I am quite sure that if I had not met you, I could have loved nobody as I love you.  Yet it is very likely that I should have loved—­sufficiently, as the way of the world goes.  It is not a romantic confession, but it is true to life:  I do so genuinely like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not happy except where shoulders rub socially:—­that is to say, have not until now been happy, except dependently on the company and smiles of others.  Now, Beloved, I have none of your company, and have had but few of your smiles (I could count them all); yet I have become more happy filling up my solitude with the understanding of you which has made me wise, than all the rest of fate or fortune could make me.  Down comes autumn’s sad heart and finds me gay; and the asters, which used to chill me at their appearing, have come out like crocuses this year because it is the beginning of a new world.

And all the winter will carry more than a suspicion of summer with it, just as the longest days carry round light from northwest to northeast, because so near the horizon, but out of sight, lies their sun.  So you, Beloved, so near to me now at last, though out of sight.

M.

Beloved:  Whether I have sorry or glad things to think about, they are accompanied and changed by thoughts of you.  You are my diary:—­all goes to you now.  That you love me is the very light by which I see everything.  Also I learn so much through having you in my thoughts:  I cannot say how it is, for I have no more knowledge of life than I had before:—­yet I am wiser, I believe, knowing much more what lives at the root of things and what men have meant and felt in all they have done:—­because I love you, dearest.  Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have more joy and more fear in me than I had before.  And if this seems to be all about myself, it is all about you really, Beloved!

Last week one of my dearest old friends, our Rector, died:  a character you too would have loved.  He was a father to the whole village, rather stern of speech, and no respecter of persons.  Yet he made a very generous allowance for those who did not go through the church door to find their salvation.  I often went only because I loved him:  and he knew it.

I went for that reason alone last Sunday.  The whole village was full of closed blinds:  and of all things over him Chopin’s Funeral March was played!—­a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning:  wild pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty.  “Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!” it cried:  and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all.  Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke dealt by a blind god ignorantly.  Yet in all great joy there is the Balder element:  and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my life become a cry like Chopin’s march over mown-down unripened grass, and youth slain in its high places.