AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S LOVE-LETTERS DELUXE EDITION LOVE-LETTERS 82

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.









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The Lady Of Shalott Alfred Lord Tennyson
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