to you over this horizon which keeps you invisible.
+Choose one, if you will, dearest, and call it mine: and to me it shall
+be yours: so that when we are apart and the stars come out, our eyes may
+meet up at the same point in the heavens, and be "keeping company" for
+us among the celestial bodies--with their permission: for I have too
+lively a sense of their beauty not to be a little superstitious about
+them. Have you not felt for yourself a sort of physiognomy in the
+constellations,--most of them seeming benevolent and full of kind
+regards:--but not all? I am always glad when the Great Bear goes away
+from my window, fine beast though he is: he seems to growl at me! No
+doubt it is largely a question of names; and what's in a name? In yours,
+Beloved, when I speak it, more than I can compass!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+
+Beloved: I have been trusting to fate, while keeping silence, that
+something from you was to come to-day and make me specially happy. And it
+has: bless you abundantly! You have undone and got round all I said about
+"jewelry," though this is nothing of the sort, but a shrine: so my word
+remains. I have it with me now, safe hidden, only now and then it comes
+out to have a look at me,--smiles and goes back again. Dearest, you must
+_feel_ how I thank you, for I cannot say it: body and soul I grow too much
+blessed with all that you have given me, both visibly and invisibly, and
+always perfectly.
+
+And as for the day: I have been thinking you the most uncurious of men,
+because you had not asked: and supposed it was too early days yet for
+you to remember that I had ever been born. To-day is my birthday! you
+said nothing, so I said nothing; and yet this has come: I trusted my
+star to show its sweet influences in its own way. Or, after all, did you
+know, and had you asked anyone but me? Yet had you known, you would
+have wished me the "happy returns" which among all your dear words to me
+you do not. So I take it that the motion comes straight to you from
+heaven; and, in the event, you will pardon me for having been still
+secretive and shy in not telling what you did not inquire after.
+_Yours_, I knew, dear, quite long ago, so had no need to ask you for it.
+And it is six months before you will be in the same year with me again,
+and give to twenty-two all the companionable sweetness that twenty-one
+has been having.
+
+Many happy returns of _my_ birthday to you, dearest! That is all that my
+birthdays are for. Have you been happy to-day, I wonder? and am
+wondering also whether this evening we shall see you walking quietly in
+and making everything into perfection that has been trembling just on
+the verge of it all day long.
+
+One drawback of my feast is that I have to write short to you; for there
+are other correspondents who on this occasion look for quick answers,
+and not all of them to be answered in an offhand way. Except you, it is
+the coziest whom I keep waiting; but elders have a way with them--even
+kind ones: and when they condescend to write upon an anniversary, we
+have to skip to attention or be in their bad books at once.
+
+So with the sun still a long way out of bed, I have to tuck up these
+sheets for you, as if the good of the day had already been sufficient
+unto itself and its full tale had been told. Good-night. It is so hard
+to take my hands off writing to you, and worry on at the same exercise
+in another direction. I kiss you more times than I can count: it is
+almost really you that I kiss now! My very dearest, my own sweetheart,
+whom I so worship. Good-night! "Good-afternoon" sounds too funny: is
+outside our vocabulary altogether. While I live, I must love you more
+than I know!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+
+My Friend: Do you think this a cold way of beginning? I do not: is it not
+the true send-off of love? I do not know how men fall in love: but I could
+not have had that come-down in your direction without being your friend
+first. Oh, my dear, and after, after; it is but a limitless friendship I
+have grown into!
+
+I have heard men run down the friendships of women as having little true
+substance. Those who speak so, I think, have never come across a real
+case of woman's friendship. I praise my own sex, dearest, for I know
+some of their loneliness, which you do not: and until a certain date
+their friendship was the deepest thing in life I had met with.
+
+For must it not be true that a woman becomes more absorbed in friendship
+than a man, since friendship may have to mean so much more to her, and
+cover so far more of her life, than it does to the average man? However
+big a man's capacity for friendship, the beauty of it does not fill his
+whole horizon for the future: he still looks ahead of it for the mate
+who will complete his life, giving his body and soul the complement
+they require. Friendship alone does not satisfy him: he makes a bigger
+claim on life, regarding certain possessions as his right.
+
+But a woman:--oh, it is a fashion to say the best women are sure to find
+husbands, and have, if they care for it, the certainty before them of a
+full life. I know it is not so. There are women, wonderful ones, who
+come to know quite early in life that no men will ever wish to make
+wives of them: for them, then, love in friendship is all that remains,
+and the strongest wish of all that can pass through their souls with
+hope for its fulfillment is to be a friend to somebody.
+
+It is man's arrogant certainty of his future which makes him impatient
+of the word "friendship": it cools life to his lips, he so confident
+that the headier nectar is his due!
+
+I came upon a little phrase the other day that touched me so deeply: it
+said so well what I have wanted to say since we have known each other.
+Some peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing his love's praises, and
+sinks his voice from the height of his passionate superlatives to call
+her his "share of the world." Peasant and Irishman, he knew that his
+fortune did not embrace the universe: but for him his love was just
+that--his share of the world.
+
+Surely when in anyone's friendship we seem to have gained our share of
+the world, that is all that can be said. It means all that we can take
+in, the whole armful the heart and senses are capable of, or that fate
+can bestow. And for how many that must be friendship--especially for how
+many women!
+
+My dear, you are my share of the world, also my share of Heaven: but
+there I begin to speak of what I do not know, as is the way with happy
+humanity. All that my eyes could dream of waking or sleeping, all that
+my ears could be most glad to hear, all that my heart could beat faster
+to get hold of--your friendship gave me suddenly as a bolt from the
+blue.
+
+My friend, my friend, my friend! If you could change or go out of my
+life now, the sun would drop out of my heavens: I should see the world
+with a great piece gashed out of its side,--my share of it gone. No, I
+should not see it, I don't think I should see anything ever again,--not
+truly.
+
+Is it not strange how often to test our happiness we harp on sorrow? I
+do: don't let it weary you. I know I have read somewhere that great love
+always entails pain. I have not found it yet: but, for me, it does mean
+fear,--the sort of fear I had as a child going into big buildings. I
+loved them: but I feared, because of their bigness, they were likely to
+tumble on me.
+
+But when I begin to think you may be too big for me, I remember you as
+my "friend," and the fear goes for a time, or becomes that sort of fear
+I would not part with if I might.
+
+I have no news for you: only the old things to tell you, the wonder of
+which ever remains new. How holy your face has become to me: as I saw it
+last, with something more than the usual proofs of love for me upon
+it--a look as if your love troubled you! I know the trouble: I feel it,
+dearest, in my own woman's way. Have patience.--When I see you so, I
+feel that prayer is the only way given me for saying what my love for
+you wishes to be. And yet I hardly ever pray in words.
+
+Dearest, be happy when you get this: and, when you can, come and give my
+happiness its rest. Till then it is a watchman on the lookout.
+
+"Night-night!" Your true sleepy one.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+
+Now _why_, I want to know, Beloved, was I so specially "good" to you in my
+last? I have been quite as good to you fifty times before,--if such a
+thing can be from me to you. Or do you mean good _for_ you? Then, dear, I
+must be sorry that the thing stands out so much as an exception!
+
+Oh, dearest Beloved, for a little I think I must not love you so much,
+or must not let you see it.
+
+When does your mother return, and when am I to see her? I long to so
+much. Has she still not written to you about our news?
+
+I woke last night to the sound of a great flock of sheep going past. I
+suppose they were going by forced marches to the fair over at Hylesbury:
+It was in the small hours: and a few of them lifted up their voices and
+complained of this robbery of night and sleep in the night. They were so
+tired, so tired, they said: and so did the muffawully patter of their
+poor feet. The lambs said most; and the sheep agreed with a husky
+croak.
+
+I said a prayer for them, and went to sleep again as the sound of the
+lambs died away; but somehow they stick in my heart, those sad sheep
+driven along through the night. It was in its degree like the woman
+hurrying along, who said, "My God, my God!" that summer Sunday morning.
+These notes from lives that appear and disappear remain endlessly; and I
+do not think our hearts can have been made so sensitive to suffering we
+can do nothing to relieve, without some good reason. So I tell you this,
+as I would any sorrow of my own, because it has become a part of me, and
+is underlying all that I think to-day.
+
+I am to expect you the day after to-morrow, but "not for certain"? Thus
+you give and you take away, equally blessed in either case. All the
+same, I shall _certainly_ expect you, and be disappointed if on Thursday
+at about this hour your way be not my way.
+
+"How shall I my true love know" if he does not come often enough to see
+me? Sunshine be on you all possible hours till we meet again.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+
+Beloved: Is the morning looking at you as it is looking at me? A little to
+the right of the sun there lies a small cloud, filmy and faint, but enough
+to cast a shadow somewhere. From this window, high up over the view, I
+cannot see where the shadow of it falls,--further than my eye can reach:
+perhaps just now over you, since you lie further west. But I cannot be
+sure. We cannot be sure about the near things in this world; only about
+what is far off and fixed.
+
+You and I looking up see the same sun, if there are no clouds over us:
+but we may not be looking at the same clouds even when both our hearts
+are in shadow. That is so, even when hearts are as close together as
+yours and mine: they respond to the same light: but each one has its own
+roof of shadow, wearing its rue with a world of difference.
+
+Why is it? why can no two of us have sorrows quite in common? What can
+be nearer together than our wills to be one? In joy we are; and yet,
+though I reach and reach, and sadden if you are sad, I cannot make your
+sorrow my own.
+
+I suppose sorrow is of the earth earthy: and all that is of earth makes
+division. Every joy that belongs to the body casts shadows somewhere. I
+wonder if there can enter into us a joy that has no shadow anywhere? The
+joy of having you has behind it the shadow of parting; is there any way
+of loving that would make parting no sorrow at all? To me, now, the idea
+seems treason! I cling to my sorrow that you are not here: I send up my
+cloud, as it were, to catch the sun's brightness: it is a kite that I
+pull with my heart-strings.
+
+To the sun of love the clouds that cover absence must look like white
+flowers in the green fields of earth, or like doves hovering: and he
+reaches down and strokes them with his warm beams, making all their
+feathers like gold.
+
+Some clouds let the gold come through; _mine_, now.--That cloud I saw
+away to the right is coming this way toward me. I can see the shadow of
+it now, moving along a far-off strip of road: and I wonder if it is
+_your_ cloud, with you under it coming to see me again!
+
+When you come, why am I any happier than when I know you are coming? It
+is the same thing in love. I have you now all in my mind's eye; I have
+you by heart; have I my arms a bit more round you then than now?
+
+How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, there should be
+disappearances and reappearances: and faces now and then showing a
+change!--You, actually, the last time you came, looking a day older than
+the day before! What was it? Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a
+wrinkle in the art of dying? Or had you turned over some new leaf, and
+found it withered on the other side?
+
+I could not see how it was: I heard you coming--it was spring! The door
+opened:--oh, it was autumnal! One day had fallen away like a leaf out of
+my forest, and I had not been there to see it go!
+
+At what hour of the twenty-four does a day shed itself out of our lives?
+Not, I think, on the stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow.
+Some people, perhaps, would say--with the first sleep; and that the
+"beauty-sleep" is the new day putting out its green wings. _I_ think it
+must be not till something happens to make the new day a stronger
+impression than the last. So it would please me to think that your
+yesterday dropped off as you opened the door; and that, had I peeped and
+seen you coming up the stairs, I should have seen you looking a day
+younger.
+
+_That_ means that you age at the sight of me! I think you do. I, I feel
+a hundred on the road to immortality, directly your face dawns on me.
+
+There's a foot gone over my grave! The angel of the resurrection with his
+mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!--Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop
+of your horse:--it sounds like a kettle boiling over!
+
+So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the while we talk; and comes
+out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and
+sent off the moment your back is turned. No, better!--to be slipped into
+your pocket and carried home to yourself _by_ yourself. How, when you
+get to your destination and find it, you will curse yourself that you
+were not a speedier postman!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+
+Dearest: Did you find your letter? The quicker I post, the quicker I need
+to sit down and write again. The grass under love's feet never stops
+growing: I must make hay of it while the sun shines.
+
+You say my metaphors make you giddy.--My clear, you, without a metaphor
+in your composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to complain;
+your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you pigeon-hole them? In
+a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing
+dervish!) _Your_ letters are much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie
+of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing
+"Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in the most scared way!
+
+Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, "I hope
+you don't keep these miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours with
+them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours." You added that
+I was better occupied--and here I am "better occupied" even as you bid
+me.
+
+But one can jump best from a spring-board: and how could I jump as far
+as your arms by letter, if I had not yours to jump from?
+
+So you see they are kept, and my disobedience of you has begun: and I
+find disobedience wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law which
+you knew I should disobey:--that is the way the world began. It is not
+for nothing that I am a daughter of Eve.
+
+And here is our world in our hands, yours and mine, now in the making.
+Which day are the evening and the morning now? I think it must be the
+birds'--and already, with the wings, disobedience has been reached! Make
+much of it! the day will come when I shall wish to obey. There are
+moments when I feel a wish taking hold of me stronger than I can
+understand, that you should command me beyond myself--to things I have
+not strength or courage for of my own accord. How close, dearest, when
+that day comes, my heart will feel itself to yours! It feels close now:
+but it is to your feet I am nearest, as yet. Lift me! There, there,
+Beloved, I kiss you with all my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for
+being no more than I am: your freehold to all eternity!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI
+
+
+Oh, Dearest: I have danced and I have danced till I am tired! I
+am dropping with sleep, but I must just touch you and say good-night.
+This was our great day of publishing, dearest, _ours_: all the world
+knows it; and all admire your choice! I was determined they should. I
+have been collecting scalps for you to hang at your girdle. All thought
+me beautiful: people who never did so before. I wanted to say to them,
+"Am I not beautiful? I am, am I not?" And it was not for myself I was
+asking this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose--what you gave
+me when we parted: you saying, alas, that you were not to be there. But
+you _were_! Its leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. I
+kiss you out of the heart of it. Good-night: come to me in my first
+dream!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+
+Dearest: It has been such a funny day from post-time onwards:--
+congratulations on the great event are beginning to arrive in envelopes
+and on wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some are not so--only the
+ordinary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone
+yesterday, Mrs. ---- called and was told the news. Of course she knew _of_
+you: but didn't think she had ever seen you. "Probably he passed you at
+the gates," I said. "What?" she went off with a view-hallo; "that
+well-dressed sort of young fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing how
+to ride? Met us in the lane. _Well_, my dear, I _do_ congratulate you!"
+
+And whether it was by the gray suit, or the mustache, or the knowing how
+to ride that her congratulations were so emphatically secured, I know not!
+
+Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan: I
+cannot let you off what she said! No tears or sentiment came from her
+to prevent me laughing: she brisked like an old war-horse at the first
+word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be
+a nurse again in her old age! She is a true "Mrs. Berry," and is ready
+to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine
+events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones.
+
+Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick
+twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body: and a very nice
+cordial way of showing, I thought it! He was quite ready to talk when I
+let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when
+he was in service at the H----s, and speaks of you as being then "a
+gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be
+a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness
+and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence.
+
+What tales will you be getting of me out of Nan-nan, some day behind my
+back, I wonder? There is one I shall forbid her to reveal: it shall be
+part of my marriage-portion to show you early that you have got a wife
+with a temper!
+
+Here is a whole letter that must end now,--and the great Word never
+mentioned! It is good for you to be put upon _maigre_ fare, for once. I
+ho_l_d my pen back with b_o_th hands: it wants so much to gi_v_e you
+the forbidd_e_n treat. Oh, the serpent in the garden! See where it has
+underlined its meaning. Frailty, thy pen is a J pen!
+
+Adieu, adieu, remember me.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+
+The letters? No, Beloved, I could not! Not yet. There you have caught me
+where I own I am still shy of you.
+
+A long time hence, when we are a safely wedded pair, you shall turn them
+over. It _may_ be a short time; but I will keep them however long. Indeed
+I must ever keep them; they talk to me of the dawn of my existence,--the
+early light before our sun rose, when my love of you was growing and had
+not yet reached its full.
+
+If I disappoint you I will try to make up for it with something I wrote
+long before I ever saw you. To-day I was turning over old things my mother
+had treasured for me of my childhood--of days spent with her: things of
+laughter as well as of tears; such a dear selection, so quaint and sweet,
+with moods of her as I dimly remember her to have been. And among them was
+this absurdity, written, and I suppose placed in the mouth of my stocking,
+the Christmas I stayed with her in France. I remember the time as a great
+treat, but nothing of this. "Nilgoes" is "Nicholas," you must understand!
+How he must have laughed over me asleep while he read this!
+
+     "Cher pere Nilgoes. S'il vous plait voulez vous me donne
+     plus de jeux que des oranges des pommes et des pombons parc
+     que nous allons faire l'arbre de noel cette anne et les
+     jeaux ferait mieux pour l'arbre de Noel. Il ne faut pas dire
+     a petite mere s'il vous plait parce que je ne veut pas
+     quelle sache sil vous voulez venir ce soir du ceil pour que
+     vous pouvez me donner ce que je vous demande Dites bon jour
+     a la St. Viearge est a l'enfant Jeuses et a Ste Joseph.
+     Adieu cher St. Nilgoes."
+
+I haven't altered the spelling, I love it too well, prophetic of a fault
+I still carry about me. How strange that little bit of invocation to the
+dear folk above sounds to me now! My mother must have been teaching me
+things after her own persuasion; most naturally, poor dear one--though
+that too has gone like water off my mind. It was one of the troubles
+between her and my father: the compact that I was to be brought up a
+Catholic was dissolved after they separated; and I am sorry, thinking it
+unjust to her; yet glad, content with being what I am.
+
+I must have been less than five when I penned this: I was always a
+letter-writer, it seems.
+
+It is a reproach now from many that I have ceased to be: and to them I
+fear it is true. That I have not truly ceased, "witness under my hand
+these presents,"--or whatever may be the proper legal terms for an
+affidavit.
+
+What were _you_ like, Beloved, as a very small child? Should I have loved
+you from the beginning had we toddled to the rencounter; and would my love
+have passed safely through the "gallous young hound" period; and could I
+love you more now in any case, had I _all_ your days treasured up in my
+heart, instead of less than a year of them?
+
+How strangely much have seven miles kept our fates apart! It seems
+uncharacteristic for this small world,--where meetings come about so far
+above the dreams of average--to have played us such a prank.
+
+This must do for this once, Beloved; for behold me busy to-day: with
+_what_, I shall not tell you. I would like to put you to a test, as
+ladies did their knights of old, and hardly ever do now--fearing, I
+suppose, lest the species should altogether fail them at the pinch. I
+would like to see if you could come here and sit with me from beginning
+to end, _with your eyes shut_: never once opening them. I am not saying
+whether I think curiosity, or affection, would make the attempt too
+difficult. But if you were sure you could, you might come here
+to-morrow--a day otherwise interdicted. Only know, having come, that if
+you open those dear cupboards of vision and set eyes on things not yet
+intended to be looked at, there will be confusion of tongues in this
+Tower we are building whose top is to reach heaven. Will you come? I
+don't _say_ "come"; I only want to know--will you?
+
+To-day my love flies low over the earth like a swallow before rain, and
+touching the tops of the flowers has culled you these. Kiss them until
+they open: they are full of my thoughts, as the world, to me, is full of
+you.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+
+Own Dearest: Come I did not think that you would, or mean that you should
+seriously; for is it not a poor way of love to make the object of it cut
+an absurd or partly absurd figure? I wrote only as a woman having a secret
+on the tip of her tongue and the tips of her fingers, and full of a
+longing to say it and send it.
+
+Here it is at last: love me for it, I have worked so hard to get it done!
+And you do not know why and what for? Beloved, it--_this_--is the
+anniversary of the day we first met; and you have forgotten it already or
+never remembered it:--and yet have been clamoring for "the letters"!
+
+On the first anniversary of our marriage, _if you remember it_, you shall
+have those same letters: and not otherwise. So there they lie safe till
+doomsday!
+
+The M.-A. has been very gracious and clear after her little outbreak of
+yesterday: her repentances, after I have hurt her feelings, are so gentle
+and sweet, they always fill me with compunction. Finding that I would go
+on with the thing I was doing, she volunteered to come and read to me: a
+requiem over the bone of contention which we had gnawed between us. Was
+not that pretty and charitable? She read Tennyson's Life for a solid
+hour, and continued it to-day. Isn't it funny that she should take up such
+a book?--she who "can't abide" Tennyson or Browning or Shakespeare: only
+likes Byron, I suppose because it was the right and fashionable liking
+when she was young. Yet she is plodding through the Life religiously--only
+skipping the verses. I have come across two little specimens of "Death and
+the child" in it. His son, Lionel, was carried out in a blanket one night
+in the great comet year, and waking up under the stars asked, "Am I dead?"
+Number two is of a little girl at Wellington's funeral who saw his charger
+carrying his _boots_, and asked, "Shall I be like that after I die?"
+
+A queer old lady came to lunch yesterday, a great traveler, though lame
+on two crutches. We carefully hid all guide-books and maps, and held our
+peace about next month, lest she should insist on coming too: though I
+think Nineveh was the place she was most anxious to go to, if the M.-A.
+would consent to accompany her!
+
+Good-by, dearest of one-year-old acquaintances! you, too, send your
+blessing on the anniversary, now that my better memory has reminded you
+of it! All that follow we will bless in company. I trust you are
+one-half as happy as I am, my own, my own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+
+You told me, dearest, that I should find your mother formidable. It is
+true; I did. She is a person very much in the grand pagan style: I admire
+it, but I cannot flow in that sort of company, and I think she meant to
+crush me. You were very wise to leave her to come alone.
+
+I like her: I mean I believe that under that terribleness she has a
+heart of gold, which once opened would never shut: but she has not
+opened it to me. I believe she could have a great charity, that no
+evil-doing would dismay her: "stanch" sums her up. But I have done
+nothing wrong enough yet to bring me into her good graces. Loving her
+son, even, though, I fear, a great offense, has done me no good turn.
+
+Perhaps that is her inconsistency: women are sure to be inconsistent
+somewhere: it is their birthright.
+
+I began to study her at once, to find _you_: it did not take long. How I
+could love her, if she would let me!
+
+You know her far far better than I, and want no advice: otherwise I
+would say--never praise me to her; quote my follies rather! To give
+ground for her distaste to revel in will not deepen me in her bad books
+so much as attempts to warp her judgment.
+
+I need not go through it all: she will have told you all that is to the
+purpose about our meeting. She bristled in, a brave old fighting figure,
+announcing compulsion in every line, but with all her colors flying. She
+waited for the door to close, then said, "My son has bidden me come, I
+suppose it is my duty: he is his own master now."
+
+We only shook hands. Our talk was very little of you. I showed her all the
+horses, the dogs, and the poultry; she let the inspection appear to
+conclude with myself: asked me my habits, and said I looked healthy. I
+owned I felt it. "Looks and feelings are the most deceptive things in the
+world," she told me; adding that "poor stock" got more than its share of
+these. And when she said it I saw quite plainly that she meant me.
+
+I wonder where she gets the notion: for we are a long-lived race, both
+sides of the family. I guessed that she would like frankness, and was as
+frank as I could be, pretending no deference to her objections. "You
+think you suit each other?" she asked me. My answer, "He suits me!"
+pleased her maternal palate, I think. "Any girl might say that!" she
+admitted. (She might indeed!)
+
+This is the part of our interview she will not have repeated to you.
+
+I was due at Hillyn when she was preparing to go: Aunt N---- came in,
+and I left her to do the honors while I slipped on my habit. I rode by
+your mother's carriage as far as the Greenway, where we branched. I
+suppose that is what her phrase means that you quote about my "making a
+trophy of her," and marching her a prisoner across the borders before
+all the world!
+
+I do like her: she is worth winning.--Can one say warmer of a future
+mother-in-law who stands hostile?
+
+All the same it was an ordeal. I believe I have wept since: for Benjy
+scratched my door often yesterday evening, and looked most wistful when
+I came out. Merely paltry self-love, dearest:--I am so little accustomed
+to not being--liked.
+
+I think she will be more gracious in her own house. I have her formal
+word that I am to come. Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you
+shall meet me and take me to see her. There is something in her
+opposition that I can't fathom: I wondered twice was lunacy her notion:
+she looked at me so hard.
+
+My mother's seclusion and living apart from us was not on _that_
+account. I often saw her: she was very dear and sweet to me, and had
+quiet eyes the very reverse of a person mentally deranged. My father, I
+know, went to visit her when she lay dying; and I remember we all wore
+mourning. My uncle has told me they had a deep regard for each other:
+but disagreed, and were independent enough to choose living apart.
+
+I do not remember my father ever speaking of her to us as children: but
+I am sure there was no state of health to be concealed.
+
+Last night I was talking to Aunt N---- about her. "A very dear woman,"
+she told me, "but your father was never so much alive to her worth as
+the rest of us." Of him she said, "A dear, fine fellow: but not at all
+easy to get on with." Him, of course, I have a continuous recollection
+of, and "a fine fellow" we did think him. My mother comes to me more
+rarely, at intervals.
+
+Don't talk me down your mother's throat: but tell her as much as she cares
+to know of this. I am very proud of my "stock" which she thinks "poor"!
+
+Dear, how much I have written on things which can never concern us
+finally, and so should not ruffle us while they last! Hold me in your
+heart always, always; and the world may turn adamant to me for aught I
+care! Be in my dreams to-night!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+
+But, Dearest: When I think of you I never question whether what I think
+would be true or false in the eyes of others. All that concerns you seems
+to go on a different plane where evidence has no meaning or existence:
+where nobody exists or means anything, but only we two alone, engaged in
+bringing about for ourselves the still greater solitude of two into one.
+Oh, Beloved, what a company that will be! Take me in your arms, fasten me
+to your heart, breathe on me. Deny me either breath or the light of day: I
+am yours equally, to live or die at your word. I shut my eyes to feel your
+kisses falling on me like rain, or still more like sunshine,--yet most of
+all like kisses, my own dearest and best beloved!
+
+Oh, we two! how wonderful we seem! And to think that there have been
+lovers like us since the world began: and the world not able to tell us
+one little word of it:--not well, so as to be believed--or only along
+with sadness where Fate has broken up the heavens which lay over some
+pair of lovers. Oenone's cry, "Ah me, my mountain shepherd," tells us
+of the joy when it has vanished, and most of all I get it in that song
+of wife and husband which ends:--
+
+    "Not a word for you,
+       Not a lock or kiss,
+         Good-by.
+     We, one, must part in two;
+       Verily death is this:
+         I must die."
+
+It was a woman wrote that: and we get love there! Is it only when joy is
+past that we can give it its full expression? Even now, Beloved, I break
+down in trying to say how I love you. I cannot put all my joy into my
+words, nor all my love into my lips, nor all my life into your arms,
+whatever way I try. Something remains that I cannot express. Believe,
+dearest, that the half has not yet been spoken, neither of my love for
+you, nor of my trust in you,--nor of a wish that seems sad, but comes in a
+very tumult of happiness--the wish to die so that some unknown good may
+come to you out of me.
+
+Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly! I love you now too much for
+your heart not to carry me to its grave, though I should die now, and you
+live to be a hundred. I pray you may! I cannot choose a day for you to
+die. I am too grateful to life which has given me to you to say--if I
+were dying--"Come with me, dearest!" Though, how the words tempt me as I
+write them!--Come with me, dearest: yes, come! Ah, but you kiss me more, I
+think, when we say good-by than when meeting; so you will kiss me most of
+all when I have to die:--a thing in death to look forward to! And, till
+then,--life, life, till I am out of my depth in happiness and drown in
+your arms!
+
+Beloved, that I can write so to you,--think what it means; what you have
+made me come through in the way of love, that this, which I could not have
+dreamed before, comes from me with the thought of you! You told me to be
+still--to let you "worship": I was to write back acceptance of all your
+dear words. Are you never to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do
+not know how, for I cannot move from where I am! Do you feel where my
+thoughts kiss you? You would be vexed with me if I wrote it down, so I do
+not. And after all, some day, under a bright star of Providence, I may
+have gifts for you after my own mind which will allow me to grow proud.
+Only now all the giving comes from you. It is I who am enriched by your
+love, beyond knowledge of my former self. Are _you_ changed, dearest, by
+anything I have done?
+
+My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, and all these thoughts are
+loose leaves that fly after you when I have to remain behind. Dear lover,
+what short visits yours seem! and the Mother-Aunt tells me they are most
+unconscionably long.--You will not pay any attention to _that_, please:
+forever let the heavens fall rather than that a hint to such foul effect
+should grow operative through me!
+
+This brings you me so far as it can:--such little words off so great a
+body of--"liking" shall I call it? My paper stops me: it is my last sheet:
+I should have to go down to the library to get more--else I think I could
+not cease writing.
+
+More love than I can name.--Ever, dearest, your own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+
+Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have
+thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me
+before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of
+books--I scarcely can guess what sort--and gone contentedly into
+middle-age with that instead of _this_ as my _raison d'etre_.
+
+How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say--"But for you, I had
+been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved,
+your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a
+little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering,
+would _you_ have liked me in that character?
+
+There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest
+dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully
+facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write:
+and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of--"What has come
+between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw
+scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me
+through damp places?"
+
+Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still
+sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and
+took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our
+dog's cemetery:--no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and
+flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted:
+and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it
+_knew_ that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy,
+too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there,
+as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his
+mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?
+
+When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking
+what I had brought him _there_ for. I pointed out to him the precise
+mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered
+you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?--if their blush
+remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.
+
+Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards
+your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we
+have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all
+my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together
+underground and evolve a new flower--"carnation, lily, lily, rose"--and
+send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give
+diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral
+collaboration that would be!
+
+Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the
+authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings
+full of eyes,--_and_, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and
+that _that_ is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained.
+Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds--that is, to
+where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I
+ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.--Your
+star, since you call me so.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+
+Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over
+some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to
+tell you what I _do_ all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my
+telling you what I _think_? Yet you get more of me this way than that.
+What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always
+different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain,
+here I start telling you.
+
+I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the
+blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it
+is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham
+headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my
+pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether
+it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;--discover new beauties
+in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,--find
+them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is
+begun!
+
+Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an
+action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of
+them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink
+race to tell you. No, it is man who _does_ things; a woman only diddles
+(to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good,
+fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is
+not me!
+
+I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception
+of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy,
+and last of all you--shutting me out from the realities of existence.
+
+If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me
+only when I am starving for you all--for my tea to be brought to me in
+the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings which bolster me up
+from morning till night--with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back
+into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round
+me again!
+
+Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: I am leaning so far out of
+window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall--heaven itself
+to fall upon me.
+
+What do I _know_ truly, who only know so much happiness?
+
+Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it
+me quickly: I am utterly yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me!
+Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love.
+
+Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life
+have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only
+by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own
+poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I
+could not have invented _you_. But perhaps you have invented me: I am
+something new to myself since I saw you first. God bless you for it!
+
+Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now--though I might go blind,
+you could not unmake me:--"The gods themselves cannot recall their
+gifts." Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, I will trust: and
+so, not to be recalled!
+
+Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this! I am yours, Beloved. I
+kiss you again and again.--Ever your own making.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+
+Dearest, Dearest: How long has this happened? You don't tell me the day or
+the hour. Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have been in pain and
+grief for four days: and I not knowing anything about it! And you have no
+hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate by it one small word to
+poor me? What heartless merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry you,
+when soothing was the one thing wanted? Well, I will not worry now, then;
+neither at not being told, nor at not being allowed to come: but I will
+come thus and thus, O my dear heart, and take you in my arms. And you will
+be comforted, will you not be? when I tell you that even if you had no
+legs at all, I would love you just the same. Indeed, dearest, so much of
+you is a superfluity: just your heart against mine, and the sound of your
+voice, would carry me up to more heavens than I could otherwise have
+dreamed of. I may say now, now that I know it was not your choice, what a
+void these last few days the lack of letters has been to me. I wondered,
+truly, if you had found it well to put off such visible signs for a while
+in order to appease one who, in other things more essential, sees you
+rebellious. But the wonder is over now; and I don't want you to write--not
+till a consultation of doctors orders it for the good of your health. I
+will be so happy talking to you: also I am sending you books:--those I
+wish you to read; and which now you _must_, since you have the leisure!
+And I for my part will make time and read yours. Whose do you most want me
+to read, that my education in your likings may become complete? What I
+send you will not deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful
+complete set--your gift--and shall read side by side with you to realize
+in imagination what the happiness of reading them for the first time ought
+to be.
+
+Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic instinct, I went out for a long tramp
+on my two feet; and no ache in them came and told me of you! Over
+Sillingford I sat on a bank and looked downhill where went a carter. And
+I looked uphill where lay something which might be nothing--or not his.
+Now, shall I make a fool of myself by pursuing to tell him he may have
+dropped something, or shall I go on and see? So I went on and saw a coat
+with a fat pocket: and by then he was out of sight, and perhaps it
+wasn't his; and it was very hot and the hill steep. So I minded my own
+business, making Cain's motto mine; and now feel so had, being quite
+sure that it was his. And I wonder how many miles he will have tramped
+back looking for it, and whether his dinner was in the pocket.
+
+These unintentional misdoings are the "sins" one repents of all one's
+life long: I have others stored away, the bitterest of small things done
+or undone in haste and repented of at so much leisure afterwards. And
+always done to people or things I had no grudge against, sometimes even
+a love for. They are my skeletons: I will tell you of them some day.
+
+This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from each other; and I feel
+it almost more hard on me than on you. Beloved, let us lay our hearts
+together and get comforted. It is not real separation to know that
+another part of the world contains the rest of me. Oh, the rest of me,
+the rest of me that you are! So, thinking of you, I can never be tired.
+I rest yours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+
+Yes, Dearest, "Patience!" but it is a virtue I have little enough of
+naturally, and used to be taught to pray for as a child. And I remember
+once really hurting clear Mother-Aunt's feelings by trying to repay her
+for that teaching by a little iniquitous laughter at her expense. It was
+too funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do sometimes over quite
+small things, or I would not be telling it you now (for there are things
+in me I would conceal even from you). I dare say you wouldn't guess it,
+but the M.-A. is a most long person over her private devotions. Perhaps it
+was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting,
+which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person
+who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a
+pattern in patience out of these snippings of her godly desires. So, one
+day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her
+time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure
+exasperation began: and finding none, they let her return in peace to her
+missal, where for a reward all the letters had been turned into gold. "And
+that, my dear, comes of patience," my aunt would say, till I grew a little
+tired of the saying. I don't know what experience my uncle had gathered of
+her patience under like circumstances: but I notice that to this day he
+treads delicately, like Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees; and
+prefers then to send me on his errands instead of doing them himself.
+
+So it happened one day that he wanted a particular coat which had been put
+away in her clothes-closet--and she was on her knees between him and it,
+with the time of her Amen quite indefinite. I was sent, said my errand
+briefly, and was permitted to fumble out her keys from her pocket while
+she continued to kneel over her morning psalms.
+
+What I brought to him turned out to be the wrong coat: I went back and
+knocked for readmittance. Long-sufferingly she bade me to come in. I
+explained, and still she repressed herself, only saying in a tone of
+affliction, "Do see this time that you take the right one!"
+
+After I had made my second selection, and proved it right on my uncle's
+person, the parallelism of things struck me, and I skipped back to my
+aunt's door and tapped. I got a low wailing "Yes?" for answer--a
+monosyllabic substitute for the "How long, O Lord?" of a saint in
+difficulties. When I called through the keyhole, "Are your psalms
+written in gold?" she became really angry:--I suppose because the
+miracle so well earned had not come to pass.
+
+Well, dearest, if you have been patient with me over so much about
+nothing, I pray this letter may appear to you written in gold. Why I
+write so is, partly, that, it is bad for us both to be down in the
+mouth, or with hearts down at heel: and so, since you cannot, I have to
+do the dancing;--and, partly, because I found I had a bad temper on me
+which needed curing, and being brought to the sun-go-down point of owing
+no man anything. Which, sooner said, has finally been done; and I am
+very meek now and loving to you, and everything belonging to you--not to
+come nearer the sore point.
+
+And I hope some day, some day, as a reward to my present submission,
+that you will sprain your ankle in my company (just a very little bit
+for an excuse) and let me have the nursing of it! It hurts my heart to
+have your poor bones crying out for comfort that I am not to bring to
+them. I feel robbed of a part of my domestic training, and may never
+pick up what I have just lost. And I fear greatly you must have been
+truly in pain to have put off Meredith for a day. If I had been at hand
+to read to you, I flatter myself you would have liked him well, and
+been soothed. You must take the will, Beloved, for the deed. I kiss you
+now, as much as even you can demand; and when you get this I will be
+thinking of you all over again.--When do I ever leave off? Love, love,
+love till our next meeting-, and then more love still, and more!--Ever
+your own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+
+Dearest: I am in a simple mood to-day, and give you the benefit of it:
+I shall become complicated again presently, and you will hear from me
+directly that happens.
+
+The house only emptied itself this morning; I may say emptied, for the
+remainder fits like a saint into her niche, and is far too comfortable
+to count. This is C----, whom you only once met, when she sat so much in
+the background that you will not remember her. She has one weakness, a
+thirst between meals--the blameless thirst of a rabid teetotaler. She
+hides cups of cold tea about the place, as a dog its bones: now and then
+one gets spilled or sat on, and when she hears of the accident, she
+looks thirsty, with a thirst which only _that_ particular cup of tea
+could have quenched. In no other way is she any trouble: indeed, she is
+a great dear, and has the face of a Madonna, as beautiful as an
+apocryphal gospel to look at and "make believe" in.
+
+Arthur, too, like the rest of them, when he came over to give me his
+brotherly blessing, wished to know what you were like. I didn't pretend
+to remember your outward appearance too well,--told him you looked like
+a common or garden Englishman, and roused his suspicions by so careless
+a championship of my choice. He accused me of being in reality highly
+sentimental about you, and with having at that moment your portrait
+concealed and strung around my neck in a locket. Mother-Aunt stood up
+for me against him, declaring I was "too sensible a girl for nonsense of
+that sort." (It is a little weakness of hers, you know, to resent
+extremes of endearment towards anyone but herself in those she has
+"brooded," and she has thought us hitherto most restrained and
+proper--as, indeed, have we not been?) Arthur and I exchanged tokens of
+truce: in a little while off went my aunt to bed, leaving us alone.
+Then, for he is the one of us that I am most frank with: "Arthur," cried
+I, and up came your little locket like a bucket from a well, for him to
+have his first sight of you, my Beloved. He objected that he could not
+see faces in a nutshell; and I suppose others cannot: only I.
+
+He, too, is gone. If you had been coming he would have spared another
+day--for to-day _was_ planned and dated, you will remember--and we would
+have ridden halfway to meet you. But, as fate has tripped you, and made
+all comings on your part indefinite, he sends you his hopes for a later
+meeting.
+
+How is your poor foot? I suppose, as it is ill, I may send it a kiss by
+post and wish it well? I do. Truly, you are to let me know if it gives
+you much pain, and I will lie awake thinking of you. This is not
+sentimental, for if one knows that a friend is occupied over one's
+sleeplessness one feels the comfort.
+
+I am perplexed how else to give you my company: your mother, I know,
+could not yet truly welcome me; and I wish to be as patient as possible,
+and not push for favors that are not offered. So I cannot come and ask
+to take you out in _her_ carriage, nor come and carry you away in mine.
+We must try how fast we can hold hands at a distance.
+
+I have kept up to where you have been reading in "Richard Feverel,"
+though it has been a scramble: for I have less opportunity of reading, I
+with my feet, than you without yours. In _your_ book I have just got to
+the smuggling away of General Monk in the perforated coffin, and my
+sense of history capitulates in an abandonment of laughter. I yield! The
+Gaul's invasion of Britain always becomes broad farce when he attempts
+it. This in clever ludicrousness beats the unintentional comedy of
+Victor Hugo's "John-Jim-Jack" as a name typical of Anglo-Saxon
+christenings. But Dumas, through a dozen absurdities, knows apparently
+how to stalk his quarry: so large a genius may play the fool and remain
+wise.
+
+You see I have given your author a warm welcome at last: and what about
+you and mine? Tell me you love his women and I will not be jealous.
+Indeed, outside him I don't know where to find a written English woman
+of modern times whom I would care to meet, or could feel honestly bound
+to look up to:--nowhere will I have her shaking her ringlets at me in
+Dickens or Thackeray. Scott is simply not modern; and Hardy's women, if
+they have nobility in them, get so cruelly broken on the wheel that you
+get but the wrecks of them at last. It is only his charming baggages who
+come to a good ending.
+
+I like an author who has the courage and self-restraint to leave his noble
+creations alive: too many try to ennoble them by death. For my part, if I
+have to go out of life before you, I would gladly trust you to the hands
+of Clara, or Rose, or Janet, or most of all Vittoria; though, to be
+accurate, I fear they have all grown too old for you by now.
+
+And you? have you any men to offer me in turn out of your literary
+admirations, supposing you should die of a snapped ankle? Would you give
+me to d'Artagnan for instance? Hardly, I suspect! But either choose me
+some proxy hero, or get well and come to me! You will be very welcome
+when you do. Sleep is making sandy eyes at me: good-night, dearest.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+
+Why, my Beloved: Since you put it to me as a point of conscience (it is
+only lying on your back with one active leg doing nothing, and the other
+dying to have done aching, which has made you take this new start of
+inquiring within upon everything), since you call on me for a
+conscientious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I love you more
+than you love me, because there is so much more of you to love, let alone
+fit for loving.
+
+Do you imagine that you are going to be a cripple for life, and therefore
+an indifferent dancer in the dances I shall always be leading you, that
+you have started this fit of self-depreciation? Or is it because I have
+thrown Meredith at your sick head that you doubt my tact and my affection,
+and my power patiently to bear for your sake a good deal of cold shoulder?
+Dearest, remember I am doctoring you from a distance: and am not yet
+allowed to come and see my patient, so can only judge from your letters
+how ill you are. That you have been concealing from me almost
+treacherously: and only by a piece of abject waylaying did I receive word
+to-day of your sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symptoms. Lay
+by Meredith, then, for a while: I am sending you a cargo of Stevenson
+instead. You have been truly unkind, trying to read what required effort,
+when you were fit for nothing of the sort.
+
+And lest even Stevenson should be too much for you, and wanting very much,
+and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I am
+letting my last large bit of shyness of you go; and with a pleasant sort
+of pain, because I know I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open
+my hands and let you have these, and with them goes my last blush:
+henceforth I am a woman without a secret, and all your interest in me may
+evaporate. Yet I know well it will not.
+
+As for this resurrection pie from love's dead-letter office, you will
+find from it at least one thing--how much I depended upon response from
+you before I could become at all articulate. It is you, dearest, from
+the beginning who have set my head and heart free and made me a woman. I
+am something quite different from the sort of child I was less than a
+year ago when I wrote that small prayer which stands sponsor for all
+that follows. How abundantly it has been answered, dearest Beloved,
+only I know: you do not!
+
+Now my prayer is not that you should "come true," but that you should
+get well. Do this one little thing for me, dearest! For you I will do
+anything: my happiness waits for that. As yet I seem to have done
+nothing. Oh, but, Beloved, I will! From a reading of the Fioretti, I
+sign myself as I feel.--Your glorious poor little one.
+
+
+
+
+THE CASKET LETTERS.
+
+
+A.
+
+    my dear Prince Wonderful,[1]
+
+Pray God bless ---- ---- and make him come true for my sake. Amen.
+
+_R.S.V.P._
+
+[Footnote 1: The MS. contained at first no name, but a blank; over it
+this has been written afterwards in a small hand.]
+
+
+B.
+
+Dear Prince Wonderful: Now that I have met you I pray that you will be my
+friend. I want just a little of your friendship, but that, so much, so
+much! And even for that little I do not know how to ask.
+
+Always to be _your_ friend: of that you shall be quite sure.
+
+
+C.
+
+Dear Prince Wonderful: Long ago when I was still a child I told myself
+of you: but thought of you only as in a fairy tale. Now I am afraid of
+trusting my eyes or ears, for fear I should think too much of you before
+I know you really to be true. Do not make me wish so much to be your
+friend, unless you are also going to be true!
+
+Please come true now, for mine and for all the world's sake:--but for
+mine especially, because I thought of you first! And if you are not able
+to come true, don't make me see you any more. I shall always remember
+you, and be glad that I have seen you just once.
+
+
+D.
+
+Dear Prince Wonderful: _Has_ God blessed you yet and made you come true? I
+have not seen you again, so how am I to know? Not that it is necessary for
+me to know even if you do come true. I believe already that you are true.
+
+If I were never to see you again I should be glad to think of you as
+living, and shall always be your friend. I pray that you may come to
+know that.
+
+
+E.
+
+Dear Highness: I do not know what to write to you: I only know how much I
+wish to write. I have always written the things I thought about: it has
+been easy to find words for them. Now I think about you, but have no
+words:--no words, dear Highness, for you! I could write at once if I knew
+you were my friend. Come true for me: I will have so much to tell you
+then!
+
+
+F.
+
+Dear Highness: If I believe in fairy tales coming true, it is because I am
+superstitious. This is what I did to-day. I shut my eyes and took a book
+from the shelf, opened it, and put my fingers down on a page. This is what
+I came to:
+
+    "All I believed is true!
+       I am able yet
+       All I want to get
+     By a method as strange as new:
+     Dare I trust the same to you?"
+
+Fate says, then, you are to be my friend. Fate has said I am yours
+already. That is very certain. Only in real life where things come true
+would a book have opened as this has done.
+
+
+G.
+
+Dear Highness: I am sure now, then, that I please you, and that you like
+me, perhaps only a little: for you turned out of your way to ride with me
+though you were going somewhere so fast. How much I wished it when I saw
+you coming, but dared not believe it would come true!
+
+"Come true": it is the word I have always been writing, and everything
+_has_:--you most of all! You are more true each time I see you. So true
+that now I will write it down at last,--the truth for you who have come
+so true.
+
+Dear Highness and Great Heart, I love you dearly, though you don't know
+it,--quite ever so much; and am going to love you ever so much more,
+only--please like _me_ a little better first! You on your dear side must
+do something: or, before I know, I may be wringing my hands all alone on
+a desert island to a bare blue horizon, with nothing in it real or
+fabulous.
+
+If I am to love you, nothing but happiness is to be allowed to come of
+it. So don't come true too fast without one little wee corresponding
+wish for me to find that you are! I am quite happy thinking you out
+slowly: it takes me all day long; the longer the better!
+
+I wonder how often in my life I shall write down that I love you, having
+once written it (I do:--I love you! there [it] is for you, with more to
+follow after!); and send you my love as I do now into the great
+emptiness of chance, hoping somehow, known or unknown, it may bless you
+and bring good to you.
+
+Oh, but 'tis a windy world, and I a mere feather in it: how can I get
+blown the way I would?
+
+Still I have a superstition that some star is over me which I have not
+seen yet, but shall,--Heaven helping me.
+
+And now good-night, and no more, no more at all! I send out an "I love
+you" to be my celestial commercial traveler for me while I fold myself
+up and become its sleeping partner.
+
+Good-night: you are the best and truest that I ever dreamed yet.
+
+
+H.
+
+Dear Highness: I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is
+not a word for you that will do! "Highness" you are: but that leaves gaps
+and coldnesses without end. "Royal," yet much more serene than royal:
+though by that I don't mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never
+saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no
+haughtiness at all: and that is the finest royalty of look possible.
+
+I look at you and wonder so how you have grown to this--to have become
+king so quietly without any coronation ceremony. You have thought more
+than you should for happiness at your age; making me, by that one line
+in your forehead, think you were three years older than you really are.
+I wish--if I dare wish you anything different--that you were! It makes
+me uncomfortable to remember that I am--what? Almost half a year your
+elder as time flies:--not really, for your brain was born long before
+mine began to rattle in its shell. You say quite _old_ things, and
+quietly, as if you had had them in your mind ten years already. When you
+told me about your two old pensioners, the blind man and his wife, whom
+you brought to so funny a reconciliation, I felt ("mir war, ich wuszte
+nicht wie") that I would like very much to go blindfold led by you: it
+struck me suddenly how happy would be a blindfoldness of perfect trust
+such as one might have with your hands on one. I suppose that is what in
+religion is called faith: I haven't it there, my dear; but I have it in
+you now. I love you, beginning to understand why: at first I did not. I
+am ashamed not to have discovered it earlier. The matter with you is
+that you have goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of goodness, I
+mean:--a different thing from there being a whereabouts for goodness in
+you; _that_ we all have in some proportion or another. I was quite right
+to love you: I know it now,--I did not when I first did.
+
+Yesterday I was turning over a silly "confession book" in which a rose was
+everybody's favorite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man, and
+womanliness for a woman (which is as much as to say that pig is the best
+quality for pork, and pork for pig): till I came upon one different from
+the others, and found myself saying "Yes" all down the page.
+
+I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a
+strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting
+from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven
+years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something
+very sweet, hardly as a real person.
+
+I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a
+man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she
+wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute
+stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she--it must have been
+before the eighties had started the popular craze for him--chose Meredith,
+my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have
+run together had she lived!
+
+Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave--constitutionally, so
+that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But
+fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover.
+You have it fixed fast in you.
+
+You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of
+manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you
+could carry your head _so_--and no other way; so that, looking at you, I
+can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an
+unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you.
+But, whatever--I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you
+and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less
+than that, now.
+
+I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not
+look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness
+this brings me.
+
+
+I.
+
+Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not
+merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a
+day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all
+to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours
+without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it
+were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad
+because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed,
+though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you:
+I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.--That
+is a vow, dear friend,--you whom I love so much!
+
+
+J.
+
+I have not had to alter any thought ever formed about you, Beloved; I have
+only had to deepen it--that is all. You grow, but you remain. I have heard
+people talk about you, generally kindly; but what they think of you is
+often wrong. I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure that I know
+you better. If my mind is so clear about you, it shows that you are good
+for me. Now for nearly three months I may not see you again; but all that
+time you will be growing in my heart; and at the end without another word
+from you I shall find that I know you better than before. Is that strange?
+It is because I love you: love is knowledge--blind knowledge, not wanting
+eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in your memory the kind place you have
+given me. You are almost my friend now, and I know it. You do not know
+that I love you.
+
+
+K.
+
+Beloved: You love me! I know it now, and bless the sun and the moon and
+the stars for the dear certainty of it. And I ask you now, O heart that
+has opened to me, have I once been unhappy or impatient while this good
+thing has been withheld from me? Indeed my love for you has occupied me
+too completely: I have been so glad to find how much there is to learn in
+a good heart deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have employed me
+as I wish I may be employed all the days of my life: and now my beloved
+employer has given me the wages I did not ask.
+
+You love me! Is it a question of little or much? Is it not rather an
+entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you
+entered mine months that seem years ago? It was the seed then, and seemed
+small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now
+it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots:
+and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the
+stars know of my happiness.
+
+They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved: they are no company for me
+without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on
+kissing it till I die! You love me: that is wonderful! You love me: and
+already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark
+and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the
+new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning
+with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.
+
+"We came over at the Norman conquest," my dear, as people say trailing
+their pedigree: but there was no ancestral pride about us--it was all for
+the love of the thing we did it: how clear it seems now! In the hall hangs
+a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man
+who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my
+father in character that he could do nothing else. I shall look for you
+now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle
+of your face--of which that line on your forehead is the remainder. And
+you love me! I wonder what the line has to do with that?
+
+By such little things do great things seem to come about: not really. I
+know it was not because I said just what I did say, and did what I did
+yesterday, that your heart was bound to come for mine. But it was those
+small things that brought you consciousness: and when we parted I knew
+that I had all the world at my feet--or all heaven over my head!
+
+Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to you from me, and not be
+ashamed or think myself forward since I have your love. All this time you
+are thinking of me: a certainty lying far outside what I can see.
+
+Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any words, it is here! If
+silence goes better with it,--speak, silence, for me when I end now!
+
+Good-night, and think greatly of me! I shall wake early.
+
+
+L.
+
+Dearest: Was my heart at all my own,--was it my own to give, till you came
+and made me aware of how much it contains? Truly, dear, it contained
+nothing before, since now it contains you and nothing else. So I have a
+brand-new heart to give away: and you, you want it and can't see that
+there it is staring you in the face like a rose with all its petals ready
+to drop.
+
+I am quite sure that if I had not met you, I could have loved nobody as I
+love you. Yet it is very likely that I should have loved--sufficiently, as
+the way of the world goes. It is not a romantic confession, but it is true
+to life: I do so genuinely like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not
+happy except where shoulders rub socially:--that is to say, have not until
+now been happy, except dependently on the company and smiles of others.
+Now, Beloved, I have none of your company, and have had but few of your
+smiles (I could count them all); yet I have become more happy filling up
+my solitude with the understanding of you which has made me wise, than
+all the rest of fate or fortune could make me. Down comes autumn's sad
+heart and finds me gay; and the asters, which used to chill me at their
+appearing, have come out like crocuses this year because it is the
+beginning of a new world.
+
+And all the winter will carry more than a suspicion of summer with it,
+just as the longest days carry round light from northwest to northeast,
+because so near the horizon, but out of sight, lies their sun. So you,
+Beloved, so near to me now at last, though out of sight.
+
+
+M.
+
+Beloved: Whether I have sorry or glad things to think about, they are
+accompanied and changed by thoughts of you. You are my diary:--all goes to
+you now. That you love me is the very light by which I see everything.
+Also I learn so much through having you in my thoughts: I cannot say how
+it is, for I have no more knowledge of life than I had before:--yet I am
+wiser, I believe, knowing much more what lives at the root of things and
+what men have meant and felt in all they have done:--because I love you,
+dearest. Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have more joy and more
+fear in me than I had before. And if this seems to be all about myself,
+it is all about you really, Beloved!
+
+Last week one of my dearest old friends, our Rector, died: a character you
+too would have loved. He was a father to the whole village, rather stern
+of speech, and no respecter of persons. Yet he made a very generous
+allowance for those who did not go through the church door to find their
+salvation. I often went only because I loved him: and he knew it.
+
+I went for that reason alone last Sunday. The whole village was full of
+closed blinds: and of all things over him Chopin's Funeral March was
+played!--a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief,
+desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it
+cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all.
+Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke
+dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the
+Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my
+life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass,
+and youth slain in its high places.
+
+After service a sort of processional instinct drew people up to the house:
+they waited about till permission was given, and went in to look at their
+old man, lying in high state among his books. I did not go. Beloved, I
+have never yet seen death: you have, I know. Do you, I wonder, remember
+your father better than I mine:--or your brother? Are they more living
+because you saw them once not living? I think death might open our eyes to
+those we lived on ill terms with, but not to the familiar and dear. I do
+not need you dead, to be certain that your heart has mine for its true
+inmate and mine yours.
+
+I love you, I love you: so let good-night bring you good-morning!
+
+
+N.
+
+At long intervals, dearest, I write to you a secret all about yourself for
+my eyes to see: because, chiefly because, I have not you to look at. Thus
+I bless myself with you.
+
+Away over the world west of this and a little bit north is the city of
+spires where you are now. Never having seen it I am the more free to
+picture it as I like: and to me it is quite full of you:--quite greedily
+full, Beloved, when elsewhere you are so much wanted! I send my thoughts
+there to pick up crumbs for me.
+
+It is a strange blend of notions--wisdom and ignorance combined: for
+_you_ I seem to know perfectly; but of your life nothing at all. And
+yet nobody there knows so much about you as I. What you _do_ matters so
+much less than what you are. You, who are the clearest heart in all the
+world, do what you will, you are so still to me, Beloved.
+
+I take a happy armful of thoughts about you into all my dreams: and when
+I wake they are there still, and have done nothing but remain true. What
+better can I ask of them?
+
+You do love me: you have not changed? Without change I remain yours so
+long as I live.
+
+
+O.
+
+And you, Beloved, what are you thinking of me all this while? Think well
+of me, I beg you: I deserve so much, loving you as truly as I do!
+
+So often, dearest, I sit thinking my hands into yours again as when we
+were saying good-by the last time. Then it was, under our laughter and
+light words, that I saw suddenly how the thing too great to name had
+become true, that from friends we were changed into lovers. It seemed the
+most natural thing to be, and yet was wonderful--for it was I who loved
+you first: a thing I could never be ashamed of, and am now proud to
+own--for has it not proved me wise? My love for you is the best wisdom
+that I have. Good-night, dearest! Sleep as well as I love you, and nobody
+in the world will sleep so soundly.
+
+
+P.
+
+A few times in my life, Beloved, I have had the Blue-moon-hunger for
+something which seemed too impossible and good ever to come true: prosaic
+people call it being "in the blues"; I comfort myself with a prettier word
+for it. To-day, not the Blue-moon itself, but the Man of it came down and
+ate plum-porridge with me! Also, I do believe that it burnt his mouth, and
+am quite reasonably happy thinking so, since it makes me know that you
+love me as much as ever.
+
+If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been of myself, lest I might be
+unworthy of your friendship or love. Suspicions of you I never had.
+
+Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds, flying
+only by twilight?
+
+But even my doubts have been thoughts, Beloved,--sure of you if not always
+of myself. And if I have looked for you only with doubtful vision, yet I
+have always seen you in as strong a light as my eyes could bear:--
+blue-moonlight. Beloved, is not twilight: and blue-moonlight has been the
+light I saw you by: it is you alone who can make sunlight of it.
+
+This I read yesterday has lain on my mind since as true and altogether
+beautiful, with the beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it was
+a minor poet who wrote it. It is of a wood where Apollo has gone in
+quest of his Beloved, and she is not yet to be found:
+
+      "Here each branch
+    Sway'd with a glitter all its crowded leaves,
+    And brushed the soft divine hair touching them
+    In ruffled clusters....
+
+      Suddenly the moon
+    Smoothed herself out of vapor-drift and made
+    The deep night full of pleasure in the eye
+    Of her sweet motion. Not alone she came
+    Leading the starlight with her like a song:
+    And not a bud of all that undergrowth
+    But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge
+    As the light steeped it: over whose massed leaves
+    The portals of illimitable sleep
+    Faded in heaven."
+
+That is love in its moonrise, not its sunrise stage: yet you see.
+Beloved, how it takes possession of its dark world, quite as fully as
+the brighter sunlight could do. And if I speak of doubts, I mean no
+twilight and no suspicions: nor by darkness do I mean any unhappiness.
+
+My blue-moon has come, leading the starlight with her like a song. Am I
+not happy enough to be patiently yours before you know it? Good things
+which are to be, before they happen are already true. Nothing is so true
+as you are, except my love for you and yours for me. Good-night,
+good-night.
+
+Sleep well, Beloved, and wake.
+
+
+Q.
+
+Beloved: I heard somebody yesterday speak of you as "charming"; and I
+began wondering to myself was that the word which could ever have covered
+my thoughts of you? I do not know whether you ever charmed me, except in
+the sense of charming which means magic and spell-binding. _That_ you did
+from the beginning, dearest. But I think I held you at first in too much
+awe to discover charm in you: and at last knew you too much to the depths
+to name you by a word so lightly used for the surface of things. Yet now a
+charm in you, which is not _all_ you, but just a part of you, comes to
+light, when I see you wondering whether you are really loved, or whether,
+Beloved, I only _like_ you rather well!
+
+Well, if you will be so "charming," I am helpless: and can do nothing,
+nothing, but pray for the blue-moon to rise, and love you a little better
+because you have some of that divine foolishness which strikes the very
+wise ones of earth, and makes them kin to weaker mortals who otherwise
+might miss their "charm" altogether.
+
+Truly, Beloved, if I am happy, it is because I am also your most patiently
+loving.
+
+
+R.
+
+Beloved: The certainty which I have now that you love me so fills all my
+thoughts, I cannot understand you being in any doubt on your side. What
+must I do that I do not do, to show gladness when we meet and sorrow when
+we have to part? I am sure that I make no pretense or disguise, except
+that I do not stand and wring my hands before all the world, and cry
+"Don't go!"--which has sometimes been in my mind, to be kept _not_ said!
+
+Indeed, I think so much of you, my dear, that I believe some day, if you
+do your part, you will only have to look up from your books to find me
+standing. If you did, would you still be in doubt whether I loved you?
+
+Oh, if any apparition of me ever goes to you, all my thoughts will surely
+look truthfully out of its eyes; and even you will read what is there at
+last!
+
+Beloved, I kiss your blind eyes, and love them the better for all their
+unreadiness to see that I am already their slave. Not a day now but I
+think I may see you again: I am in a golden uncertainty from hour to hour.
+
+I love you: you love me: a mist of blessing swims over my eyes as I write
+the words, till they become one and the same thing: I can no longer divide
+their meaning in my mind. Amen: there is no need that I should.
+
+
+S.
+
+Beloved: I have not written to you for quite a long time: ah, I could not.
+I have nothing now to say! I think I could very easily die of this great
+happiness, so certainly do you love me! Just a breath more of it and I
+should be gone.
+
+Good-by, dearest, and good-by, and good-by! If you want letters from me
+now, you must ask for them! That the earth contains us both, and that we
+love each other, is about all that I have mind enough to take in. I do not
+think I can love you more than I do: you are no longer my dream but my
+great waking thought. I am waiting for no blue-moonrise now: my heart has
+not a wish which you do not fulfill. I owe you my whole life, and for any
+good to you must pay it out to the last farthing, and still feel myself
+your debtor.
+
+Oh, Beloved, I am most poor and most rich when I think of your love.
+Good-night; I can never let thought of you go!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beloved: These are almost all of them, but not quite; a few here and there
+have cried to be taken out, saying they were still too shy to be looked
+at. I can't argue with them: they know their own minds best; and you know
+mine.
+
+See what a dignified historic name I have given this letter-box, or
+chatterbox, or whatever you like to call it. But "Resurrection Pie" is
+_my_ name for it. Don't eat too much of it, prays your loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+
+Saving your presence, dearest, I would rather have Prince Otto, a very
+lovable character for second affections to cling to. Richard Feverel would
+never marry again, so I don't ask for him: as for the rest, they are all
+too excellent for me. They give me the impression of having worn
+copy-books under their coats, when they were boys, to cheat punishment:
+and the copy-books got beaten into their systems.
+
+You must find me somebody who was a "gallous young hound" in the days of
+his youth--Crossjay, for instance:--there! I have found the very man for
+me!
+
+But really and truly, are you better? It will not hurt your foot to come
+to me, since I am not to come to you? How I long to see you again,
+dearest! it is an age! As a matter of fact, it is a fortnight: but I dread
+lest you will find some change in me. I have kept a real white hair to
+show you, I drew it out of my comb the other morning: wound up into a curl
+it becomes quite visible, and it is ivory-white: you are not to think it
+flaxen, and take away its one wee sentiment! And I make you an offer:--you
+shall have it if, honestly, you can find in your own head a white one to
+exchange.
+
+Dearest, I am not _hurt_, nor do I take seriously to heart your mother's
+present coldness. How much more I could forgive her when I put myself in
+her place! She may well feel a struggle and some resentment at having to
+give up in any degree her place with you. All my selfishness would come
+to the front if that were demanded of me.
+
+Do not think, because I leave her alone, that I am repaying her coldness
+in the same coin. I know that for the present anything I do must offend.
+Have I demanded your coming too soon? Then stay away another day--or
+two: every day only piles up the joy it will be to have your arms round
+me once more. I can keep for a little longer: and the gray hair will
+keep, and many to-morrows will come bringing good things for us, when
+perhaps your mother's "share of the world" will be over.
+
+Don't say it, but when you next kiss her, kiss her for me also: I am
+sorry for all old people: their love of things they are losing is so far
+more to be reverenced and made room for than ours of the things which
+will come to us in good time abundantly.
+
+To-night I feel selfish at having too much of your love: and not a bit
+of it can I let go! I hope, Beloved, we shall live to see each other's
+gray hairs in earnest: gray hairs that we shall not laugh at, as at this
+one I pulled. How dark your dear eyes will look with a white setting! My
+heart's heart, every day you grow larger round me, and I so much
+stronger depending upon you!
+
+I won't say--come for certain, to-morrow: but come if, and as soon as,
+you can. I seem to see a mile further when I am on the lookout for you:
+and I shall be long-sighted every day until you come. It is only
+_doubtful_ hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. I am as happy as
+the day is long waiting for you: but the day _is_ long, dearest, none
+the less when I don't see you.
+
+All this space on the page below is love. I have no time left to put it
+into words, or words into it. You bless my thoughts constantly.--Believe
+me, never your thoughtless.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+
+Dearest: How, when, and where is there any use wrangling as to
+which of us loves the other the best ("the better," I believe, would be
+the more grammatical phrase in incompetent Queen's English), and why in
+that of all things should we pretend to be rivals? For this at least
+seems certain to me, that, being created male and female, no two lovers
+since the world began ever loved each other quite in the _same_ way: it
+is not in nature for it to be so. They cannot compare: only to the best
+that is in them they _do_ love each after their kind,--as do we for
+certain!
+
+Be sure, then, that I am utterly contented with what I get (and you,
+Beloved, and you?): nay, I wonder forever at the love you have given me:
+and if I will to lay mine at your feet, and feel yours crowning my
+life,--why, so it is, you know; you cannot alter it! And if you insist
+that your love is at _my_ feet, I have only to turn Irish and reply that
+it is because I am heels over head in love with you:--and, mark you,
+that is no pretty attitude for a lady that you have driven me into in
+order that I may stick to my "crown"!
+
+Go to, dearest! There is one thing in which I can beat you, and that is
+in the bandying of words and all verbal conjurings: take this as the
+last proof of it and rest quiet. I know you love me a great great deal
+more than I have wit or power to love you: and that is just the little
+reason why your love mounts till, as I tell you, it crowns me (head or
+heels): while mine, insufficient and groveling, lies at your feet, and
+will till they become amputated. And I can give you, but won't, sixty
+other reasons why things are as I say, and are to be left as I say. And
+oh, my world, my world, it is with you I go round sunwards, and you make
+my evenings and mornings, and will, till Time shuts his wings over us!
+And now it is doleful business I have to write to you....
+
+I have dropped to sleep over all this writing of things, and my cheek down
+on the page has made the paper unwilling to take the ink again:--what a
+pretty compliment to me: and, if you prefer it, what an easy way of
+writing to you! I can send you such any day and be as idle as I like. And
+you will decide about all the above exactly as you and I think best (or
+should it be "better" again, being only between us two?). When you get
+this, blow your beloved self a kiss in the glass for me,--a great big
+shattering blow that shall astonish Mercury behind his window-pane.
+Good-night, my best--or "better," for that is what I most want you to be.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+
+My Own Beloved: And I never thanked you yesterday for your dear words
+about the resurrection pie; that comes of quarreling! Well, you must prove
+them and come quickly that I may see this restoration of health and
+spirits that you assure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you to
+sleep; but I suppose that is what you mean.
+
+Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning: listen to this
+and guess where it comes from:
+
+    "When March with variant winds was past,
+     And April had with her silver showers
+     Ta'en leif at life with an orient blast;
+     And lusty May, that mother of flowers,
+     Had made the birds to begin their hours,
+     Among the odours ruddy and white,
+     Whose harmony was the ear's delight:
+
+    "In bed at morrow I sleeping lay;
+     Methought Aurora, with crystal een,
+     In at the window looked by day,
+     And gave me her visage pale and green;
+     And on her hand sang a lark from the splene,
+     'Awake ye lovers from slumbering!
+     See how the lusty morrow doth spring!'"
+
+Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue! That is
+Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit
+altered by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I had not had to
+leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay
+outside this century? That shows the permanent element in all good
+poetry, and in all good joy in things also. In the four centuries since
+that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of
+certain words, as for instance "spleen," which now means irritation and
+vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite--what we should call, I
+suppose, "a full heart." It is what I am always saying--a good digestion
+is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are
+capable of: and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it
+is now of the miserable ones. Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a
+full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off
+without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same
+code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not
+poetry at all as we try to make it out to be.
+
+I have no news for you at all of anyone: all inside the house is a
+simmer of peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down against the heat the
+whole day long. No callers; and as for me, I never call elsewhere. The
+gossips about here eke out a precarious existence by washing each
+other's dirty linen in public: and the process never seems to result in
+any satisfactory cleansing.
+
+I avoid saying what news I trust to-morrow's post-bag may contain for
+me. Every wish I send you comes "from the spleen," which means I am very
+healthy, and, conditionally, as happy as is good for me. Pray God bless
+my dear Share of the world, and make him get well for his own and my
+sake! Amen.
+
+This catches the noon post, an event which always shows I am jubilant,
+with a lot of the opposite to a "little death" feeling running over my
+nerves. I feel the grass growing _under_ me: the reverse of poor Keats'
+complaint. Good-by, Beloved, till I find my way into the provender of
+to-morrow's post-bag.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+
+Oh, wings of the morning, here you come! I have been looking out for you
+ever since post came. Roberts is carrying orders into town, and will bring
+you this with a touch of the hat and an amused grin under it. I saw you
+right on the top Sallis Hill: this is to wager that my eyes have told me
+correctly. Look out for me from far away, I am at my corner window: wave
+to me! Dearest, this is to kiss you before I can.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+
+Dearest: I have made a bad beginning of the week: I wonder how it will
+end? it all comes of my not seeing enough of you. Time hangs heavy on my
+hands, and the Devil finds me the mischief!
+
+I prevailed upon myself to go on Sunday and listen to our new lately
+appointed vicar: for I thought it not fair to condemn him on the strength
+of Mrs. P----'s terrible reporting powers and her sensuous worship of his
+full-blown flowers of speech--"pulpit-pot-plants" is what I call them.
+
+It was not worse and not otherwise than I had expected. I find there are
+only two kinds of clerics as generally necessary to salvation in a country
+parish--one leads his parishioners to the altar and the other to the
+pulpit: and the latter is vastly the more popular among the articulate and
+gad-about members of his flock. This one sways himself over the edge of
+his frame, making signals of distress in all directions, and with that and
+his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-car,
+till he comes down to earth at the finish with the Doxology for a
+parachute. His shepherd's crook is one long note of interrogation, with
+which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his
+hearers, and his hearers up to an understanding of himself. All his
+arguments are put interrogatively, and few of them are worth answering.
+Well, well, I shall be all the freer for your visit when you come next
+Sunday, and any Sunday after that you will: and he shall come in to tea if
+you like and talk to you in quite a cultured and agreeable manner, as he
+can when his favorite beverage is before him.
+
+I discover that I get "the snaps" on a Monday morning, if I get them at
+all. The M.-A. gets them on the Sunday itself, softly but regularly: they
+distress no one, and we all know the cause: her fingers are itching for
+the knitting which she mayn't do. Your Protestant ignores Lent as a Popish
+device, a fond thing vainly invented: but spreads it instead over
+fifty-two days in the year. Why, I want to know, cannot I change the
+subject?
+
+Sunday we get no post (and no collection except in church) unless we send
+down to the town for it, so Monday is all the more welcome: but this I
+have been up and writing before it arrives--therefore the "snaps."
+
+Our postman is a lovely sight. I watched him walking up the drive the
+other morning, and he seemed quite perfection, for I guessed he was
+bringing me the thing which would make me happy all day. I only hope the
+Government pays him properly.
+
+I think this is the least pleasant letter I have ever sent you: shall I
+tell you why? It was not the sermon: he is quite a forgivable good man in
+his way. But in the afternoon that same Mrs. P---- came, got me in a
+corner, and wanted to unburden herself of invective against your mother,
+believing that I should be glad, because her coldness to me has become
+known! What mean things some people can think about one! I heard nothing:
+but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want stroking. And my love to your
+mother, please, if she will have it. It is only through her that I get
+you.--Ever your very own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+
+Dearest: Here comes a letter to you from me flying in the opposite
+direction. I won't say I am not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two
+places at once! Give this letter, then, a special nesting-place, because I
+am so much on the wing elsewhere.
+
+I shut my eyes most of the time through France, and opened them on a
+soup-tureen full of coffee which presented itself at the frontier: and
+then realized that only a little way ahead lay Berne, with baths, buns,
+bears, breakfast, and other nice things beginning with B, waiting to make
+us clean, comfortable, contented, and other nice things beginning with C.
+
+Through France I loved you sleepy fashion, with many dreams in between not
+all about you. But now I am breathing thoughts of you out of a new
+atmosphere--a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking
+between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their
+heads: and no time for a word more about anything except you: you, and
+double-you,--and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so
+beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne: if
+not,--Italy.
+
+What a lot I have to go through before we meet again visibly! You will
+find me world-worn, my Beloved! Write often.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+
+Beloved: You know of the method for making a cat settle down in
+a strange place by buttering her all over: the theory being that by the
+time she has polished off the butter she feels herself at home? My
+morning's work has been the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with such
+things as will Lucerne her the most. When her instincts are appeased I
+am the more free to indulge my own.
+
+So after breakfast we went round the cloisters, very thick set with
+tablets and family vaults, and crowded graves inclosed. It proved quite
+"the best butter." To me the penance turned out interesting after a
+period of natural repulsion. A most unpleasant addition to sepulchral
+sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the
+stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the
+pedestal above the name is the photo:--a smug man with bourgeois
+whiskers,--a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,--a woman
+well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked
+the pretension of such types to the dignity of death and immortality.
+
+But just one or two faces stood the test, and were justified: a young
+man oppressed with the burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother
+in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a woman not beautiful but
+for her neck which carried indignation; her face had a thwarted look.
+"Dead and rotten" one did not say of these in disgust and involuntarily
+as one did of the others. And yet I don't suppose the eye picks out the
+faces that kindled most kindness round them when living, or that one can
+see well at all where one sees without sympathy. I think the
+Mother-Aunt's face would not look dear to most people as it does to
+me,--yet my sight of her is the truer: only I would not put it up on a
+tombstone in order that it might look nothing to those that pass by.
+
+I wrote this much, and then, leaving the M.-A. to glory in her
+innumerable correspondence, Arthur and I went off to the lake, where we
+have been for about seven hours. On it, I found it become infinitely
+more beautiful, for everything was mystified by a lovely bloomy haze,
+out of which the white peaks floated like dreams: and the mountains
+change and change, and seem not all the same as going when returning.
+Don't ask me to write landscape to you: one breathes it in, and it is
+there ever after, but remains unset to words.
+
+The T----s whittle themselves out of our company just to the right
+amount: come back at the right time (which is more than Arthur and I are
+likely to do when our legs get on the spin), and are duly welcome with a
+diversity of doings to talk about. Their tastes are more the M.-A.'s,
+and their activities about halfway between hers and ours, so we make
+rather a fortunate quintette. The M---- trio join us the day after
+to-morrow, when the majority of us will head away at once to Florence.
+Arthur growls and threatens he means to be left behind for a week: and
+it suits the funny little jealousy of the M.-A. well enough to see us
+parted for a time, quite apart from the fact that I shall then be more
+dependent on her company. She will then glory in overworking
+herself,--say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. No letter at all,
+dearest, this; merely talky-talky.--Yours without words.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+
+Dearest: I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the majority had
+their way, and we simply skipped into it, got ourselves bumped down at
+the Duomo and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed, and
+skipped out again by the first train next morning. Over the walls of the
+Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli (don't expect me
+ever to spell the names of dead painters correctly: it is a politeness
+one owes to the living, but the famous dead are exalted by being spelt
+phonetically as the heart dictates, and become all the better company
+for that greatest of unspelled and spread-about names--Shakspere,
+Shakspeare, Shakespeare--his mark, not himself). Such a long parenthesis
+requires stepping-stones to carry you over it: "crumbs" was the last
+(wasn't a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen's
+fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I hadn't time to digest them properly. Let
+me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you
+love me as much then as I think you do now.
+
+The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is wonderful,--a mirror of sound
+hung over the head of an official who opens his mouth for centimes to
+drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather you don't, for that is
+his perquisite), and they fly circling, and flock, and become a single
+chord stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are living inside
+what in the days of our youth would have been called "the sound of a
+grand Amen."
+
+The cathedral has fine points, or more than points--aspects: but the
+Italian version of Gothic, with its bands of flat marbles instead of
+moldings, was a shock to me at first. I only begin to understand it now
+that I have seen the outside of the Duomo at Florence. Curiously enough,
+it doesn't strike me as in the least Christian, only civic and splendid,
+reminding me of what Ruskin says about church architecture being really
+a dependant on the feudal or domestic. The Strozzi Palace is a beautiful
+piece of street-architecture; its effect is of an iron hand which gives
+you a buffet in the face when you look up and wonder--how shall I climb
+in? I will tell you more about insides when I write next.
+
+I fear my last letter to you from Lucerne may either have strayed, or not
+even have begun straying: for in the hurry of coming away I left it,
+addressed, I _think_, but unstamped; and I am not sure that that
+particular hotel will be Christian enough to spare the postage out of the
+bill, which had a galaxy of small extras running into centimes, and
+suggesting a red-tape rectitude that would not show blind
+twenty-five-centime gratitude to the backs of departed guests. So be
+patient and forgiving if I seem to have written little. I found two of
+yours waiting for me, and cannot choose between them which I find most
+dear. I will say, for a fancy, the shorter, that you may ever be
+encouraged to write your shortest rather than none at all. One word from
+you gives me almost as much pleasure as twenty, for it contains all your
+sincerity and truth; and what more do I want? Yon bless me quite. How many
+perfectly happy days I owe to you, and seldom dare dream that I have made
+any beginning of a return! If I could take one unhappy day out of your
+life, dearest, the secret would be mine, and no such thing should be left
+in it. Be happy, beloved! oh, happy, happy,--with me for a partial
+reason--that is what I wish!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+
+Dearest: The Italian paper-money paralyzes my brain: I cannot
+calculate in it; and were I left to myself an unscrupulous shopman could
+empty me of pounds without my becoming conscious of it till I beheld
+vacuum. But the T----s have been wonderful caretakers to me: and
+to-morrow Arthur rejoins us, so that I shall be able to resume my full
+activities under his safe-conduct.
+
+The ways of the Italian cabbies and porters fill me with terror for the
+time when I may have to fall alive and unassisted into their hands: they
+have neither conscience nor gratitude, and regard thievish demands when
+satisfied merely as stepping-stones to higher things.
+
+Many of the outsides of Florence I seemed to know by heart--the Palazzo
+Vecchio for instance. But close by it Cellini's two statues, the Judith
+and the Perseus, brought my heart up to my mouth unexpectedly. The
+Perseus is so out of proportion as to be ludicrous from one point of
+view: but another is magnificent enough to make me forgive the scamp his
+autobiography from now to the day of judgment (when we shall all begin
+forgiving each other in great haste, I suppose, for fear of the devil
+taking the hindmost!), and I registered a vow on the spot to that
+effect:--so no more of him here, henceforth, but good!
+
+There is not so much color about as I had expected: and austerity rather
+than richness is the note of most of the exteriors.
+
+I have not been allowed into the Uffizi yet, so to-day consoled myself
+with the Pitti. Titian's "Duke of Norfolk" is there, and I loved him,
+seeing a certain likeness there to somebody whom I--like. A photo of him
+will be coming to you. Also there is a very fine Lely-Vandyck of Charles
+I. and Henrietta Maria, a quite moral painting, making a triumphant
+assertion of that martyr's bad character. I imagine he got into heaven
+through having his head cut off and cast from him: otherwise all of him
+would have perished along with his mouth.
+
+Somewhere too high up was hanging a ravishing Botticelli--a Madonna and
+Child bending over like a wind-blown tree to be kissed by St. John:--a
+composition that takes you up in its arms and rocks you as you look at
+it. Andrea del Sarto is to me only a big mediocrity: there is nothing
+here to touch his chortling child-Christ in our National Gallery.
+
+At Pisa I slept in a mosquito-net, and felt like a bride at the altar
+under a tulle veil which was too large for her. Here, for lack of that
+luxury, being assured that there were no mosquitoes to be had, I have
+been sadly ravaged. The creatures pick out all foreigners, I think, and
+only when they have exhausted the supply do they pass on to the natives.
+Mrs. T---- left one foot unveiled when in Pisa, and only this morning
+did the irritation in the part bitten begin to come out.
+
+I can now ask for a bath in Italian, and order the necessary things for
+myself in the hotel: also say "come in" and "thank you." But just the
+few days of that very German _table d'hote_ at Lucerne, where I talked
+gladly to polish myself up, have given my tongue a hybrid way of talking
+without thinking: and I say "_ja, ja_," and "_nein_," and "_der, die,
+das_," as often as not before such Italian nouns as I have yet captured.
+To fall upon a chambermaid who knows French is like coming upon my
+native tongue suddenly.
+
+Give me good news of your foot and all that is above it: I am so doubtful
+of its being really strong yet; and its willing spirits will overcome it
+some day and do it an injury, and hurt my feelings dreadfully at the same
+time.
+
+Walk only on one leg whenever you think of me! I tell you truly I am
+wonderfully little lonely: and yet my thoughts are constantly away with
+you, wishing, wishing,--what no word on paper can ever carry to you. It
+shall be at our next meeting!--All yours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+
+My Dearest: Florence is still eating up all my time and energies: I
+promised you there should be austerity and self-denial in the matter of
+letter-writing: and I know you are unselfish enough to expect even less
+than I send you.
+
+Girls in the street address compliments to Arthur's complexion:--
+"beautiful brown boy" they call him: and he simmers over with vanity, and
+wishes he could show them his boating arms, brown up to the shoulder, as
+well. Have you noticed that combination in some of the dearest specimens
+of young English manhood,--great physical vanity and great mental modesty?
+and each as transparently sincere as the other.
+
+The Bargello is an ideal museum for the storage of the best things out of
+the Middle Ages. It opens out of splendid courtyards and staircases, and
+ranges through rooms which have quite a feudal gloom about them; most of
+these are hung with bad late tapestries (too late at least for my taste),
+so that the gloom is welcome and charming, making even "Gobelins" quite
+bearable. I find quite a new man here to admire--Pollaiolo, both painter
+and sculptor, one of the school of "passionate anatomists," as I call
+them, about the time of Botticelli, I fancy. He has one bust of a young
+Florentine which equals Verocchio on the same ground, and charms me even
+more. Some of his subjects are done twice over, in paint and bronze: but
+he is more really a sculptor, I think, and merely paints his piece into a
+picture from its best point of view.
+
+Verocchio's idea of David is charming: he is a saucy fellow who has gone
+in for it for the fun of the thing--knew he could bring down a hawk with
+his catapult, and therefore why not a Goliath also? If he failed, he
+need but cut and run, and everybody would laugh and call him plucky for
+doing even that much. So he does it, brings down his big game by good
+luck, and stands posing with a sort of irresistible stateliness to suit
+the result. He has a laugh something like "little Dick's," only more
+full of bubbles, and is saying to himself, "What a hero they all think
+me!" He is the merriest of sly-dog hypocrites, and has thin, wiry arms
+and a craney neck. He is a bit like Tom Sawyer in character, more ornate
+and dramatic than Huckleberry Finn, but quite as much a liar, given a
+good cause.
+
+Another thing that has seized me, more for its idea than actual carrying
+out, is an unnamed terra-cotta Madonna and Child. He is crushing himself
+up against her neck, open-mouthed and terrified, and she spreading long
+fingers all over his head and face. My notion of it is that it is the
+Godhead taking his first look at life from the human point of view; and
+he realizes himself "caught in his own trap," discovering it to be ever
+so much worse than it had seemed from an outside view. It is a fine
+modern _zeit-geist_ piece of declamation to come out of the rather
+over-sweet della Robbia period of art.
+
+There seems to have been a rage at one period for commissioning statues
+of David: so Donatello and others just turned to and did what they liked
+most in the way of budding youth, stuck a Goliath's head at its feet,
+and called it "David." Verocchio is the exception.
+
+We are going to get outside Florence for a week or ten days; it is too
+hot to be borne at night after a day of tiring activity. So we go to the
+D----s' villa, which they offered us in their absence; it lies about
+four miles out, and is on much higher ground: address only your very
+immediately next letter there, or it may miss me.
+
+There are hills out there with vineyards among them which draw me into
+wishing to be away from towns altogether. Much as I love what is to be
+found in this one, I think Heaven meant me to be "truly rural"; which
+all falls in, dearest, with what _I_ mean to be! Beloved, how little I
+sometimes can say to you! Sometimes my heart can put only silence into
+the end of a letter; and with that I let this one go.--Yours, and so
+lovingly.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+
+Beloved: I had your last letter on Friday: all your letters have come in
+their right numbers. I have lost count of mine; but I think seven and two
+postcards is the total, which is the same as the numbers of clean and
+unclean beasts proportionately represented in the ark.
+
+Up here we are out of the deadliness of the heat, and are thankful for it.
+Vineyards and olives brush the eyes between the hard, upright bars of the
+cypresses: and Florence below is like a hot bath which we dip into and
+come out again. At the Riccardi chapel I found Benozzo Gozzoli, not in
+crumbs, but perfectly preserved: a procession of early Florentine youths,
+turning into angels when they get to the bay of the window where the altar
+once stood. The more I see of them, the greater these early men seem to
+me: I shall be afraid to go to Venice soon; Titian will only half satisfy
+me, and Tintoretto, I know, will be actively annoying: I shall stay in my
+gondola, as your American lady did on her donkey after riding twenty
+miles to visit the ruins, of--Carnac, was it not? It is well to have the
+courage of one's likings and dislikings, that is the only true culture
+(the state obtained by use of a "coulter" or cutter)--I cut many things
+severely which, no doubt, are good for other people.
+
+Botticelli I was shy of, because of the craze about him among people who
+know nothing: he is far more wonderful than I had hoped, both at the
+Uffizi and the Academia: but he is quite pagan. I don't know why I say
+"but"; he is quite typical of the world's art-training: Christianity may
+get hold of the names and dictate the subjects, but the artist-breed
+carries a fairly level head through it all, and, like Pater's Mona Lisa,
+draws Christianity and Paganism into one: at least, wherever it reaches
+perfect expression it has done so. Some of the distinctly primitives are
+different; their works inclose a charm which is not artistic. Fra
+Angelico, after being a great disappointment to me in some of his large
+set pictures in the Academia and elsewhere, shows himself lovely in fresco
+(though I think the "crumb" element helps him). His great Crucifixion is
+big altogether, and has so permanent a force in its aloofness from mere
+drama and mere life. In San Marco, the cells of the monks are quite
+charming, a row of little square bandboxes under a broad raftered
+corridor, and in every cell is a beautiful little fresco for the monks to
+live up to. But they no longer live there now: all that part of San Marco
+has become a peep-show.
+
+I liked being in Savonarola's room, and was more susceptible to the
+remains of his presence than I have been to Michel Angelo or anyone
+else's. Michel Angelo I feel most when he has left a thing unfinished;
+then one can put one's finger into the print of the chisel, and believe
+anything of the beauty that might have come out of the great stone
+chrysalis lying cased and rough, waiting to be raised up to life.
+
+Yesterday Arthur and I walked from here to Fiesole, which we had
+neglected while in Florence--six miles going, and more like twelve
+coming back, all because of Arthur's absurd cross-country instinct,
+which, after hours of river-bends, bare mountain tracks, and tottering
+precipices, brought us out again half a mile nearer Florence than when
+we started.
+
+At Fiesole is the only church about here whose interior architecture I
+have greatly admired, austere but at the same time gracious--like a
+Madonna of the best period of painting. We also went to look at the
+Roman baths and theater: the theater is charming enough, because it is
+still there: but for the baths--oblongs of stone don't interest me just
+because they are old. All stone is old: and these didn't even hold water
+to give one the real look of the thing. Too tired, and even more too
+lazy, to write other things, except love, most dear Beloved.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+
+Dearest: We were to have gone down with the rest into Florence
+yesterday: but soft miles of Italy gleamed too invitingly away on our
+right, and I saw Arthur's eyes hungry with the same far-away wish. So I
+said "Prato," and he ran up to the fattore's and secured a wondrous
+shandry-dan with just space enough between its horns to toss the two of
+us in the direction where we would go. Its gaunt framework was painted
+of a bright red, and our feet had only netting to rest on: so
+constructed, the creature was most vital and light of limb, taking every
+rut on the road with flea-like agility. Oh, but it was worth it!
+
+We had a drive of fourteen miles through hills and villages, and
+castellated villas with gardens shut in by formidably high walls--always,
+a charm: a garden should always have something of the jealous seclusion of
+a harem. I am getting Italian landscape into my system, and enjoy it more
+and more.
+
+Prato is a little cathedral town, very like the narrow and tumble-down
+parts of Florence, only more so. The streets were a seething caldron of
+cattle-market when we entered, which made us feel like a tea-cup in a
+bull-ring (or is it thunderstorm?) as we drove through needle's-eye ways
+bristling with agitated horns.
+
+The cathedral is little and good: damaged, of course, wherever the last
+three centuries have laid hands on it. At the corner of the west front
+is an out-door pulpit beautifully put on with a mushroom hood over its
+head. The main lines of the interior are finely severe, either quite
+round or quite flat, and proportions good always. An upholstered priest
+coming out to say mass is generally a sickening sight, so wicked and
+ugly in look and costume. The best-behaved people are the low-down
+beggars, who are most decoratively devotional.
+
+We tried to model our exit on a brigand-beggar who came in to ask
+permission to murder one of his enemies. He got his request granted at
+one of the side-altars (some strictly local Madonna, I imagine), and his
+gratitude as he departed was quite touching. Having studiously copied
+his exit, we want to know whom we shall murder to pay ourselves for our
+trouble.
+
+It amuses me to have my share of driving over these free and easy and
+very narrow highroads. But A. has to do the collision-shouting and the
+cries of "Via!"--the horse only smiles when he hears me do it.
+
+Also did I tell you that on Saturday we two walked from here over to
+Fiesole--six miles there, and ten back: for why?--because we chose to go
+what Arthur calls "a bee-line across country," having thought we had
+sighted a route from the top of Fiesole. But in the valley we lost it,
+and after breaking our necks over precipices and our hearts down
+cul-de-sacs that led nowhere, and losing all the ways that were pointed
+out to us, for lack of a knowledge of the language, we came out again
+into view of Florence about half a mile nearer than when we started and
+proportionately far away from home. When he had got me thoroughly
+foot-sore, Arthur remarked complacently, "The right way to see a country
+is to lose yourself in it!" I didn't feel the truth of it then: but
+applied to other things I perceive its wisdom. Dear heart, where I have
+lost myself, what in all the world do I know so well as you?
+
+    Your most lost and loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+
+Beloved: Rain swooped down on us from on high during the night, and the
+country is cut into islands: the river from a rocky wriggling stream has
+risen into a tawny, opaque torrent that roars with a voice a mile long and
+is become quite unfordable. The little mill-stream just below has broken
+its banks and poured itself away over the lower vineyards into the river;
+a lot of the vines look sadly upset, generally unhinged and unstrung, yet
+I am told the damage is really small. I hope so, for I enjoyed a real
+lash-out of weather, after the changelessness of the long heat.
+
+I have been down in Florence beginning to make my farewells to the many
+things I have seen too little of. We start away for Venice about the end
+of the week. At the Uffizi I seem to have found out all my future
+favorites the first day, and very little new has come to me; but most of
+them go on growing. The Raphael lady is quite wonderful; I think she was
+in love with him, and her soul went into the painting though he himself
+did not care for her; and she looks at you and says, "See a miracle: he
+was able to paint this, and never knew that I loved him!" It is
+wonderful that; but I suppose it can be done,--a soul pass into a work
+and haunt it without its creator knowing anything about how it came
+there. Always when I come across anything like that which has something
+inner and rather mysterious, I tremble and want to get back to you. You
+are the touchstone by which I must test everything that is a little new
+and unfamiliar.
+
+From now onwards, dearest, you must expect only cards for a time: it is
+not settled yet whether we stop at Padua on our way in or our way out. I
+am clamoring for Verona also; but that will be off our route, so Arthur
+and I may go there alone for a couple of greedy days, which I fear will
+only leave me dissatisfied and wishing I had had patience to depend on
+coming again--perhaps with you!
+
+Uncle N. has written of your numerous visits to him, and I understand you
+have been very good in his direction. He does not speak of loneliness; and
+with Anna and her brood next week or now, he will be as happy as his
+temperament allows him to be when he has nothing to worry over.
+
+I am proud to say I have gone brown without freckles. And are you really
+as cheerful as you write yourself to be? Dearest and best, when is your
+holiday to begin; and is it to be with me? Does anywhere on earth hold
+that happiness for us both in the near future? I kiss you well, Beloved.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+
+Dearest: Venice is round me as I write! Well, I will not waste my Baedeker
+knowledge on you,--you too can get a copy; and it is not the panoramic
+view of things you will be wanting from me: it is my own particular Venice
+I am to find out and send you. So first of all from the heart of it I send
+you mine: when I have kissed you I will go on. My eyes have been seeing so
+much that is new, I shall want a fresh vocabulary for it all. But mainly I
+want to say, let us be here again together quickly, before we lose any
+more of our youth or our two-handed hold on life. I get short of breath
+thinking of it!
+
+So let it be here, Beloved, that some of our soon-to-be happiness opens
+and shuts its eyes: for truly Venice is a sleepy place. I am wanting,
+and taking, nine hours' sleep after all I do!
+
+Outside coming over the flats from Padua, she looked something like a
+manufacturing town at its ablutions,--a smoky chimney well to the fore:
+but get near to her and you find her standing on turquoise, her feet set
+about with jaspers, and with one of her eyes she ravishes you: and all
+her campanile are like the "thin flames" of "souls mounting up to God."
+
+That is from without: within she becomes too sensuous and civic in her
+splendor to let me think much of souls. "Rest and be indolent" is the
+motto for the life she teaches. The architecture is the song of the
+lotos-eater built into stone--were I in a more florid mood I would have
+said "swan-song," for the whole stands finished with nothing more to be
+added: it has sung itself out: and if there is a moral to it all, no
+doubt it is in Ruskin, and I don't wont to read it just now.
+
+What I want is you close at hand looking up at all this beauty, and
+smiling when I smile, which is your way, as if you had no opinions of
+your own about anything in which you are not a professor. So you will
+write and agree that I am to have the pleasure of this return to look
+forward to? If I know that, I shall be so much more reconciled to all
+the joy of the things I am seeing now for the first time: and shall see
+so much better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are here helping me.
+
+Here is love, dearest! help yourself to just as much as you wish for;
+though all that I send is good for you! No letter from you since
+Florence, but I am neither sad nor anxious: only all the more your
+loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+
+Beloved: The weather is as gray as England to-day, and much rainier. To
+feel it on my cheeks and be back north with that and warmer things, I
+would go out in it in the face of protests, and had to go alone--not
+Arthur even being in the mood just then for a patriotic quest of the
+uncomfortable. I had myself oared into the lagoons across a racing current
+and a driving head-wind which made my gondolier bend like a distressed
+poplar over his oar; patience on a monument smiling at backsheesh--"all
+comes to him who knows."
+
+Of course, for comfort and pleasure, and everything but economy, we have
+picked up a gondolier to pet: we making much of him, and he much out of
+us. He takes Arthur to a place where he can bathe--to use his own
+expression--"cleanly," that is to say, unconventionally; and this
+appropriately enough is on the borders of a land called "the Garden of
+Eden" (being named so after its owners). He--"Charon," I call him--is
+large and of ruddy countenance, and talks English in blinkers--that is
+to say, gondola English--out of which he could not find words to summon
+me a cab even if it were not opposed to his interests. Still there are
+no cabs to be called in Venice, and he is teaching us that the shortest
+way is always by water. If Arthur is not punctually in his gondola by 7
+A.M., I hear a call for the "Signore Inglese" go up to his window; and
+it is hungry Charon waiting to ferry him.
+
+Yesterday your friend Mr. C---- called and took me over to Murano in a
+beautiful pair-oared boat that simply flew. There I saw a wonderful apse
+filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-black figure of
+the Madonna, ten heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me
+become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands leaning up the bend with
+two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor is all
+mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; the architecture classic
+in the grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is like the spirit of God
+moving on the face of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesying to the dry
+bones.
+
+The Colleoni is quite as much more beautiful in fact and seen full-size
+as I had hoped from all smaller reproductions. A fine equestrian figure
+always strikes one as enthroned, and not merely riding; if I can't get
+that, I consider a centaur the nobler creature with its human body set
+down into the socket of the brute, and all fire--a candle burning at
+both ends: which, in a way, is what the centaur means, I imagine?
+
+Bellini goes on being wonderful, and for me beats Raphael's Blenheim
+Madonna period on its own ground. I hear now that the Raphael lady I
+raved over in Florence is no Raphael at all,--which accounts for it
+being so beautiful and interesting--to _me_, I hasten to add. Raphael's
+studied calmness, his soul of "invisible soap and imperceptible water,"
+may charm some; me it only chills or leaves unmoved.
+
+Is this more about art than you care to hear? I have nothing to say
+about myself, except that I am as happy as a cut-in-half thing can be.
+Is it any use sending kind messages to your mother? If so, my heart is
+full of them. Bless you, dearest, and good-night.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVIII.
+
+
+Dearest: St. Mark's inside is entirely different from anything I had
+imagined. I had expected a grove of pillars instead of these wonderful
+breadths of wall; and the marble overlay I had not understood at all till
+I saw it. My admiration mounts every time I enter: it has a different
+gloom from any I have ever been in, more joyous and satisfying, not in the
+least moody as our own Gothic seems sometimes to be; and saints instead of
+devils look at you solemn-eyed from every corner of shade.
+
+A heavy rain turns the Piazza into a lake: this morning Arthur had to
+carry me across. Other foolish Englishwomen were shocked at such means,
+and paddled their own leaky canoes, or stood on the brink and looked
+miserable. The effect of rain-pool reflections on the inside of St.
+Mark's is noticeable, causing it to bloom unexpectedly into fresh
+subtleties and glories. The gold takes so sympathetically to any least
+tint of color that is in the air, and counts up the altar candles even
+unto its furthest recesses and cupolas.
+
+I think before I leave Venice I shall find about ten Tintorettos which I
+really like. Best of all is that Bacchus and Ariadne in the Ducal Palace,
+of which you gave me the engraving. His "Marriage of St. Catherine," which
+is there also, has all Veronese's charm of color and what I call his
+"breeding"; and in the ceiling of the Council Chamber is one splendid
+figure of a sea-youth striding a dolphin.
+
+Last evening we climbed the San Giorgio campanile for a sunset view of
+Venice; it is a much better point of view than the St. Mark's one, and
+we were lucky in our sunset. Venice again looked like a beautified
+factory town, blue and blue with smoke and evening mists. Down below in
+the church I met a delightful Capuchin priest who could talk French, and
+a poor, very young lay-brother who had the holy custody of the eyes
+heavily upon his conscience when I spoke to him. I was so sorry for him!
+
+The Mother-Aunt is ill in bed; but as she is at the present moment
+receiving three visitors, you will understand about how ill. The fact
+is, she is worn to death with sight-seeing. I can't stop her; while she
+is on her legs it is her duty, and she will. The consequence is I get
+rushed through things I want to let soak into me, and have to go again.
+My only way of getting her to rest has been by deserting her; and then I
+come back and receive reproaches with a meek countenance.
+
+Mr. C---- has been good to us and cordial, and brings his gondola often
+to our service. A gondola and pair has quite a different motion from a
+one-oared gondola; it is like riding a seahorse instead of a sea-camel--
+almost exciting, only it is so soft in its prancings.
+
+He took A. and myself into the procession which welcomed the crowned heads
+last Wednesday; the hurly-burly of it was splendid. We tore down the Grand
+Canal from end to end, almost cheek by jowl with the royalties; the M.-A.
+was quite jubilant when she heard we had had such "good places." Hundreds
+of gondolas swarmed round; many of them in the old Carpaccio rig-outs,
+very gorgeous though a little tawdry when taken out of the canvas. Hut the
+rush and the collisions, and the sound of many waters walloping under the
+bellies of the gondolas, and the blows of fighting oars--regular
+underwater wrestling matches--made it as vivid and amusing as a prolonged
+Oxford and Cambridge boat-race in fancy costume. Our gondoliers streamed
+with the exertion, and looked like men fighting a real battle, and yet
+enjoyed it thoroughly. Violent altercations with police-boats don't ruffle
+them at all; at one moment it looks daggers drawn; at the next it is
+shrugs and smiles. Often, from not knowing enough of Italian and Italian
+ways, I get hot all over when an ordinary discussion is going on, thinking
+that blows are about to be exchanged. The Mother-Aunt had hung a wonderful
+satin skirt out of window for decoration; and when she leaned over it in a
+bodice of the same color, it looked as if she were sitting with her legs
+out as well! I suppose it was this peculiar effect that, when the King and
+Queen came by earlier in the morning, won for her a special bow and smile.
+
+I must hurry or I shall miss the post that I wish to catch. There seems
+little chance now of my getting you in Venice; but elsewhere perhaps you
+will drop to me out of the clouds.
+
+    Your own and most loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIX.
+
+
+My Own, Own Beloved: Say that my being away does not seem too long? I have
+not had a letter yet, and that makes me somehow not anxious but
+compunctious; only writing to you of all I do helps to keep me in good
+conscience. Not the other foot gone to the mender's, I hope, with the same
+obstructive accompaniments as went to the setting-up again of the last? If
+I don't hear soon, you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as much
+by the word as a gondola by the hour.
+
+Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di
+Schiavone: two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some
+other saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the
+love and pathos of animals. First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort
+of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a
+floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master
+busy at writing (a Benjy saying, "Come and take me for a walk, there's a
+good saint!"). Scattered among the adornments of the room are small
+bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, these being his
+tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and
+accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring
+monastery. Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take
+to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of
+the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm's way. And all the
+while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with
+shrugs tries to explain that even the best butter wouldn't melt in his
+dear lion's mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome lies dying in
+excessive odor of sanctity, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers
+and viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a "happy death," while
+Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he
+cares so little. And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies
+and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being
+taken from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer,
+nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to
+comfort the disconsolate beast: but _la bete humaine_ has got the
+whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just
+mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his
+head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog
+does when you make fun of him.
+
+These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite
+glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to
+distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the
+Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!
+
+Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What
+I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I
+write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you
+to share everything.
+
+Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!
+Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I
+think you have some southern blood in you.
+
+Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you
+are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my
+ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a
+foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.
+used to call him "John Bull let loose."
+
+My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green
+fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the
+other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding
+under the monastery walls.
+
+All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect
+me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with
+you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything
+included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to
+be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XL.
+
+
+Beloved: If two days slip by, I don't know where I am when I come to
+write; things get so crowded in such a short space of time. Where I left
+off I know not: I will begin where I am most awake--your letter which I
+have just received.
+
+That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a truce till February! And
+since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one--with only one end, as
+we know,--do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you
+assumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff
+before the wind. You do not tell me _what_ she argues, and I do not ask.
+She does not say I shall not love you enough!
+
+To answer businesslike to your questions first: with your forgiveness we
+stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the
+month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? Others have the wish to
+stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a
+certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for
+impatience, seeing, moreover, that in your love I have every help for
+remaining patient. It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the "truce"
+sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong
+our stay indefinitely? I know one besides myself who would be glad, and
+would welcome an outside excuse dearly.
+
+For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things! Arthur's heart is laid
+up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal
+maladies. He is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and I write
+in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences. I fancy I know
+the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where
+Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. She talked vaguely of
+being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues.
+Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but
+in hotel books. And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag
+him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising
+Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else. The
+bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms
+him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in
+exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my
+education and enthusiasms,--and does not realize with how foreign an
+air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.
+
+I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake
+transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of
+the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the
+galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where
+somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.
+
+The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate
+every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three
+pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other
+fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they
+take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian
+beggars--and the cleanest.
+
+Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of
+giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first
+floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for
+measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and
+perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at
+each end, and portieres along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a
+place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly. His face
+seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment
+like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing
+as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is
+what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph. Then I am
+more blessed even than I knew. What, you are coming? So well I do love
+you, my Beloved!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLI.
+
+
+Dearest: This letter will travel with me: we leave to-day. Our
+movements are to be too restless and uncomfortable for the next few days
+for me to have a chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing anywhere. At
+Riva we shall rest, I hope.
+
+Yesterday a storm began coming over towards evening, and I thought to
+myself that if it passed in time there should be a splendid sunset of
+smolder and glitter to be seen from the Campanile, and perhaps by good
+chance a rainbow.
+
+I went alone: when I got to the top the rain was pelting hard; so there
+I stayed happily weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice "silvered
+with slants of rain," and watching umbrellas scuttering below with toes
+beneath them. The golden smolder was very slow in coming: it lay over
+the mainland and came creeping along the railway track. Then came the
+glitter and the sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow. But it
+wasn't a bow, it was a circle: the Campanile stood up as it were a
+spoke in the middle,--the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the ground
+of the Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile. It was
+worth waiting an hour to see. The islands shone mellow and bright in the
+clearance with the storm going off black behind them. Good-by, Venice!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Verona began by seeming dull to me; but it improves and unfolds beautiful
+corners of itself to be looked at: only I am given so little time. The
+Tombs of the Della Scalas and the Renaissance facade of the Consiglio are
+what chiefly delight me. I had some quiet hours in the Museo, where I fell
+in love with a little picture by an unknown painter, of Orpheus charming
+the beasts in a wandering green landscape, with a dance of fauns in the
+distance, and here and there Eurydice running;--and Orpheus in Hades, and
+the Thracian women killing him, and a crocodile fishing out his head, and
+mermaids and ducks sitting above their reflections reflecting.
+
+Also there is one beautiful Tobias and the Angel there by a painter
+whose name I most ungratefully forget. I saw a man yesterday carrying
+fishes in the market, each strung through the gills on a twig of myrtle:
+that is how Tobias ought to carry his fish: when a native custom
+suggests old paintings, how charming it always is!
+
+
+    Riva.
+
+We have just got here from Verona. In the matter of the garden at least
+it is a Paradise of a place. A great sill of honeysuckle leans out from
+my window: beyond is a court grown round with creepers, and beyond that
+the garden--such a garden! The first thing one sees is an arcade of
+vines upon stone pillars, between which peep stacks of roses, going off
+a little from their glory now, and right away stretches an alley of
+green, that shows at the end, a furlong off, the blue glitter of water.
+It is a beautifully wild garden: grass and vegetables and trees and
+roses all grow in a jungle together. There are little groves of bamboo
+and chestnut and willow; and a runnel of water is somewhere--I can hear
+it. It suggests rest, which I want; and so, for all its difference,
+suggests you, whom also I want,--more, I own it now, than I have said!
+But that went without saying, Beloved, as it always must if it is to be
+the truth and nothing short of the truth.
+
+While this has been waiting to go, your letter has been put into my hands.
+I am too happy to say words about it, and can afford now to let this go as
+it is. The little time of waiting for you will be perfect happiness now;
+and your coming seems to color all that is behind as well. I have had a
+good time indeed, and was only wearying with the plethora of my enjoyment:
+but the better time has been kept till now. We shall be together day after
+day and all day long for at least a month, I hope: a joy that has never
+happened to us yet.
+
+Never mind about the lost letter now, dearest, dearest: Venice was a
+little empty just one week because of it. I still hope it will come; but
+what matter?--I know _you_ will. All my heart waits for you.--Your most
+glad and most loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLII.
+
+
+Dearest: I saw an old woman riding a horse astride: and I was convinced on
+the spot that this is the rightest way of riding, and that the sidesaddle
+was a foolish and affected invention. The horse was fine, and so was the
+young man leading it: the old woman was upright and stately, with a wide
+hat and full petticoats like a Maximilian soldier.
+
+This was at Bozen, where we stayed for two nights, and from which I have
+brought a cold with me: it seems such an English thing to have, that I
+feel quite at home in the discomfort of it. It had been such wonderful
+weather that we were sitting out of doors every evening up to 9.30 P.M.
+without wraps, and on our heads only our "widows' caps." (The M.-A.
+persists in a style which suggests that Uncle N. has gone to a better
+world.) Mine was too flimsy a work of fiction, and a day before I had been
+for a climb and got wet through, so a chill laid its benediction on my
+head, and here I am,--not seriously incommoded by the malady, but by the
+remedy, which is the M.-A. full of kind quackings and fierce tyranny if I
+do but put my head out of window to admire the view, whose best is a
+little round the corner.
+
+I had no idea Innsbruck was so high up among the mountains: snows are on
+the peaks all around. Behind the house-tops, so close and near, lies a
+quarter circle of white crests. You are told that in winter creatures
+come down and look in at the windows: sometimes they are called wolves,
+sometimes bears--any way the feeling is mediaeval.
+
+Hereabouts the wayside shrines nearly always contain a crucifix, whereas
+in Italy that was rare--the Virgin and Child being the most common. I
+remarked on this, which I suppose gave rise to a subsequent observation
+of the M.-A.'s: "I think the Tyrolese are a _good_ people: they are not
+given over to Mariolatry like those poor priest-ridden Italians." I
+think, however, that they merely have that fundamental grace, religious
+simplicity, worshiping--just what they can get, for yesterday I saw two
+dear old bodies going round and telling their beads before the bronze
+statues of the Maximilian tomb--King Arthur, Charles the Bold, etc. I
+suppose, by mere association, a statue helps them to pray.
+
+The national costume does look so nice, though not exactly beautiful. I
+like the flat, black hats with long streamers behind and a gold tassel,
+and the spacious apron. Blue satin is a favorite style, always silk or
+satin for Sunday best: one I saw of pearl-white brocade.
+
+Since we came north we have had lovely weather, except the one day of
+which I am still the filterings: and morning along the Brenner Pass was
+perfect. I think the mountains look most beautiful quite early, at
+sunrise, when they are all pearly and mysterious.
+
+We go on to Zurich on Thursday, and then, Beloved, and then!--so this
+must be my last letter, since I shall have nowhere to write to with you
+rushing all across Europe and resting nowhere because of my impatience
+to have you. The Mother-Aunt concedes a whole month, but Arthur will
+have to leave earlier for the beginning of term. How little my two
+dearest men have yet seen of each other! Barely a week lies between us:
+this will scarcely catch you. Dearest of dearests, my heart waits on
+yours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLIII.
+
+
+My Dearest: See what an effect your "gallous young hound" episode has had
+on me. I send it back to you roughly done into rhyme. I don't know
+whether it will carry; for, outside your telling of it, "Johnnie Kigarrow"
+is not a name of heroic sound. What touches me as so strangely complete
+about it is that you should have got that impression and momentary
+romantic delusion as a child, and now hear, years after, of his
+disappearing out of life thus fittingly and mysteriously, so that his name
+will fix its legend to the countryside for many a long day. I would like
+to go there some day with you, and standing on Twloch Hill imagine all the
+country round as the burial-place of the strong man on whose knees my
+beloved used to play when a child.
+
+It must have been soon after this that your brother died: truly,
+dearest, from now, and strangely, this Johnnie Kigarrow will seem more
+to me than him; touching a more heroic strain of idea, and stiffening
+fibers in your nature that brotherhood, as a rule, has no bearing on.
+
+A short letter to-day, Beloved, because what goes with it is so long.
+This is the first time I have come before your eyes as anything but a
+letter-writer, and I am doubtful whether you will care to have so much
+all about yourself. Yet for that very reason think how much I loved
+doing it! I am jealous of those days before I knew you, and want to have
+all their wild-honey flavor for myself. Do remember more, and tell me!
+Dearest heart, it was to me you were coming through all your scampers
+and ramblings; no wonder, with that unknown good running parallel, that
+my childhood was a happy one. May long life bless you, Beloved!
+
+(_Inclosure._)
+
+    My brother and I were down in Wales,
+    And listened by night to the Welshman's tales;
+    He was eleven and I was ten.
+    We sat on the knees of the farmer's men
+    After the whole day's work was done:
+    And I was friends with the farmer's son.
+    His hands were rough as his arms were strong,
+    His mouth was merry and loud for song;
+    Each night when set by the ingle-wall
+    He was the merriest man of them all.
+    I would catch at his beard and say
+    All the things I had done in the day--
+    Tumbled bowlders over the force,
+    Swum in the river and fired the gorse--
+    "Half the side of the hill!" quoth I:--
+    "Ah!" cried he, "and didn't you die?"
+
+    "Chut!" said he, "but the squeak was narrow!
+    Didn't you meet with Johnnie Kigarrow?"
+    "No!" said I, "and who will he be?
+    And what will be Johnnie Kigarrow to me?"
+    The farmer's son said under his breath,
+    "Johnnie Kigarrow may be your death
+    Listen you here, and keep you still--
+    Johnnie Kigarrow bides under the hill;
+    Twloch barrow stands over his head;
+    He shallows the river to make his bed;
+    Bowlders roll when he stirs a limb;
+    And the gorse on the hills belongs to him!
+    And if so be one fires his gorse,
+    He's out of his bed, and he mounts his horse.
+    Off he sets: with the first long stride
+    He is halfway over the mountain side:
+    With his second stride he has crossed the barrow,
+    And he has you fast, has Johnnie Kigarrow!"
+
+    Half I laughed and half I feared;
+    I clutched and tugged at the strong man's beard,
+    And bragged as brave as a boy could be--
+    "So? but, you see, he didn't catch me!"
+
+    Fear caught hold of me: what had I done?
+    High as the roof rose the farmer's son:
+    How the sight of him froze my marrow!
+    "I," he cried, "am Johnnie Kigarrow!"
+
+    Well, you wonder, what was the end?
+    Never forget;--he had called me "friend"!
+    Mighty of limb, and hard, and blown;
+    Quickly he laughed and set me down.
+    "Heh!" said, he, "but the squeak was narrow,
+    Not to be caught by Johnnie Kigarrow!"
+
+    Now, I hear, after years gone by,
+    Nobody knows how he came to die.
+    He strode out one night of storm:
+    "Get you to bed, and keep you warm!"
+    Out into darkness so went he:
+    Nobody knows where his bones may be.
+
+    Only I think--if his tongue let go
+    Truth that once,--how perhaps _I_ know.
+    Twloch river, and Twloch barrow,
+    Do you cover my Johnnie Kigarrow?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLIV.
+
+
+Dearest: I have been doing something so wise and foolish: mentally wise,
+I mean, and physically foolish. Do you guess?--Disobeying your parting
+injunction, and sitting up to see eclipses.
+
+It was such a luxury to do as I was _not_ told just for once; to feel
+there was an independent me still capable of asserting itself. My belief
+is that, waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your godhead has put
+on its spiritual nightcap, and begun nodding, your mesmeric influence
+relaxes. Up starts resolution and independence, and I breathe desolately
+for a time, feeling myself once more a free woman.
+
+'Twas a tremulous experience, Beloved; but I loved it all the more for
+that. How we love playing at grief and death--the two things that must
+come--before it is their due time! I took a look at my world for three
+most mortal hours last night, trying to see you _out_ of it. And oh, how
+close it kept bringing me! I almost heard you breathe, and was forever
+wondering--Can we ever be nearer, or love each other more than we do?
+For _that_ we should each want a sixth sense, and a second soul: and it
+would still be only the same spread out over larger territory. I prefer
+to keep it nesting close in its present limitations, where it feels like
+a "growing pain"; children have it in their legs, we in our hearts.
+
+I am growing sleepy as I write, and feel I am sending you a dull
+letter,--my penalty for doing as you forbade.
+
+I sat up from half-past one to a quarter to five to see our shadow go
+over heaven. I didn't see much, the sky was too piebald: but I was not
+disappointed, as I had never watched the darkness into dawn like that
+before: and it was interesting to hear all the persons awaking:--cocks
+at half-past four, frogs immediately after, then pheasants and various
+others following. I was cuddled close up against my window, throned in a
+big arm-chair with many pillows, a spirit-lamp, cocoa, bread and butter,
+and buns; so I fared well. Just after the pheasants and the first
+querulous fidgetings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft pattering along
+the path below: and Benjy, secretive and important, is fussing his way
+to the shrubbery, when instinct or real sentiment prompts him to look up
+at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to
+persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other
+mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and
+peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in
+the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that
+sort?--that every morning he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and
+wags, and goes by?
+
+I heard him very happy in the shrubs a moment after: he and a pheasant,
+I fancy, disputing over a question of boundaries. And he comes in for
+breakfast, three hours later, looking positively _fresh,_ and wants to
+know why I am yawning.
+
+Most mornings he brings your letter up to my room in his mouth. It is
+old Nan-nan's joke: she only sends up _yours_ so, and pretends it is
+Benjy's own clever selection. I pretend that, too, to him; and he thinks
+he is doing something wonderful. The other morning I was--well, Benjy
+hears splashing: and tires of waiting--or his mouth waters. An extra can
+of hot water happens to stand at the door; and therein he deposits his
+treasure (mine, I mean), and retires saying nothing. The consequence is,
+when I open three minutes after his scratch, I find you all ungummed and
+swimming, your beautiful handwriting bleared and smeared, so that no eye
+but mine could have read it. Benjy's shame when I showed him what he
+had done was wonderful.
+
+How it rejoices me to write quite foolish things to you!--that I _can_
+helps to explain a great deal in the up-above order of things, which I
+never took in when I was merely young and frivolous. One must have
+touched a grave side of life before one can take in that Heaven is not
+opposed to laughter.
+
+My eye has just caught back at what I have written; and the "little
+death" runs through me, just because I wrote "grave side." It shouldn't,
+but loving has made me superstitious: the happiness seems too great; how
+can it go on? I keep thinking--this is not life: you are too much for
+me, my dearest!
+
+Oh, my Beloved, come quickly to meet me to-day: this morning! Ride over;
+I am willing it. My own dearest, you must come. If you don't, what shall
+I believe? That Love cannot outdo space: that when you are away I cannot
+reach you by willing. But I can: come to me! You shall see my arms open
+to you as never before. What is it?--you must be coming. I have more
+love in me after all than I knew.
+
+Ah, I know: I wrote "grave side," and all my heart is in arms against
+the treason. With us it is not "till death us do part": we leap it
+altogether, and are clasped on the other side.
+
+My dear, my dear, I lay my head down on your heart: I love you! I post
+this to show how certain I am. At twelve to-day I shall see you.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLV.
+
+
+Beloved: I look at this ridiculous little nib now, running like a plow
+along the furrows! What can the poor thing do? Bury its poor black, blunt
+little nose in the English language in order to tell you, in all sorts of
+roundabout ways, what you know already as well as I do. And yet, though
+that is all it can do, you complain of not having had a letter! Not had a
+letter? Beloved, there are half a hundred I have not had from you! Do you
+suppose you have ever, any one week in your life, sent me as many as I
+wanted?
+
+Now, for once, I did hold off and didn't write to you: because there was
+something in your last I couldn't give any answer to, and I hoped you
+would come yourself before I need. Then I hoped silence would bring you:
+and now--no!--instead of your dear peace-giving face I get this complaint!
+
+Ah, Beloved, have you in reality any complaint, or sorrow that I can set
+at rest? Or has that little, little silence made you anxious? I do come
+to think so, for you never flourish your words about as I do: so,
+believing that, I would like to write again differently; only it is truer
+to let what I have written stand, and make amends for it in all haste. I
+love you so infinitely well, how could even a year's silence give you any
+doubt or anxiety, so long as you knew I was not ill?
+
+"Should one not make great concessions to great grief even when it is
+unreasonable?" I cannot answer, dearest: I am in the dark. Great grief
+cannot be great without reasons: it should give them, and you should judge
+by them:--you, not I. I imagine you have again been face to face with
+fierce, unexplained opposition. Dearest, if it would give you happiness, I
+would say, make five, ten, twenty years' "concession," as you call it. But
+the only time you ever spoke to me clearly about your mother's mind toward
+me, you said she wanted an absolute surrender from you, not covered only
+by her lifetime. Then though I pitied her, I had to smile. A twenty years'
+concession even would not give rest to her perturbed spirit. I pray
+truly--having so much reason for your sake to pray it--"God rest her soul!
+and give her a saner mind toward both of us."
+
+Why has this come about at all? It is not February yet: and _our_ plans
+have been putting forth no buds before their time. When the day comes,
+and you have said the inevitable word, I think more calm will follow
+than you expect. _You_, dearest, I do understand: and the instinct of
+tenderness you have toward a claim which yet fills you with the sense of
+its injustice. I know that you can laugh at her threat to make you poor;
+but not at hurting her affections. Did your asking for an "answer" mean
+that I was to write so openly? Bless you, my own dearest.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLVI.
+
+
+Dearest: To-day I came upon a strange spectacle: poor old Nan-nan weeping
+for wounded pride in me. I found her stitching at raiment of needlework
+that is to be mine (piles of it have been through her fingers since the
+word first went out; for her love asserts that I am to go all home-made
+from my old home to my new one--wherever that may be!). And she was
+weeping because, as I slowly got to understand, from one particular
+quarter too little attention had been paid to me:--the kow-tow of a
+ceremonious reception into my new status had not been deep enough to
+make amends to her heart for its partial loss of me.
+
+Her deferential recognition of the change which is coming is pathetic
+and full of etiquette; it is at once so jealous and so unselfish.
+Because her sense of the proprieties will not allow her to do so much
+longer, she comes up to my room and makes opportunity to scold me over
+quite slight things:--and there I am, meeker under her than I would be
+to any relative. So to-day I had to bear a statement of your mother's
+infirmities rigorously outlined in a way I could only pretend to be deaf
+to until she had done. Then I said, "Nan-nan, go and say your prayers!"
+And as she stuck her heels down and refused to go, there I left the poor
+thing, not to prayer, I fear, but to desolate weeping, in which love and
+pride will get more firmly entangled together than ever.
+
+I know when I go up to my room next I shall find fresh flowers put upon
+my table: but the grievous old dear will be carrying a sore heart that I
+cannot comfort by any words. I cannot convince her that I am not hiding
+in myself any wounds such as she feels on my behalf.
+
+I write this, dearest, as an indirect answer to yours,--which is but
+Nan-nan's woe writ large. If I could persuade your two dear and very
+different heads how very slightly wounded I am by a thing which a little
+waiting will bring right, I could give it even less thought than I do.
+Are you keeping the truce in spirit when you disturb yourself like this?
+Trust me, Beloved, always to be candid: I will complain to you when I
+feel in need of comfort. Be comforted yourself, meanwhile, and don't
+shape ghosts of grief which never do a goose-step over me! Ah well,
+well, if there is a way to love you better than I do now, only show it
+me! Meantime, think of me as your most contented and happy-go-loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLVII.
+
+
+Dearest: I am haunted by a line of quotation, and cannot think where it
+comes from:
+
+    "Now sets the year in roaring gray."
+
+Can you help me to what follows? If it is a true poem it ought now to be
+able to sing itself to me at large from an outer world which at this
+moment is all gray and roaring. To-day the year is bowing itself out
+tempestuously, as if angry at having to go. Dear golden year! I am sorry
+to see its face so changed and withering: it has held so much for us
+both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and quite like spring. All the seasons
+have their marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this is an autumn
+march-wind; before long I shall be out into it, and up the hill to look
+over at your territory and you being swept and garnished for the seven
+devils of winter.
+
+"Roaring gray" suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with
+this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in "Maud" and "In
+Memoriam" as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as
+this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard
+there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend's funeral,
+would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John's old hats,
+and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of
+his small lyrics:
+
+    "Nightingales warbled without,
+     Within was weeping for thee."
+
+The "old hat" was mentioned as something humorous: yet an old glove is
+the most accepted symbol of faithful absence: and why should head rank
+lower than hand? What creatures of convention we are!
+
+There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries
+in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a
+sleeper's head will bring away the dream. One of the stories which used
+to put a lump in my throat as a child was of an old backwoodsman who by
+that means found out that his dog stole hams from the storeroom. The dog
+was given away in disgrace, and came to England to die of a broken heart
+at the sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpacking, seemed like
+a monstrous day of judgment--the bones of his misdeeds rising again
+reclothed with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had never
+forgotten.
+
+I wonder how long it was before I left off definitely choosing out a
+story for the pleasure of making myself cry! When one begins to avoid
+that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth is flown.
+
+To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of the best year I have ever
+lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLVIII.
+
+
+Dearest: If anybody has been "calling me names" that are not mine, they do
+me a fine injury, and you did well to purge the text of their abuse. I
+agree with no authority, however immortal, which inquires "What's in a
+name?" expecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers. I answer with a
+snap of temper that the blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors are in
+mine! Do you suppose I could have been the same woman had such names as
+Amelia or Bella or Cinderella been clinging leechlike to my consciousness
+through all the years of my training? Why, there are names I can think of
+which would have made me break down into side-ringlets had I been forced
+to wear them audibly.
+
+The effect is not so absolute when it is a second name that can be tucked
+away if unpresentable, but even then it is a misfortune. There is C----,
+now, who won't marry, I believe, chiefly because of the insane "Annie"
+with which she was smitten at the baptismal font by an afterthought. She
+regards it as a taint in her constitution which orders her to a lonely
+life lest worse might follow. And apply the consideration more publicly:
+do you imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort of king if, when
+he comes to the throne, he calls himself King Albert Edward in florid
+Continental fashion, instead of "Edward the Seventh," with a right hope
+that an Edward the Eighth may follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck
+race of it with the Henries? I don't know anything that would do more to
+knit up the English constitution: but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial
+I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing to be done.
+
+Now of all this I had an instance in the village the day before yesterday.
+At the corner house by the post-office, as I went by, a bird opened his
+bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down he went over a golden
+scale: pitched afresh, and dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over
+the range of both. Then he flung back his shaggy head and laughed. "In all
+my father's realm there are no such bells as these!" It was the laughing
+jackass. "Who gave you your name?" "My godfathers and my godmothers in my
+baptism." Well, _his_ will have _that_ to answer for, however safely for
+the rest he may have eschewed the world, the flesh, and the devil. Poor
+bird, to be set to sing to us under such a burden:--of which, unconscious
+failure, he knows nothing.
+
+Here I have remembered for you a bit of a poem that took hold of me some
+while ago and touched on the same unkindness: only here the flower is
+conscious of the wrong done to it, and looks forward to a day of juster
+judgment:--
+
+    "What have I done?--Man came
+     (There's nothing that sticks like dirt),
+     Looked at me with eyes of blame,
+     And called me 'Squinancy-wort!'
+     What have I done? I linger
+     (I cannot say that I live)
+     In the happy lands of my birth;
+     Passers-by point with the finger:
+     For me the light of the sun
+     Is darkened. Oh, what would I give
+     To creep away, and hide my shame in the earth!
+     What have I done?
+     Yet there is hope. I have seen
+     Many changes since I began.
+     The web-footed beasts have been
+     (Dear beasts!)--and gone, being part of some wider plan.
+     Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this man!"
+
+Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments: here is another instance,
+where evidently in life I did not love well enough a character nobler than
+this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, who toadies to all my moods.
+Calling at the lower farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname "Manger,"
+because his dog-jaws always refused to smile on me. His old mistress gave
+me a pathetic account of his last days. It was the muzzling order that
+broke his poor old heart. He took it as an accusation on a point where,
+though of a melancholy disposition, his reputation had been spotless. He
+never lifted his head nor smiled again. And not all his mistress' love
+could explain to him that he was not in fault. She wept as she told it me.
+
+Good-by, dearest, and for this letter so full of such little worth call me
+what names you like; and I will go to Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch for
+the patience in which they must have taken after their father when he so
+named them, I suppose for a discipline.
+
+My Beloved, let my heart come where it wants to be. Twilight has been on
+me to-day, I don't know why; and I have not written it off as I hoped to
+do.--All yours and nothing left.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XLIX.
+
+
+Dearest: I suppose your mother's continued absence, and her unexplanation
+of her further stay, must be taken for unyielding disapproval, and tells
+us what to expect of February. It is not a cordial form of "truce": but
+since it lets me see just twice as much of you as I should otherwise, I
+will not complain so long as it does not make you unhappy. You write to
+her often and kindly, do you not?
+
+Well, if this last letter of hers frees you sufficiently, it is quite
+settled at this end that you are to be with us for Christmas:--read into
+that the warmest corners of a heart already fully occupied. I do not think
+of it too much, till I am assured it is to be.
+
+Did you go over to Pembury for the day? Your letter does not say anything:
+but your letters have a wonderful way with them of leaving out things of
+outside importance. I shall hear from the rattle of returning fire-engines
+some day that Hatterling has been burned down: and you will arrive cool
+the next day and say, "Oh yes, it is so!"
+
+I am sure you have been right to secure this pledge of independence to
+yourself: but it hurts me to think what a deadly offense it may be both to
+her tenderness for you and her pride and stern love of power. To realize
+suddenly that Hatterling does not mean to you so much as the power to be
+your own master and happy in your own way, which is altogether opposite to
+_her_ way, will be so much of a blow that at first you will be able to do
+nothing to soften it.
+
+February fill-dyke is likely to be true to its name, this coming one, in
+all that concerns us and our fortunes. Meanwhile, if at Pembury you
+brought things any nearer settlement, and are not coming so soon as
+to-morrow, let me know: for some things of "outside importance" do affect
+me unfavorably while in suspense. I have not your serene determination to
+abide the workings of Kismet when once all that can be done is done.
+
+The sun sets now, when it does so visibly, just where Pembury _is_. I
+take it as an omen. In your diary to-morrow you may write down in the
+business column that you have had a business letter from _me_, or as
+near to one as I can go:--chiefly for that it requires an answer on this
+matter of "outside importance," which otherwise you will altogether
+leave out. But you will do better still to come. My whole heart goes out
+to fetch you: my dearest dear, ever your own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER L.
+
+
+Beloved: No, not Browning but Tennyson was in my thoughts at our last ride
+together: and I found myself shy, as I have been for a long time wishing
+to say things I could not. What has never entered your head to ask becomes
+difficult when I wish to get it spoken. So I bring Tennyson to tell you
+what I mean:--
+
+    "Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaaey?
+     Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saaey."
+
+The tune of this kept me silent all the while we galloped: this and
+Pembury, a name that glows to me now like the New Jerusalem.
+
+And do you understand, Beloved? or must I say more? My freedom has made
+its nest under my uncle's roof: but I _am_ a quite independent person in
+other ways besides character.
+
+Well, Pembury was settled on your own initiative: and I looked on proud
+and glad. Now I have my own little word to add, merely a tail that wags
+and makes merry over a thing decided and done. Do you forgive me for
+this: and for the greater offense of being quite shy at having to write
+it?
+
+My Aunt thanks you for the game: for my part I cannot own that it will
+taste sweeter to me for being your own shooting. And please, whatever
+else you do big and grand and dangerous, respect my superstitions and
+don't shoot any larks this winter. In the spring I would like to think
+that here or there an extra lark bubbles over because I and my whims
+find occasional favor in your sight. When I ask great favors you always
+grant them; and so, Ahasuerus, grant this little one to your beautifully
+loving.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Give me the credit of being conscious of it, Beloved: postscripts I
+never _do_ write. I am glad you noticed it. If I find anything left out
+I start another letter: _this_ is that other letter: it goes into the
+same envelope merely for company, and signs itself yours in all state.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LI.
+
+
+Dearest: It was so nice and comedy to see the Mother-Aunt this
+morning importantly opening a letter from you all to herself with the
+pleasure quite unmixed by any inclosure for me, or any other letter in
+the house _to_ me so far as she was aware. I listened to you with new
+ears, discovering that you write quite beautifully in the style which I
+never get from you. Don't, because I admire you in your more formal
+form, alter in your style to me. I prefer you much, for my own part,
+formless: and feel nearer to your heart in an unfinished sentence than
+in one that is perfectly balanced. Still I want you to know that your
+cordial warmed her dear old heart and makes her not think now that she
+has let me see too much of you. She was just beginning to worry herself
+jealously into that belief the last two days: and Arthur's taking to you
+helped to the same end. Very well; I seem to understand everybody's
+oddities now,--having made a complete study of yours.
+
+Best Beloved, I have your little letter lying close, and feel dumb when
+I try to answer. You with your few words make me feel a small thing with
+all my unpenned rabble about me. Only you do know so very well that I
+love you better than I can ever write. This is my first letter of the
+new year: will our letter-writing go on all this year, or will it, as we
+dearly dream, die a divine death somewhere before autumn?
+
+In any case, I am, dearest, your most happy and loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LII.
+
+
+My Dearest: Arthur and the friend went off together yesterday. I am glad
+the latter stayed just long enough after you left for me to have leisure
+to find him out human. Here is the whole story: he came and unbosomed to
+me three days ago: and he said nothing about not telling, so I tell you.
+As water goes from a duck's back, so go all things worth hearing from me
+to you.
+
+Arthur had said to him, "Come down for a week," and he had answered,
+"Can't, because of clothes!" explaining that beyond evening-dress he had
+only those he stood in. "Well," said Arthur, "stand in them, then; you
+look all right." "The question is," said his friend, "can I sit down?"
+However, he came; and was appalled to find that a man unpacked his
+trunk, and would in all probability be carrying away his clothes each
+night to brush them. He, conscious of interiors, a lining hanging in
+rags, and even a patching somewhere, had not the heart to let his one
+and only day-jacket go down to the servants' hall to be sniffed over:
+and so every evening when he dressed for dinner he hid his jacket
+laboriously under the permanent layers of a linen wardrobe which stood
+in his room.
+
+I had all this in the frankest manner from him in the hour when he
+became human: and my fancy fired at the vision. Graves with a fierce eye
+set on duty probing hither and thither in search after the missing coat;
+and each night the search becoming more strenuous and the mystery more
+baffling than ever. It had a funny likeness to the Jack Raikes episode
+in "Evan Harrington," and pleased me the more thus cropping up in real
+life.
+
+Well, I demanded there and then to be shown the subject of so much
+romance and adventure: and had the satisfaction of mending it, he
+sitting by in his shirt-sleeves the while, and watching delighted and
+without craven apologies.
+
+I notice it is not his own set he is ashamed of, but only the moneyed,
+high-sniffing servant-class who have no understanding for honorable
+poverty: and to be misunderstood pricks him in the thinnest of thin
+places.
+
+He told me also that he brought only three white ties to last him for
+seven days: and that Graves placed them out in order of freshness and
+cleanliness night after night:--first three new ones consecutively, then
+three once worn. After that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all
+further responsibility, and laid out all three of them for him to choose
+from. On the last three days of his stay he did me the honor to leave his
+coat out, declaring that my mendings had made it presentable before an
+emperor. Out of this dates the whole of his character, and I understand,
+what I did not, why Arthur and he get on together.
+
+Now the house is empty, and your comings will be--I cannot say more
+welcome: but there will be more room for them to be after my own heart.
+
+Heaven be over us both. Faithfully your most loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LIII.
+
+
+Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden
+last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but
+became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed
+the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the
+door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,--where was I to put a
+foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair
+of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its
+true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it
+becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle
+feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson
+cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free;
+and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I
+can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been
+scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees
+are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over:
+but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into
+last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I
+cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have
+forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of
+solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could
+hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on
+the outer edge of the bell itself. Across the park there are dead boughs
+cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to
+tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.
+
+I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy
+in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth
+who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is
+now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little
+letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such
+a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances,
+however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.
+
+With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no
+accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a
+flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for
+you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting
+before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was
+their giveaway attitude.
+
+I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you
+will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear
+barking behind the rhododendrons.--So much your most loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LIV.
+
+
+Beloved: We have been having a great day of tidyings out, rummaging
+through years and years of accumulations--things quite useless but which I
+have not liked to throw away. My soul has been getting such dusty answers
+to all sorts of doubtful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and
+the other lay hidden. And there were other things, the memory of which had
+lain quite dead or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted hack
+into life like corn from the grave of an Egyptian mummy.
+
+Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little collection of secret
+playthings which it used to be my fond belief that nobody knew of but
+myself. It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of
+seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for
+destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest
+idols. But, whether for those or more mystic reasons, I know I had dolls
+which I nursed only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firmest
+love upon. It was because of them that I bore the reproach of being but
+a lukewarm mother of dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth
+being that my motherly passion expended itself in secret on certain
+outcasts of society whom others despised or had forgotten. They, on
+their limp and dissolute bodies, wore all the finery I could find to
+pile on them: and one shady transaction done on their behalf I remember
+now without pangs. There was one creature of state whom an inconsiderate
+relative had presented to Anna and myself in equal shares. Of course
+Anna's became more and more lionlike. I had very little love for the
+bone of contention myself, but the sense of injustice rankled in me. So
+one day, at an unclothing, Anna discovered that certain undergarments
+were gone altogether away. She sat aghast, questioned me, and, when I
+refused to disgorge, screamed down vengeance from the authorities. I was
+morally certain I had taken no more than my just share, and resolution
+sat on my lips under all threats. For a punishment the whole ownership
+of the big doll was made over to Anna: I was no worse off, and was very
+contented with my obstinacy. To-day I found the beautifully wrought
+bodice, which I had carried beyond reach of even the supreme court of
+appeal, clothing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll whose head
+tottered on its stem like an over-ripe plum, and whose legs had no
+deportment at all: and am sending it off in charitable surrender to
+Anna to be given, bag and rag, to whichever one of the children she
+likes to select.
+
+Also I found:--would you care to have a lock of hair taken from the head
+of a child then two years old, which, bright golden, does not match what
+I have on now in the least? I can just remember her: but she is much of
+a stranger to both of us. Why I value it is that the name and date on
+the envelope inclosing it are in my mother's handwriting: and I suppose
+_she_ loved very much the curly treasure she then put away. Some of the
+other things, quite funny, I will show you the next time you come over.
+How I wish that vanished mite had mixed some of her play-hours with
+yours:--you only six miles away all the time: had one but known!--Now
+grown very old and loving, always your own.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LV.
+
+
+Beloved: I am getting quite out of letter-writing, and it is your doing,
+not mine. No sooner do I get a line from you than you rush over in person
+and take the answer to it out of my mouth!
+
+I have had six from you in the last week, and believe I have only
+exchanged you one: all the rest have been nipped in the bud by your
+arrivals. My pen turns up a cross nose whenever it hears you coming now,
+and declares life so dull as not to be worth living. Poor dinky little
+Othello! it shall have its occupation again to-day, and say just what it
+likes.
+
+It likes you while you keep away: so that's said! When I make it write
+"come," it kicks and tries to say "don't." For it is an industrious
+minion, loves to have work to do, and never complains of overhours. It
+is a sentimental fact that I keep all its used-up brethren in an
+inclosure together, and throw none of them away. If once they have
+ridden over paper to you, I turn them to grass in their old age. I let
+this out because I think it is time you had another laugh at me.
+
+Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you have done so if you want to make me
+a little more happy than I have been this last day or two. There has
+been too much thinking in the heads of both of us. Be empty-headed for
+once when you write next: whether you write little or much, I am sure
+always of your full heart: but I cannot trust your brain to the same
+pressure: it is such a Martha to headaches and careful about so many
+things, and you don't bring it here to be soothed as often as you
+should--not at its most needy moments, I mean.
+
+Have you made the announcement? or does it not go till to-day? I am not
+sorry, since the move comes from her, that we have not to wait now till
+February. You will feel better when the storm is up than when it is only
+looming. This is the headachy period.
+
+Well. Say "well" with me, dearest! It is going to be well: waiting has
+not suited us--not any of us, I think. Your mother is one in a thousand,
+I say that and mean it:--worth conquering as all good things are. I
+would not wish great fortune to come by too primrosy a way. "Canst thou
+draw out Leviathan with a hook?" Even so, for size, is the share of the
+world which we lay claim to, and for that we must be toilers of the
+deep.--Always, Beloved, your truest and most loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LVI.
+
+
+My Own Own Love: You have given me a spring day before the buds begin,--
+the weather I have been longing for! I had been quite sad at heart these
+cold wet days, really _down_;--a treasonable sadness with you still
+anywhere in the world (though where in the world have you been?). Spring
+seemed such a long way off over the bend of it, with you unable to come;
+and it seems now another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it again,
+dearest,--all that was in it, with any blots that happened to come:--there
+was a dear smudge in to-day's, with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite
+clear on it,--delicious to rest my face against and feel _you_ there.)
+
+And so back to my spring weather: all in a moment you gave me a whole
+week of the weather I had longed after. For you say the sun has been
+shining on you: and I would rather have it there than here if it refuses
+to be in two places at once. Also my letters have pleased you. When they
+do, I feel such a proud mother to them! Here they fly quick out of the
+nest; but I think sometimes they must come to you broken-winged, with
+so much meant and all so badly put.
+
+How can we ever, with our poor handful of senses, contrive to express
+ourselves perfectly? Perhaps,--I don't know:--dearest, I love you! I
+kiss you a hundred times to the minute. If everything in the world were
+dark round us, could not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to
+know of each other?--me that you were true and brave and so beautiful
+that a woman must be afraid looking at you:--and you that I was just my
+very self,--loving and--no! just loving: I have no room for anything
+more! You have swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none left: I
+am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg.--Give me back crumbs of
+myself! I am so hungry, I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred
+times.
+
+Dear share of the world, what a wonderful large helping of it you are to
+me! I alter Portia's complaint and swear that "my little body is
+bursting with this great world." And now it is written and I look at it,
+it seems a Budge and Toddy sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven that the
+Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid the recognition of the
+ludicrous! C---- was telling me how long ago, in her own dull Protestant
+household, she heard a riddle propounded by some indiscreet soul who did
+not understand the prudish piety which reigned there: and saw such
+shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it. "What is it," was
+asked, "that a common man can see every day but that God never sees?"
+"His equal" is the correct answer: but even so demure and proper a
+support to thistly theology was to the ears that heard it as the hand of
+Uzzah stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smitten. As for
+C----, a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she hazarded "A joke" to be
+the true answer, and was ordered into banishment by the head of that
+God-fearing household for having so successfully diagnosed the family
+skeleton.
+
+As for skeletons, why your letter makes me so happy is that the one
+which has been rubbing its ribs against you for so long seems to have
+given itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution. And you are yourself
+again, as you have not been for many a long day. I suppose there has
+been thunder, and the air is cleared: and I am not to know any of that
+side of your discomforts?
+
+Still I _do_ know. You have been writing your letters with pressed lips
+for a month past: and I have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to
+you at all at all. Oh, why will she not love me? I know I am lovable
+except to a very hard heart, and hers is not: it is only like yours,
+reserved in its expression. It is strange what pain her prejudice has
+been able to drop into my cup of happiness; and into yours, dearest, I
+fear, even more.
+
+Oh, I love you, I love you! I am crying with it, having no words to
+declare to you what I feel. My tears have wings in them: first
+semi-detached, then detached. See, dearest, there is a rain-stain to
+make this letter fruitful of meaning!
+
+It is sheer convention--and we, creatures of habit--that tears don't
+come kindly and easily to express where laughter leaves off and a
+something better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical and entirely
+me, as I am when I get off my hinges too suddenly.
+
+Amen, amen! When we are both a hundred we shall remember all this very
+peaceably; and the "sanguine flower" will not look back at us less
+beautifully because in just one spot it was inscribed with woe. And if
+we with all our aids cannot have patience, where in this midge-bitten
+world is that virtue to find a standing?
+
+I kiss you--how? as if it were for the first or the last time? No, but
+for all time, Beloved! every time I see you or think of you sums up my
+world. Love me a little, too, and I will be as contented as I am your
+loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LVII.
+
+
+Come to me! I will not understand a word you have written till you come.
+Who has been using your hand to strike me like this, and why do you lend
+it? Oh, if it is she, you do not owe her _that_ duty! Never write such
+things:--speak! have you ever found me not listen to you, or hard to
+convince? Dearest, dearest!--take what I mean: I cannot write over this
+gulf. Come to me,--I will believe anything you can _say_, but I can
+believe nothing of this written. I must see you and hear what it is you
+mean. Dear heart, I am blind till I set eyes on you again! Beloved, I have
+nothing, nothing in me but love for you: except for that I am empty!
+Believe me and give me time; I will not be unworthy of the joy of holding
+you. I am nothing if not _yours_! Tell this to whoever is deceiving you.
+
+Oh, my dearest, why did you stay away from me to write so? Come and put an
+end to a thing which means nothing to either of us. You love me: how can
+it have a meaning?
+
+Can you not hear my heart crying?--I love nobody but you--do not know
+what love is without you! How can I be more yours than I am? Tell me, and
+I will be!
+
+Here are kisses. Do not believe yourself till you have seen me. Oh, the
+pain of having to _write_, of not having your arms round me in my misery!
+I kiss your dear blind eyes with all my heart.--My Love's most loved and
+loving.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LVIII.
+
+
+No, no, I cannot read it! What have I done that you will not
+come to me? They are mad here, telling me to be calm, that I am not to
+go to you. I too am out of my mind--except that I love you. I know
+nothing except that. Beloved, only on my lips will I take my dismissal
+from yours: not God himself can claim you from me till you have done me
+that justice. Kiss me once more, and then, if you can, say we must part.
+You cannot!--Ah, come here where my heart is, and you cannot!
+
+Have I never told you enough how I love you? Dearest, I have no words
+for all my love: I have no pride in me. Does not this alone tell
+you?--You are sending me away, and I cry to you to spare me. Can I love
+you more than that? What will you have of me that I have not given? Oh,
+you, the sun in my dear heavens--if I lose you, what is left of me?
+Could you break so to pieces even a woman you did not love? And me you
+_do_ love,--you _do_. Between all this denial of me, and all this
+silence of words that you have put your name to, I see clearly that you
+are still my lover.--Your writing breaks with trying not to say it: you
+say again and again that there is no fault in me. I swear to you,
+dearest, there is none, unless it be loving you: and how can you mean
+that? For what are you and I made for unless for each other? With all
+our difference people tell us we are alike. We were shaped for each
+other from our very birth. Have we not proved it in a hundred days of
+happiness, which have lifted us up to the blue of a heaven higher than
+any birds ever sang? And now you say--taking on you the blame for the
+very life-blood in us both--that the fault is yours, and that your fault
+is to have allowed me to love you and yourself to love me!
+
+Who has suddenly turned our love into a crime? Beloved, is it a sin that
+here on earth I have been seeing God through you? Go away from me, and He
+is gone also. Ah, sweetheart, let me see you before all my world turns
+into a wilderness! Let me know better why,--if my senses are to be emptied
+of you. My heart can never let you go. Do you wish that it should?
+
+Bring your own here, and see if it can tell me that! Come and listen to
+mine! Oh, dearest heart that ever beat, mine beats so like yours that
+once together you shall not divide their sound!
+
+Beloved, I will be patient, believe me, to any words you can say: but I
+cannot be patient away from you. If I have seemed to reproach you, do
+not think that now. For you are to give me a greater joy than I ever had
+before when you take me in your arms again after a week that has spelled
+dreadful separation. And I shall bless you for it--for this present pain
+even--because the joy will be so much greater.
+
+Only come: I do not live till you have kissed me again. Oh, my beloved,
+how cruel love may seem if we do not trust it enough! My trust in you has
+come back in a great rush of warmth, like a spring day after frost. I
+almost laugh as I let this go. It brings you,--perhaps before I wake: I
+shall be so tired to-night. Call under my window, make me hear in my
+sleep. I will wake up to you, and it shall be all over before the rest of
+the world wakes. There is no dream so deep that I shall not hear you out
+of the midst of it. Come and be my morning-glory to-morrow without fail. I
+will rewrite nothing that I have written--let it go! See me out of deep
+waters again, because I have thought so much of you! I have come through
+clouds and thick darkness. I press your name to my lips a thousand times.
+As sure as sunrise I say to myself that you will come: the sun is not
+truer to his rising than you to me.
+
+Love will go flying after this till I sleep. God bless you!--and me also;
+it is all one and the same wish.--Your most true, loving, and dear
+faithful one.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LIX.
+
+
+I have to own that I know your will now, at last. Without seeing you I am
+convinced: you have a strong power in you to have done that! You have told
+me the word I am to say to you: it is your bidding, so I say it--Good-by.
+But it is a word whose meaning I cannot share.
+
+Yet I have something to tell you which I could not have dreamed if it
+had not somehow been true: which has made it possible for me to believe,
+without hearing you speak it, that I am to be dismissed out of your
+heart.--May the doing of it cost you far less pain than I am fearing!
+
+You did not come, though I promised myself so certainly that you would:
+instead came your last very brief note which this is to obey. Still I
+watched for you to come, believing it still and trusting to silence on
+my part to bring you more certainly than any more words could do. And
+at last either you came to me, or I came to you: a bitter last meeting.
+Perhaps your mind too holds what happened, if so I have got truly at
+what your will is. I must accept it as true, since I am not to see you
+again. I cannot tell you whether I thought it or dreamed it, but it
+seems still quite real, and has turned all my past life into a mockery.
+
+When I came I was behind you; then you turned and I could see your
+face--you too were in pain: in that we seemed one. But when I touched
+you and would have kissed you, you shuddered at me and drew back your
+head. I tell you this as I would tell you anything unbelievable that I
+had heard told of you behind your back. You see I am obeying you at
+last.
+
+For all the love which you gave me when I seemed worthy of it I thank
+you a thousand times. Could you ever return to the same mind, I should
+be yours once more as I still am; never ceasing on my side to be your
+lover and servant till death, and--if there be anything more--after as
+well.
+
+My lips say amen now: but my heart cannot say it till breath goes out of
+my body. Good-by: that means--God be with you. I mean it; but He seems to
+have ceased to be with me altogether. Good-by, dearest. I kiss your heart
+with writing for the last time, and your eyes, that will see nothing more
+from me after this. Good-by.
+
+
+Note.--All the letters which follow were found lying loosely
+together. They only went to their destination after the writer's death.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LX.
+
+
+To-day, dearest, a letter from you reached me: a fallen star which had
+lost its way. It lies dead in my bosom. It was the letter that lost itself
+in the post while I was traveling: it comes now with half a dozen
+postmarks, and signs of long waiting in one place. In it you say, "We have
+been engaged now for two whole months; I never dreamed that two moons
+could contain so much happiness." Nor I, dearest! We have now been
+separated for three; and till now I had not dreamed that time could so
+creep, to such infinitely small purpose, as it has in carrying me from the
+moment when I last saw you.
+
+You were so dear to me, Beloved; _that_ you ever are! Time changes
+nothing in you as you seemed to me then. Oh, I am sick to touch your
+hands: all my thoughts run to your service: they seem to hear you call,
+only to find locked doors.
+
+If you could see me now I think you would open the door for a little
+while.
+
+If they came and told me--"You are to see him just for five minutes, and
+then part again"--what should I be wanting most to say to you? Nothing--
+only "Speak, speak!" I would have you fill my heart with your voice the
+whole time: five minutes more of you to fold my life round. It would
+matter very little what you said, barring the one thing that remains never
+to be said.
+
+Oh, could all this silence teach me the one thing I am longing to know!--
+why am I unworthy of you? If I cannot be your wife, why cannot I see you
+still,--serve you if possible? I would be grateful.
+
+You meant to be generous; and wishing not to wound me, you said that
+"there was no fault" in me. I realize now that you would not have said
+that to the woman you still loved. And now I am never to know what part
+in me is hateful to you. I must live with it because you would not tell
+me the truth!
+
+Every day tells me I am different from the thing I wish to be--your
+love, the woman you approve.
+
+I love you, I love you! Can I get no nearer to you ever for all this
+straining? If I love you so much, I must be moving toward what you would
+have me be. In our happiest days my heart had its growing pains,--growing
+to be as you wished it.
+
+Dear, even the wisest make mistakes, and the tenderest may be hard
+without knowing: I do not think I am unworthy of you, if you knew all.
+
+Writing to you now seems weakness: yet it seemed peace to come in here
+and cry to you. And when I go about I have still strength left, and try
+to be cheerful. Nobody knows, I think nobody knows. No one in the house
+is made downcast because of me. How dear they are, and how little I can
+thank them! Except to you, dearest, I have not shown myself selfish.
+
+I love you too much, too much: I cannot write it.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXI.
+
+
+You are very ill, they tell me. Beloved, it is such kindness in
+them to have regard for the wish they disapprove and to let me know.
+Knowledge is the one thing needful whose lack has deprived me of my
+happiness: the express image of sorrow is not so terrible as the
+foreboding doubt of it. Not because you are ill, but because I know
+something definitely about you, I am happier to-day: a little nearer to
+a semblance of service to you in my helplessness. How much I wish you
+well, even though that might again carry you out of my knowledge! And,
+though death might bring you nearer than life now makes possible, I pray
+to you, dearest, not to die. It is not right that you should die yet,
+with a mistake in your heart which a little more life might clear away.
+
+Praying for your dear eyes to remain open, I realize suddenly how much
+hope still remains in me, where I thought none was left. Even your
+illness I take as a good omen; and the thought of you weak as a child
+and somewhat like one in your present state with no brain for deep
+thinking, comes to my heart to be cherished endlessly: there you lie,
+Beloved, brought home to my imagination as never since the day we
+parted. And the thought comes to the rescue of my helpless longing--that
+it is as little children that men get brought into the kingdom of
+Heaven. Let that be the medicine and outcome of your sickness, my own
+Beloved! I hold my breath with hope that I shall have word of you when
+your hand has strength again to write. For I know that in sleepless
+nights and in pain you will be unable not to think of me. If you made
+resolutions against that when you were well, they will go now that you
+are laid weak; and so some power will come back to me, and my heart will
+never be asleep for thinking that yours lies awake wanting it:--nor ever
+be at rest for devising ways by which to be at the service of your
+conscious longing.
+
+Ah, my own one Beloved, whom I have loved so openly and so secretly, if
+you were as I think some other men are, I could believe that I had given
+you so much of my love that you had tired of me because I had made no
+favor of it but had let you see that I was your faithful subject and
+servant till death: so that after twenty years you, chancing upon an
+empty day in your life, might come back and find me still yours;--as
+to-morrow, if you came, you would.
+
+My pride died when I saw love looking out of your eyes at me; and it has
+not come back to me now that I see you no more. I have no wish that it
+should. In all ways possible I would wish to be as I was when you loved
+me; and seek to change nothing except as you bid me.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXII.
+
+
+So I have seen you, Beloved, again, after fearing that I never should. A
+day's absence from home has given me this great fortune.
+
+The pain of it was less than it might have been, since our looks did not
+meet. To have seen your eyes shut out their recognition of me would have
+hurt me too much: I must have cried out against such a judgment. But you
+passed by the window without knowing, your face not raised: so little
+changed, yet you have been ill. Arthur tells me everything: he knows I
+must have any word of you that goes begging.
+
+Oh, I hope you are altogether better, happier! An illness helps some
+people: the worst of their sorrow goes with the health that breaks down
+under it; and they come out purged into a clearer air, and are made
+whole for a fresh trial of life.
+
+I hear that you are going quite away; and my eyes bless this chance to
+have embraced you once again. Your face is the kindest I have ever
+seen: even your silence, while I looked at you, seemed a grace instead
+of a cruelty. What kindness, I say to myself, even if it be mistaken
+kindness, must have sealed those dear lips not to tell me of my unworth!
+
+Oh, if I could see once into the brain of it all! No one but myself knows
+how good you are: how can I, then, be so unworthy of you? Did you think I
+would not surrender to anything you fixed, that you severed us so
+completely, not even allowing us to meet, and giving me no way to come
+back to you though I might come to be all that you wished? Ah, dear face,
+how hungry you have made me!--the more that I think you are not yet so
+happy as I could wish,--as I could make you,--I say it foolishly:--yet if
+you would trust me, I am sure.
+
+Oh, how tired loving you now makes me! physically I grow weary with the
+ache to have you in my arms. And I dream, I dream always, the shadows of
+former kindness that never grow warm enough to clasp me before I
+wake.--Yours, dearest, waking or sleeping.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXIII.
+
+
+Do you remember, Beloved, when you came on your birthday, you said I was
+to give you another birthday present of your own choosing, and I promised?
+And it was that we were to do for the whole day what _I_ wished: you were
+not to be asked to choose.
+
+You said then that it was the first time I had ever let you have your
+way, which was to see me be myself independently of you:--as if such a
+self existed.
+
+You will never see what I write now; and I did not do then any of the
+things I most wished: for first I wished to kneel down and kiss your
+hands and feet; and you would not have liked that. Even now that you
+love me no more, you would not like me to do such a thing. A woman can
+never do as she likes when she loves--there is no such thing until he
+shows it her or she divines it. I loved you, I loved you!--that was all
+I could do, and all I wanted to do.
+
+You have kept my letters? Do you read them ever, I wonder? and do they
+tell you differently about me, now that you see me with new eyes? Ah no,
+you dare not look at them: they tell too much truth! How can love-letters
+ever cease to be the winged things they were when they first came? I fancy
+mine sick to death for want of your heart to rest on; but never less
+loving.
+
+If you would read them again, you would come back to me. Those little
+throats of happiness would be too strong for you. And so you lay them in
+a cruel grave of lavender,--"Lavender for forgetfulness" might be
+another song for Ophelia to sing.
+
+I am weak with writing to you, I have written too long: this is twice
+to-day.
+
+I do not write to make myself more miserable: only to fill up my time.
+
+When I go about something definite, I can do it:--to ride, or read aloud
+to the old people, or sit down at meals with them is very easy; but I
+cannot make employment for myself--that requires too much effort of
+invention and will: and I have only will for one thing in life--to get
+through it: and no invention to the purpose. Oh, Beloved, in the grave I
+shall lie forever with a lock of your hair in my hand. I wonder if,
+beyond there, one sees anything? My eyes ache to-day from the brain,
+which is always at blind groping for you, and the point where I missed
+you.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXIV.
+
+
+Dearest: It is dreadful to own that I was glad at first to know that you
+and your mother were no longer together, glad of something that must mean
+pain to you! I am not now. When you were ill I did a wrong thing: from her
+something came to me which I returned. I would do much to undo that act
+now; but this has fixed it forever. With it were a few kind words. I could
+not bear to accept praise from her: all went back to her! Oh, poor thing,
+poor thing! if I ever had an enemy I thought it was she! I do not think so
+now. Those who seem cold seldom are. I hope you were with her at the last:
+she loved you beyond any word that was in her nature to utter, and the
+young are hard on the old without knowing it. We were two people, she and
+I, whose love clashed jealously over the same object, and we both failed.
+She is the first to get rest.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXV.
+
+
+My Dear: I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always
+just as I knew you: the same without a shadow of change.
+
+I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence
+you have made. My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight
+of your handwriting gave it.
+
+I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has made me a stranger to
+myself. I could not look at you and say "I am your Star":--I could not
+believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited me, and the one here
+now is not the one you knew and loved: their one likeness is that they
+both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was
+returned, and the other certain of nothing. What a world of difference
+lies in that!
+
+I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pushing to
+the front: my glass shows it me. Thus we are all built up: bones are at
+the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin,
+they show through, the true architecture of humanity.
+
+I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure
+in life,--a woman who has lost her "share of the world": I try to shape
+myself to it.
+
+It is deadly when a woman's sex, what was once her glory, reveals itself
+to her as an all-containing loss. I realized myself fully only when I
+was with you; and now I can't undo it.--You gone, I lean against a
+shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca
+without a Paolo. Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you
+with me. I never believed myself a "strong" woman; your lightest wish
+shaped me to its liking. Now you have molded me with your own image and
+superscription, and have cast me away.
+
+Are not the die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the
+same form?--there is not a hair's breadth anywhere between their
+surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other. Yet part them, and
+the light strikes on them how differently! That is a mere condition of
+light: join them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, and they
+are the same--two faces of a single form. So you and I, dear, when we
+are dead, shall come together again, I trust. Or are we to come back to
+each other defaced and warped out of our true conjunction? I think not:
+for if you have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be melted
+again by your touch, and flow to meet all the change that is in you,
+since my true self is to be you.
+
+Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either with or without thoughts
+of me? I cannot understand, but I trust that it may be so. If I could
+have a reason why I have so passed out of your life, I could endure it
+better. What was in me that you did not wish? What was in you that I
+must not wish for evermore? If the root of this separation was in you,
+if in God's will it was ordered that we were to love, and, without
+loving less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so willingly. But
+it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:--I strain my eyes for
+sight and can't see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given
+great handfuls of darkness. I said to you the sun had dropped out of my
+heaven.--My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you? Am I in the mold
+with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in
+which we are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me,
+as I now for you?
+
+I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death
+can be like! Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips
+then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long
+deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and
+thirst--an antidote to it all?
+
+I may know soon. How very strange if at the last I forget to think of
+you!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXVI.
+
+
+Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for
+the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day
+as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to
+look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what _unanswerable_ things
+they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!
+There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a
+drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
+now feels and waits.
+
+All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only _seems_, dearest,
+for I still say, I _do_ say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I,
+who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these
+monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes
+reconciled with the pain that is there always.
+
+Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for
+granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did
+love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you
+no longer do.
+
+And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say
+over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault
+in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All
+that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only
+right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not
+forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I
+cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would
+comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know
+you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather
+than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was
+once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I
+always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray
+to meet."
+
+This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten
+it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes
+with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after
+death!--I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to
+any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain
+things shall go with me to dissolution.
+
+Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one
+quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence;
+yet I wish it so much--to exist again outside all this failure of my
+life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.
+
+And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing
+altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say--Send
+him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love
+me again when you see how much I have suffered,--and suffered because I
+would not let thought of you go.
+
+Could you dream, Beloved, reading _this_ that there is bright sunlight
+streaming over my paper as I write?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXVII.
+
+
+Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in
+what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without
+knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received?
+Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow
+weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to
+you: and I am glad of that weariness--it seems to be some virtue that has
+gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I
+should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at
+last.
+
+I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all
+my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I
+remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was
+still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do
+that!
+
+Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had
+emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no
+_emptying_ the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought
+again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children
+and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I
+have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we
+were together,--grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are
+set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!
+
+If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still,
+IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want,
+to know something of the life in between,--I could put these letters
+that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day
+have I been truly, that is to say _willingly_, out of your heart. When
+Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes
+him to see their child, which till then he had never seen--and its
+likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to
+you in all that I leave here written?
+
+If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and
+am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be
+sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that
+it will not reach you.
+
+Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I
+wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy
+unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things
+set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked
+out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a
+ghost, it will take _your_ shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as
+trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth.
+Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it
+for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country
+that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts on the
+bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the
+lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts
+of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts
+of hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, and those none.
+Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.
+
+How strange that when one has suffered most, it is the poets (those who
+are supposed to _sing_) who best express things for us. Yet singing is the
+thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke up to find itself full
+of tune, it was mine; now you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied
+it dry: and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I think it is their
+cruelty that appeals to me:--they can sing of grief! O hard hearts!
+
+Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have suddenly become wide open to
+the night-sounds outside. A night-jar is making its beautiful burr in
+the stillness, and there are things going away and away, telling me the
+whereabouts of life like points on a map made for the ear. You, too, are
+_somewhere_ outside, making no sound: and listening for you I heard
+these. It seemed as if my brain had all at once opened and caught a new
+sense. Are you there? This is one of those things which drop to us with
+no present meaning: yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live.
+
+Good-night! At your head, at your feet, is there any room for me to-night,
+Beloved?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXVIII.
+
+
+Dearest: The thought keeps troubling me how to give myself to you most, if
+you should ever come back for me when I am no longer here. These poor
+letters are all that I can leave: will they tell you enough of my heart?
+
+Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and it is there already! My
+heart, dearest, only moves in the wish to be what you desire.
+
+Yet I am conscious that I cannot give, unless you shall choose to take:
+and though I write myself down each day your willing slave, I cry my
+wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear me.
+
+Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is little you know of it.
+My wish would be to have every year of my life blessed by your
+consciousness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you have, truly, to
+remember: though I think five summers at least came to flower, and
+withered in that one.
+
+I wish you knew my whole life: I cannot tell it: it was too full of
+infinitely small things. Yet what I can remember I would like to tell
+now: so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there
+be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and
+discovering in it more than you knew before.
+
+How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your
+eye! Beloved, _then_, however faded the ink may have grown, I think the
+spirit of my love will remain fresh in it:--I kiss you on the lips with
+every word. The thought of "good-by" is never to enter here: it is _A
+reviderci_ for ever and ever:--"Love, love," and "meet again!"--the words
+we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember, when all the
+world for us was a garden.
+
+Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,--little things they must be--I
+will: and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their
+littleness will make them doubly welcome:--just as to know that you were
+once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom you plagued when a boy,
+was to me a darling discovery: all at once I caught my childhood's
+imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and
+eyes.
+
+Good-night, good-night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory:
+the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it--if ever!
+
+Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time
+would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!
+
+From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot
+give. Good-night, dearest.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXIX.
+
+
+Beloved: I remember my second birthday. I am quite sure of it, because my
+third I remember so infinitely well.--Then I was taken in to see Arthur
+lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my
+arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of
+his small body.
+
+I think from the first I was told of him as my "brother": cousin I have
+never been able to think him. But all this belongs to my third: on my
+second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I
+would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something
+there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness
+across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a
+door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and
+flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying.
+
+I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the
+rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite a long time
+the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange that I cannot remember
+what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,--perhaps
+it was done for me: Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early
+joys, and the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the only
+one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you: and he blesses me
+with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps
+I know better than he. And after the wax babies I had him for my third
+birthday.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXX.
+
+
+Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do:
+just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and
+no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in
+early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct
+and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my
+mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,--and _then_, for the
+first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude
+and distance which I had never before noticed:--I suppose because I had
+never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.
+
+It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me
+think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing
+those who called, except generically as callers--people who kissed me,
+and whom therefore I liked to see.
+
+One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I
+mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room
+where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest
+conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over
+it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.
+
+I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go,
+happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us
+in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows
+to our intelligence--things which did matter and mean much.
+
+Corduroys come early into my life,--their color and the queer earthy
+smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up
+from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom
+I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I
+lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man,
+but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when
+the change in my sense of beauty took place as regards him.
+
+Anything unusual that appealed to my senses left exaggerated marks. My
+father once in full uniform appeared to me as a giant, so that I
+screamed and ran, and required much of his kindest voice to coax me back
+to him.
+
+Also once in the street a dancer in fancy costume struck me in the same
+way, and seemed in his red tunic twice the size of the people who
+crowded round him.
+
+I think as a child the small ground-flowers of spring took a larger hold
+upon me than any others:--I was so close to them. Roses I don't remember
+till I was four or five; but crocus and snowdrop seem to have been in my
+blood from the very beginning of things; and I remember likening the
+green inner petals of the snowdrop to the skirts of some ballet-dancing
+dolls, which danced themselves out of sight before I was four years old.
+
+Snapdragons, too, I remember as if with my first summer: I used to feed
+them with bits of their own green leaves, believing faithfully that
+those mouths must need food of some sort. When I became more thoughtful
+I ceased to make cannibals of them: but I think I was less convinced
+then of the digestive process. I don't know when I left off feeding
+snapdragons: I think calceolarias helped to break me off the habit, for
+I found they had no throats to swallow with.
+
+In much the same way as sights that have no meaning leave no traces, so
+I suppose do words and sounds. It was many years before I overheard, in
+the sense of taking in, a conversation by elders not meant for me:
+though once, in my innocence, I hid under the table during the elders'
+late dinner, and came out at dessert, to which we were always allowed to
+come down, hoping to be an amusing surprise to them. And I could not at
+all understand why I was scolded; for, indeed, I had _heard_ nothing at
+all, though no doubt plenty that was unsuitable for a child's ears had
+been said, and was on the elders' minds when they upbraided me.
+
+
+
+Dearest, such a long-ago! and all these smallest of small things I
+remember again, to lay them up for you: all the child-parentage of me whom
+you loved once, and will again if ever these come to you.
+
+Bless my childhood, dearest: it did not know it was lonely of you, as I
+know of myself now! And yet I have known you, and know you still, so am
+the more blest.--Good-night.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXI.
+
+
+I used to stand at the foot of the stairs a long time, when by myself,
+before daring to start up: and then it was always the right foot that went
+first. And a fearful feeling used to accompany me that I was going to meet
+the "evil chance" when I got to the corner. Sometimes when I felt it was
+there very badly, I used at the last moment to shut my eyes and walk
+through it: and feel, on the other side, like a pilgrim who had come
+through the waters of Jordan.
+
+My eyes were always the timidest things about me: and to shut my eyes
+tight against the dark was the only way I had of meeting the solitude of
+the first hour of bed when Nan-nan had left me, and before I could get
+to sleep.
+
+I have an idea that one listens better with one's eyes shut, and that this
+and other things are a remnant of our primitive existence when perhaps the
+ears of our arboreal ancestors kept a lookout while the rest of their
+senses slept. I think, also, that the instinct I found in myself, and have
+since in other children, to conceal a wound is a similar survival. At one
+time, I suppose, in the human herd the damaged were quickly put out of
+existence; and it was the self-preservation instinct which gave me so keen
+a wish to get into hiding when one day I cut my finger badly--something
+more than a mere scratch, which I would have cried over and had bandaged
+quite in the correct way. I remember I sat in a corner and pretended to be
+nursing a rag doll which I had knotted round my hand, till Nan-nan
+noticed, perhaps, that I looked white, and found blood flowing into my
+lap. And I can recall still the overcoming comfort which fell upon me as I
+let resolution go, and sobbed in her arms full of pity for myself and
+scolding the "naughty knife" that had done the deed. The rest of that day
+is lost to me.
+
+Yet it is not only occasions of happiness and pain which impress
+themselves. When the mind takes a sudden stride in consciousness,--that,
+also, fixes itself. I remember the agony of shyness which came on me when
+strange hands did my undressing for me once in Nan-nan's absence: the
+first time I had felt such a thing. And another day I remember, after
+contemplating the head of Judas in a pictorial puzzle for a long time,
+that I seized a brick and pounded him with it beyond recognition:--these
+were the first vengeful beginnings of Christianity in me. All my history,
+Bible and English, came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over
+the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many
+kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them
+with pins till only a white blur remained on the paper.
+
+All this comes to me quite seriously now: I used to laugh thinking it
+over. But can a single thing we do be called trivial, since out of it we
+grow up minute by minute into a whole being charged with capacity for
+gladness or suffering?
+
+Now, as I look back, all these atoms of memory are dust and ashes that I
+have walked through in order to get to present things. How I suffer, how
+I suffer! If you could have dreamed that a human body could contain so
+much suffering, I think you would have chosen a less dreadful way of
+showing me your will: you would have given me a reason why I have to
+suffer so.
+
+Dearest, I am broken off every habit I ever had, except my love of you. If
+you would come back to me you could shape me into whatever you wished. I
+will be different in all but just that one thing.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXII.
+
+
+Here in my pain, Beloved, I remember keenly now the one or two occasions
+when as a small child I was consciously a cause of pain to others. What an
+irony of life that once of the two times when I remember to have been
+cruel, it was to Arthur, with his small astonished baby-face remaining a
+reproach to me ever after! I was hardly five then, and going up to the
+nursery from downstairs had my supper-cake in my hand, only a few
+mouthfuls left. He had been having his bath, and was sitting up on
+Nan-nan's knee being got into his bed clothes; when spying me with my cake
+he piped to have a share of it. I dare say it would not have been good for
+him, but of that I thought nothing at all: the cruel impulse took me to
+make one mouthful of all that was left. He watched it go without crying;
+but his eyes opened at me in a strange way, wondering at this sudden
+lesson of the hardness of a human heart. "All gone!" was what he said,
+turning his head from me up to Nan-nan, to see perhaps if she too had a
+like surprise for his wee intelligence. I think I have never forgiven
+myself that, though Arthur has no memory of it left in him: the judging
+remembrance of it would, I believe, win forgiveness to him for any wrong
+he might now do me, if that and not the contrary were his way with me: so
+unreasonably is my brain scarred where the thought of it still lies. God
+may forgive us our trespasses by marvelous slow ways; but we cannot always
+forgive them ourselves.
+
+The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later:
+Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the
+out-houses there was a swallow's nest too high up to be reached by any
+ladder we could get up there. I was intent on getting the _eggs_, and
+thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall
+below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a
+sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay,
+tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them,
+but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the
+nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the
+parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my
+conscience. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: they returned, first
+up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to
+where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a
+nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart
+bound up with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine.
+Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away
+not to return.
+
+I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate: but of
+course the young one died: and I--_cleared away all remains that nobody
+might see_! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance,
+but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has
+never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe
+till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?"
+was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward
+forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that
+blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of
+three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a
+last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two
+swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to think, not worth many
+sparrows? Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my
+life that those swallows in their generations might live again.
+
+Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell you of my childhood end
+in a sad way. For it is no use, no use: I have not to-day a glimmer of
+hope left that your eyes will ever rest on what I have been at such deep
+trouble to write.
+
+If I were being punished for these two childish things I did, I should
+see a side of justice in it all. But it is for loving you I am being
+punished: and not God himself shall make me let you go! Beloved,
+Beloved, all my days are at your feet, and among them days when you held
+me to your heart. Good-night; good-night always now!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXIII.
+
+
+Dearest: I could never have made any appeal _from_ you to anybody: all my
+appeal has been _to_ you alone. I have wished to hear reason from no other
+lips but yours; and had you but really and deeply confided in me, I
+believe I could have submitted almost with a light heart to what you
+thought best:--though in no way and by no stretch of the imagination can I
+see you coming to me for the last time and _saying_, as you only wrote,
+that it was best we should never see each other again.
+
+You could not have said that with any sound of truth; and how can it
+look truer frozen into writing? I have kissed the words, because you
+wrote them; not believing them. It is a suspense of unbelief that you
+have left me in, oh, still dearest! Yet never was sad heart truer to the
+fountain of all its joy than mine to yours. You had only to see me to
+know that.
+
+Some day, I dream, we shall come suddenly together, and you will see,
+before a word, before I have time to gather my mind back to the bodily
+comfort of your presence, a face filled with thoughts of you that have
+never left it, and never been bitter:--I believe never once bitter. For
+even when I think, and convince myself that you have wronged yourself--and
+so, me also,--even then: oh, then most of all, my heart seems to break
+with tenderness, and my spirit grow more famished than ever for the want
+of you! For if you have done right, wisely, then you have no longer any
+need of me: but if you have done wrong, then you must need me. Oh, dear
+heart, let that need overwhelm you like a sea, and bring you toward me on
+its strong tide! And come when you will I shall be waiting.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXIV.
+
+
+Dearest and Dearest: So long as you are still this to my heart I trust to
+have strength to write it; though it is but a ghost of old happiness that
+comes to me in the act. I have no hope now left in me: but I love you not
+less, only more, if that be possible: or is it the same love with just a
+weaker body to contain it all? I find that to have definitely laid off all
+hope gives me a certain relief: for now that I am so hopeless it becomes
+less hard not to misjudge you--not to say and think impatiently about you
+things which would explain why I had to die like this.
+
+Dearest, nothing but love shall explain anything of you to me. When I
+think of your dear face, it is only love that can give it its meaning.
+If love would teach me the meaning of this silence, I would accept all
+the rest, and not ask for any joy in life besides. For if I had the
+meaning, however dark, it would be by love speaking to me again at last;
+and I should have your hand holding mine in the darkness forever.
+
+Your face, Beloved, I can remember so well that it would be enough if I
+had your hand:--the meaning, just the meaning, why I have to sit blind.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXV.
+
+
+Dearest: There is always one possibility which I try to remember in all I
+write: even where there is no hope a thing remains _possible_:--that your
+eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave here. And I would have
+nothing so dark as to make it seem that I were better dead than to have
+come to such a pass through loving you. If I felt that, dearest, I should
+not be writing my heart out to you, as I do: when I cease doing that I
+shall indeed have become dead and not want you any more, I suppose. How
+far I am from dying, then, now!
+
+So be quite sure that if now, even now,--for to-day of all days has
+seemed most dark--if now I were given my choice--to have known you or
+not to have known you,--Beloved, a thousand times I would claim to keep
+what I have, rather than have it taken away from me. I cannot forget
+that for a few months I was the happiest woman I ever knew: and that
+happiness is perhaps only by present conditions removed from me. If I
+have a soul, I believe good will come back to it: because I have done
+nothing to deserve this darkness unless by loving you: and if _by_
+loving you, I am glad that the darkness came.
+
+Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this: _I_ have not, and cannot
+have. Something that you have not chosen for me to know, you know: it
+should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not to have shared it
+with me. Maybe there is something I know that you do not. In the way of
+sorrow, I think and wish--yes. In the way of love, I wish to think--no.
+
+Any more thinking wearies me. Perhaps we have loved too much, and have
+lost our way out of our poor five senses, without having strength to
+take over the new world which is waiting beyond them. Well, I would
+rather, Beloved, suffer through loving too much, than through loving too
+little. It is a good fault as faults go. And it is _my_ fault, Beloved:
+so some day you may have to be tender to it.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXVI.
+
+
+Dearest: I feel constantly that we are together still: I cannot explain.
+When I am most miserable, even so that I feel a longing to fly out of
+reach of the dear household voices which say shy things to keep me
+cheerful,--I feel that I have you in here waiting for me. Heart's heart,
+in my darkest, it is you who speak to me!
+
+As I write I have my cheek pressed against yours. None of it is true:
+not a word, not a day that has separated us! I am yours: it is only the
+poor five senses part of us that spells absence. Some day, some day you
+will answer this letter which has to stay locked in my desk. Some day,
+I mean, an answer will reach me:--without your reading this, your answer
+will come. Is not your heart at this moment answering me?
+
+Dearest, I trust you: I could not have dreamed you to myself, therefore
+you must be true, quite independently of me. You as I saw you once with
+open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make yourself, Beloved, not to be
+what you are: you have called my soul to life if for no other reason than
+to bear witness of you, come what may. No length of silence can make a
+truth once sounded ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing it
+makes its way to the stars: dispersed or removed it cannot be lost. I too,
+for truth's sake, may have to be dispersed out of my present self which
+shuts me from you: but I shall find you some day,--you who made me, you
+who every day make me! A part of you cut off, I suffer pain because I _am_
+still part of you. If I had no part in you I should suffer nothing. But I
+do, I do. One is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still feels
+it,--not the pleasure of it but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of me
+now?
+
+Because I am suffering, you shall not think I am entirely miserable. But
+here and now I am all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at times
+to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point at which it assuages
+itself and becomes healing: that pain is not endurance wasted; but that
+I and my weary body have a goal which will give a meaning to all this,
+somehow, somewhere: never, I begin to fear, here, while this body has
+charge of me.
+
+Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry: and having worn myself
+out with it and ended, I kiss your lips and bless God that I have known
+you.
+
+I have not said--I never could say it--"Let the day perish wherein Love
+was born!" I forget nothing of you: you are clear to me,--all but one
+thing: why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent
+different ways. And yet so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow
+is yours: I wet your face with my tears and cry, "Sleep well."
+
+To-night also, Beloved, sleep well! Night and morning I make you my
+prayer.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXVII.
+
+
+My own one beloved, my dearest dear! Want me, please want me! I will keep
+alive for you. Say you wish me to live,--not come to you: don't say that
+if you can't--but just wish me to live, and I will. Yes, I will do
+anything, even live, if you tell me to do it. I will be stronger than all
+the world or fate, if you have any wish about me at all. Wish well,
+dearest, and surely the knowledge will come to me. Wish big things of me,
+or little things: wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better because of it.
+Wish anything of me: only not that I should love you better. I can't,
+dearest, I can't. Any more of that, and love would go out of my body and
+leave it clay. If you would even wish _that_, I would be happy at finding
+a way to do your will below ground more perfectly than any I found on it.
+Wish, wish: only wish something for me to do. Oh, I could rest if I had
+but your little finger to love. The tyranny of love is when it makes no
+bidding at all. That you have no want or wish left in you as regards me
+is my continual despair. My own, my beloved, my tormentor and comforter,
+my ever dearest dear, whom I love so much!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXVIII.
+
+
+To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me.
+Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your
+arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only
+our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting
+for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend
+that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!
+
+Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in
+sharp stabs of pain: they must go _somewhere_ for me to be delivered of
+them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you,
+if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and
+shall, dearest, and will till I die!
+
+I _will_ die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you.
+I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the
+poets have written. They go through me like ghosts: I am haunted by
+them: but they are bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the
+other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in
+me. Nobody ever loved as I love since the world began.
+
+There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I
+feel in myself only the dregs left: and still in them is the fire and
+the suffering.
+
+No: but I will be better: it is better to have known you than not. Give
+me time, dearest, to get you to heart again! I cannot leave you like
+this: not with such words as these for "good-night!"
+
+Oh, dear face, dear unforgettable lost face, my soul strains up to look
+for you through the blind eyes that have been left to torment me because
+they can never behold you. Very often I have seen you looking grieved,
+shutting away some sorrow in yourself quietly: but never once angry or
+impatient at any of the small follies of men. Come, then, and look at me
+patiently now! I am your blind girl: I must cry out because I cannot see
+you. Only make me believe that you yet think of me as, when you so
+unbelievably separated us, you said you had always found me--"the
+dearest and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet." Beloved,
+if in your heart I am still that, separation does not matter. I can
+wait, I can wait.
+
+I kiss your feet: even to-morrow may bring the light. God bless you! I
+pray it more than ever; because to me to-night has been so very dark.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXIX.
+
+
+Dearest: I have not written to you for three weeks. At last I am better
+again. You seem to have been waiting for me here: always wondering when I
+would come back. I do come back, you see.
+
+Dear heart, how are you? I kiss your feet; you are my one only happiness,
+my great one. Words are too cold and cruel to write anything for me.
+Picture me: I am too weak to write more, but I have written this, and am
+so much better for it.
+
+Reward me some day by reading what is here. I kiss, because of you, this
+paper which I am too tired to fill any more.
+
+Love, nothing but love! Into every one of these dead words my heart has
+been beating, trying to lay down its life and reach to you.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXX.
+
+
+A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon: before I am done with
+twenty-three I shall have passed my age. Beloved, it hurts me more than I
+can say that the news of it should come to you from anyone but me: for
+this, though I write it, is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined
+soul even in the pains that gave it birth. Yes, it does pain me, frightens
+me even, that I must die all by myself, and feeling still so young. I
+thought I should look forward to it, but I do not; no, no, I would give
+much to put it off for a time, until I could know what it will mean for me
+as regards you. Oh, if you only knew and _cared,_ what wild comfort I
+might have in the knowledge! It seems strange that if I were going away
+from the chance of a perfect life with you I should feel it with less pain
+than I feel this. The dust and the ashes of life are all that I have to
+let fall: and it is bitterness itself to part with them.
+
+How we grow to love sorrow! Joy is never so much a possession--it goes
+over us, incloses us like air or sunlight; but sorrow goes into us and
+becomes part of our flesh and bone. So that I, holding up my hand to the
+sunshine, see sorrow red and transparent like stained glass between me
+and the light of day, sorrow that has become inseparably mine, and is
+the very life I am wishing to keep!
+
+Dearest, will the world be more bearable to you when I am out of it? It is
+selfish of me not to wish so, since I can satisfy you in this so soon!
+Every day I will try to make it my wish: or wish that it may be so when
+the event comes--not a day before. Till then let it be more bearable that
+I am still alive: grant me, dearest, that one little grace while I live!
+
+Bearable! My sorrow _is_ bearable, I suppose, because I do bear it from
+day to day: otherwise I would declare it not to be. Don't suffer as I
+do, dearest, unless that will comfort you.
+
+One thing is strange, but I feel quite certain of it: when I heard that I
+carried death about in me, scarcely an arm's-length away, I thought
+quickly to myself that it was not the solution of the mystery. Others
+might have thought that it was: that because I was to die so soon,
+therefore I was not fit to be your wife. But I know it was not that. I
+know that whatever hopes death in me put an end to, you would have married
+me and loved me patiently till I released you, as I am to so soon.
+
+It is always this same woe that crops up: nothing I can ever think can
+account for what has been decreed. That too is a secret: mine comes to
+meet it. When it arrives shall I know?
+
+And not a word, not a word of this can reach you ever! Its uses are
+wrung out and drained dry to comfort me in my eternal solitude.
+
+Good-night; very soon it will have to be good-by.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXI.
+
+
+Beloved: I woke last night and believed I had your arms round me, and that
+all storms had gone over me forever. The peace of your love had inclosed
+me so tremendously that when I was fully awake I began to think that what
+I held was you dead, and that our reconciliation had come at that great
+cost.
+
+Something remains real of it all, even now under the full light of day:
+yet I know you are not dead. Only it leaves me with a hope that at the
+lesser cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness may break in, and
+that whichever of us has been the most in poor and needy ignorance will
+know the truth at last--the truth which is an inseparable need for all
+hearts that love rightly.
+
+Even now to me the thought of you is a peace passing _all_ understanding.
+Beloved, Beloved, Beloved, all the greetings I ever gave you gather here,
+and are hungry to belong to you by a better way than I have ever dreamed.
+I am yours, till something more than death swallows me up.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXII.
+
+
+Dearest: If you will believe any word of mine, you must not believe that I
+have died of a broken heart should science and the doctors bring about a
+fulfillment of their present prophesyings concerning me.
+
+I think my heart has held me up for a long time, not letting me know
+that I was ill: I did not notice. And now my body snaps on a stem that
+has grown too thin to hold up its weight. I am at the end of twenty-two
+years: they have been too many for me, and the last has seemed a useless
+waste of time. It is difficult not to believe that great happiness might
+have carried me over many more years and built up for me in the end a
+renewed youth: I asked that quite frankly, wishing to know, and was told
+not to think it.
+
+So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever I may have written to fill up my
+worst loneliness, be sure, if you care to be, that though my life was
+wholly yours, my death was my own, and comes at its right natural time.
+Pity me, but invent no blame to yourself. My heart has sung of you even
+in the darkest days; in the face of everything, the blankness of
+everything, I mean, it has clung to an unreasoning belief that in spite of
+appearances all had some well in it, above all to a conviction that--
+perhaps without knowing it--you still love me. Believing _that,_ it
+could not break, could not, dearest. Any other part of me, but not that.
+
+Beloved, I kiss your face, I kiss your lips and eyes: my mind melts into
+kisses when I think of you. However weak the rest of me grows, my love
+shall remain strong and certain. If I could look at you again, how in a
+moment you would fill up the past and the future and turn even my grief
+into gold! Even my senses then would forget that they had ever been
+starved. Dear "share of the world," you have been out of sight, but I
+have never let you go! Ah, if only the whole of me, the double doubting
+part of me as well, could only be so certain as to be able to give wings
+to this and let it fly to you! Wish for it, and I think the knowledge
+will come to me!
+
+Good-night! God brings you to me in my first dream: but the longing so
+keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXIII.
+
+
+I am frightened, dearest, I am frightened at death. Not only
+for fear it should take me altogether away from you instead of to you,
+but for other reasons besides,--instincts which I thought gone but am
+not rid of even yet. No healthy body, or body with power of enjoyment in
+it, wishes to die, I think: and no heart with any desire still living
+out of the past. We know nothing at all really: we only think we
+believe, and hope we know; and how thin that sort of conviction gets
+when in our extremity we come face to face with the one immovable fact
+of our own death waiting for us! That is what I have to go through. Yet
+even the fear is a relief: I come upon something that I can meet at
+last; a challenge to my courage whether it is still to be found here in
+this body I have worn so weak with useless lamentations. If I had your
+hand, or even a word from you, I think I should not be afraid: but
+perhaps I should. It is all one. Good-by: I am beginning at last to feel
+a meaning in that word which I wrote at your bidding so long-ago. Oh,
+Beloved, from face to feet, good-by! God be with you wherever you go and
+I do not!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXIV.
+
+
+Dearest: I am to have news of you. Arthur came to me last night, and told
+me that, if I wished, he would bring me word of you. He goes to-morrow. He
+put out the light that I might not see his face: I felt what was there.
+
+You should know this of him: he has been the dearest possible of human
+beings to me since I lost you. I am almost not unblessed when I have him
+to speak to. Yet we can say so little together. I guess all he means. An
+endless wish to give me comfort:--and I stay selfish. The knowledge that
+he would stolidly die to serve me hardly touches me.
+
+Oh, look kindly in his eyes if you see him: mine will be looking at you
+out of his!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXV.
+
+
+Good-morning, Beloved; there is sun shining. I wonder if Arthur is with
+you yet?
+
+If faith could still remove mountains, surely I should have seen you
+long ago. But if I were to see you now, I should fear that it meant you
+were dead.
+
+That the same world should hold you and me living and unseen by each
+other is a great mystery. Will love ever explain it?
+
+I wish I could bid the sun stand still over your meeting with Arthur so
+that I might know. We were so like each other once. Time has worn it
+off: but he is like what I was. Will you remember me well enough to
+recognize me in him, and to be a little pitiful to my weak longing for a
+word this one last time of all? Beloved, I press my lips to yours, and
+pray--speak!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER LXXXVI.
+
+
+Dearest: To-day Arthur came and brought me your message: I have at my
+heart your "profoundly grateful remembrances." Somewhere else unanswered
+lies your prayer for God to bless me. To answer that, dearest, is not in
+His hands but in yours. And the form of your message tells me it will not
+be,--not for this body and spirit that have been bound together so long in
+truth to you.
+
+I set down for you here--if you should ever, for love's sake, send
+and make claim for any message back from me--a profoundly grateful
+remembrance; and so much more, so much more that has never failed.
+
+Most dear, most beloved, you were to me and are. Now I can no longer
+hold together: but it is my body, not my love that has failed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Transcriber's Notes:
+
+--Though this book was published anonymously, it was later revealed to be
+by Laurence Housman.
+
+--In Letter XLIII "roughtly" was corrected to "roughly"
+
+--In Letter XXXVI "sort" was corrected to "short"
+
+--In Letter LXX, "elder's" was corrected to "elders'"
+
+--In Letter LXXVIII "unforgetable" was corrected to "unforgettable"]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's An Englishwoman's Love-Letters, by Anonymous
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