phy and ranged myself with the sentimentalists of
the day? I will not believe it. I will fight this upstart folly while
breath is in me, and I will teach you to fight it with me. This morning I
took that poor book of Miss Addams's and, in place of what you sent me,
wrote such a review as will quite astound the "forty-million fool" you so
despise--we agree there, at least. And all the while I was writing, I kept
saying to myself, How will Jessica answer that? and, Will not Jessica
believe now that my hatred of humanitarianism does not spring from
selfishness or contempt, but from sympathy for mankind?

Yet if anything could bring me to hate my brothers it would be this
monstrous certainty that my feeling towards them stands in the way of the
one supreme, all consuming desire of my heart. I could cry out in the
words of the _Imitation_:

"As often as I have gone among men, I have returned less a man"; for their
foolish chatter has stolen from me the possession without which we are
dwarfed and marred in our being. Your love is more to me than all the
hopes of men. You must hearken to me. I have charged the winds with my
passion; the scent of flowers shall tell you the sweetness of love; you
shall not walk among your beloved trees but their whispering shall repeat
the words they heard me speak. I will wrap you about with fancies and
dreams and passionate thoughts till no way of escape is left you. You
shall not read a book but some word of mine shall come between your eyes
and the printed page. You shall not hear a simple song but you shall
remember that music is the voice of love. You think that I have no heart
for the many and can therefore have no heart for one. Dear girl, my love
is so great that it has made me stronger a thousand times than you; there
is no escape for you.

As I passed the little goblin boy this morning I dropped a coin in his
hand and said: "It is from a lady in Georgia who loves you." His face
lighted up with surprise at the words (not at the money, for I have given
him that before), and I was glad to extend the benediction of your
sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish
as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor;
but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from
the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism,
sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew
of _ism