ress close to you to say so, in
this imperfect way, my dear dearest beloved! Why do you not help me,
rather than take my words, my proper word, from me and call them
yours, when yours they are not? You said lately love of you 'made you
humble'--just as if to hinder _me_ from saying that earnest
truth!--entirely true it is, as I feel ever more convincingly. You do
not choose to understand it should be so, nor do I much care, for the
one thing you must believe, must resolve to believe in its length and
breadth, is that I do love you and live only in the love of you.

I will rest on the confidence that you do so believe! You _know_ by
this that it is no shadowy image of you and _not_ you, which having
attached myself to in the first instance, I afterward compelled my
fancy to see reproduced, so to speak, with tolerable exactness to the
original idea, in you, the dearest real _you_ I am blessed with--you
_know_ what the eyes are to me, and the lips and the hair. And I, for
my part, know _now_, while fresh from seeing you, certainly _know_,
whatever I may have said a short time since, that _you_ will go on to
the end, that the arm round me will not let me go,--over such a blind
abyss--I refuse to think, to fancy, _towards_ what it would be to
loose you now! So I give my life, my soul into your hand--the giving
is a mere form too, it is yours, ever yours from the first--but ever
as I see you, sit with you, and come away to think over it all, I find
more that seems mine to give; you give me more life and it goes back
to you.

I shall hear from you to-morrow--then, I will go out early and get
done with some calls, in the joy and consciousness of what waits me,
and when I return I will write a few words. Are these letters, these
merest attempts at getting to talk with you through the distance--yet
always with the consolation of feeling that you will know all,
interpret all and forgive it and put it right--can such things be
cared for, expected, as you say? Then, Ba, my life _must_ be better
... with the closeness to help, and the 'finding out the way' for
which love was always noted. If you begin making in fancy a lover to
your mind, I am lost at once--but the one quality of _affection_ for
you, which would sooner or later have to be placed on his list of
component graces; _that_ I will dare start supply--the entire love you
could dream of _is_ here. You think you see some of the other
adornments, and only too many; and you wi