ship": I was to write back acceptance of all your
dear words. Are you never to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do
not know how, for I cannot move from where I am! Do you feel where my
thoughts kiss you? You would be vexed with me if I wrote it down, so I do
not. And after all, some day, under a bright star of Providence, I may
have gifts for you after my own mind which will allow me to grow proud.
Only now all the giving comes from you. It is I who am enriched by your
love, beyond knowledge of my former self. Are _you_ changed, dearest, by
anything I have done?

My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, and all these thoughts are
loose leaves that fly after you when I have to remain behind. Dear lover,
what short visits yours seem! and the Mother-Aunt tells me they are most
unconscionably long.--You will not pay any attention to _that_, please:
forever let the heavens fall rather than that a hint to such foul effect
should grow operative through me!

This brings you me so far as it can:--such little words off so great a
body of--"liking" shall I call it? My paper stops me: it is my last sheet:
I should have to go down to the library to get more--else I think I could
not cease writing.

More love than I can name.--Ever, dearest, your own.

LETTER XVII.

Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have
thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me
before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of
books--I scarcely can guess what sort--and gone contentedly into
middle-age with that instead of _this_ as my _raison d'etre_.

How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say--"But for you, I had
been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved,
your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a
little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering,
would _you_ have liked me in that character?

There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest
dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully
facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write:
and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of--"What has come
between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw
scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me
through damp places?"

Having written this sentim