An Englishwomans Love-Letters | Page 2

with flags of surrender fluttering themselves to rags from every
wall and window! No: in love it is the women who are the strategists:
and they have at last to fall into the ambush they know of with a good
grace.
You must let me praise myself a little for the past, since I can never
praise myself again. You must do that for me now! There is not a battle
left for me to win. You and peace hold me so much a prisoner, have so
caught me from my own way of living, that I seem to hear a pin drop
twenty years ahead of me: it seems an event! Dearest, a thousand times,
I would not have it be otherwise: I am only too willing to drop out of
existence altogether and find myself in your arms instead. Giving you
my love, I can so easily give you my life. Ah, my dear, I am yours so
utterly, so gladly! Will you ever find it out, you who took so long to
discover anything?

LETTER II.
Dearest: Your name woke me this morning: I found my lips piping
their song before I was well back into my body out of dreams. I wonder
if the rogues babble when my spirit is nesting? Last night you were a
high tree and I was in it, the wind blowing us both; but I forget the
rest,--whatever, it was enough to make me wake happy.
There are dreams that go out like candle-light directly one opens the
shutters: they illumine the walls no longer; the daylight is too strong for
them. So, now, I can hardly remember anything of my dreams: daylight,
with you in it, floods them out.
Oh, how are you? Awake? Up? Have you breakfasted? I ask you a
thousand things. You are thinking of me, I know: but what are you
thinking? I am devoured by curiosity about myself--none at all about
you, whom I have all by heart! If I might only know how happy I make

you, and just which thing I said yesterday is making you laugh
to-day--I could cry with joy over being the person I am.
It is you who make me think so much about myself, trying to find
myself out. I used to be most self-possessed, and regarded it as the
crowning virtue: and now--your possession of me sweeps it away, and I
stand crying to be let into a secret that is no longer mine. Shall I ever
know why you love me? It is my religious difficulty; but it never rises
into a doubt. You do love me, I know. Why, I don't think I ever can
know.
You ask me the same question about yourself, and it becomes absurd,
because I altogether belong to you. If I hold my breath for a moment
wickedly (for I can't do it breathing), and try to look at the world with
you out of it, I seem to have fallen over a precipice; or rather, the solid
earth has slipped from under my feet, and I am off into vacuum. Then,
as I take breath again for fear, my star swims up and clasps me, and
shows me your face. O happy star this that I was born under, that
moved with me and winked quiet prophecies at me all through my
childhood, I not knowing what it meant:--the dear radiant thing naming
to me my lover!
As a child, now and then, and for no reason, I used to be sublimely
happy: real wings took hold of me. Sometimes a field became fairyland
as I walked through it; or a tree poured out a scent that its blossoms
never had before or after. I think now that those must have been
moments when you too were in like contact with earth,--had your feet
in grass which felt a faint ripple of wind, or stood under a lilac in a
drench of fragrance that had grown double after rain.
When I asked you about the places of your youth, I had some fear of
finding that we might once have met, and that I had not remembered it
as the summing up of my happiness in being young. Far off I see
something undiscovered waiting us, something I could not have
guessed at before--the happiness of being old. Will it not be something
like the evening before last when we were sitting together, your hand in
mine, and one by one, as the twilight drew about us, the stars came and
took up their stations overhead? They seemed to me then to be

following out some quiet train of thought in the universal mind: the
heavens were remembering the stars back into their places:--the
Ancient of Days drawing upon the