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.
continued below....
