selfishness, dear girl; it is prayer. If you should come to me begging for
peace, I should be filled with amazement; for I myself have it not. What I
can give is love's unwearied tenderness and love's unceasing homage to the
beauty of your body and your soul. More than that, I shall give you in the
end the crown of the world's honour. Without you I may accomplish the task
laid upon me, but only with heaviness of soul and abnegation of all that
my heart craves. I was reading in an old drama last night until I came to
these words, and then I set the book aside:

Once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies.

In that sweet hyperbole I seemed to read a transcript of your beauty. If I
am selfish, beloved, all love is selfishness.

Dear girl, it seems that always I must woo you in metaphysics and express
my ardour in theorems. But have I not made myself understood? "Man's love
is of man's life a thing apart," as a thousand women have quoted: and it
is true. But do you not see that even for this reason his love swells into
a passionate idolatry of the woman who knows no such cleavage in her soul.
Try us with sacrifices. I could throw away every earthly good to bestow on
you a year of happiness--only not my philosophic proposition, as you
sarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you--pray
heaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think,
meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of AEneas and Dido,
only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within AEneas he expressed
dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little
understanding of the poem or of human nature to censure AEneas as a cold
egotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart, _multa
gemens_? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terror
and death. The tragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so the Fates have
ordered.

But why do I write such grim reflections? There is no tragedy, no
separation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness:

The treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman's love.

All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of
this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber's part, sweet Jessica, and
he who ravished that great jew