think I
should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at
last.

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all
my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I
remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was
still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do
that!

Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had
emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no
_emptying_ the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought
again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children
and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I
have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we
were together,--grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are
set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still,
IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want,
to know something of the life in between,--I could put these letters
that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day
have I been truly, that is to say _willingly_, out of your heart. When
Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes
him to see their child, which till then he had never seen--and its
likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to
you in all that I leave here written?

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and
am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be
sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that
it will not reach you.

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I
wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy
unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things
set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked
out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a
ghost, it will take _your_ shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as
trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth.
Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it
for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country
that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts