Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly!  I love you now too much for your heart not to carry me to its grave, though I should die now, and you live to be a hundred.  I pray you may!  I cannot choose a day for you to die.  I am too grateful to life which has given me to you to say—­if I were dying—­“Come with me, dearest!” Though, how the words tempt me as I write them!—­Come with me, dearest:  yes, come!  Ah, but you kiss me more, I think, when we say good-by than when meeting; so you will kiss me most of all when I have to die:—­a thing in death to look forward to!  And, till then,—­life, life, till I am out of my depth in happiness and drown in your arms!

Beloved, that I can write so to you,—­think what it means; what you have made me come through in the way of love, that this, which I could not have dreamed before, comes from me with the thought of you!  You told me to be still—­to let you “worship”:  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?