When you come, why am I any happier than when I know you are coming?  It is the same thing in love.  I have you now all in my mind’s eye; I have you by heart; have I my arms a bit more round you then than now?

How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, there should be disappearances and reappearances:  and faces now and then showing a change!—­You, actually, the last time you came, looking a day older than the day before!  What was it?  Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a wrinkle in the art of dying?  Or had you turned over some new leaf, and found it withered on the other side?

I could not see how it was:  I heard you coming—­it was spring!  The door opened:—­oh, it was autumnal!  One day had fallen away like a leaf out of my forest, and I had not been there to see it go!

At what hour of the twenty-four does a day shed itself out of our lives?  Not, I think, on the stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow.  Some people, perhaps, would say—­with the first sleep; and that the “beauty-sleep” is the new day putting out its green wings. I think it must be not till something happens to make the new day a stronger impression than the last.  So it would please me to think that your yesterday dropped off as you opened the door; and that, had I peeped and seen you coming up the stairs, I should have seen you looking a day younger.

That means that you age at the sight of me!  I think you do.  I, I feel a hundred on the road to immortality, directly your face dawns on me.

There’s a foot gone over my grave!  The angel of the resurrection with his mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!—­Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop of your horse:—­it sounds like a kettle boiling over!

So this goes into hiding:  listens to us all the while we talk; and comes out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and sent off the moment your back is turned.  No, better!—­to be slipped into your pocket and carried home to yourself by yourself.  How, when you get to your destination and find it, you will curse yourself that you were not a speedier postman!

LETTER X.

Dearest:  Did you find your letter?  The quicker I post, the quicker I need to sit down and write again.  The grass under love’s feet never stops growing:  I must make hay of it while the sun shines.

You say my metaphors make you giddy.—­My clear, you, without a metaphor in your composition, do that to me!  So it is not for you to complain; your curses simply fly back to roost.  Where do you pigeon-hole them?  In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like blackbirds:  and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing “Chewee, chewee, chewee!” in the most scared way!

Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, “I hope you don’t keep these miserables!  Though I fill up my hollow hours with them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours.”  You added that I was better occupied—­and here I am “better occupied” even as you bid me.