t you seemed very real that day, and your lips
had all the fragrance of humanity.

Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present
bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read
of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand
seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the
groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with
the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise
before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words,
you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings
to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they
clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and
beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every
image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more
fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain
is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You
see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your
mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away.
With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:

VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS

Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found,
The moss-grown rock, the pines around!
And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms,
Catullus and his love's alarms.
_Da basia mille_, so the poem ran;
And, lip to lip, our hearts began
With ne'er a word translate the words complete:--
Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?
A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more,
And then confound the telltale score!
So may we live and love, till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.
Yon failing sun shall rise another morn,
And the thin moon round out her horn;
But we, when once we lose our waning light,--
Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!

XL

JESSICA TO PHILIP

A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have
ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if
love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to
the c