If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been of myself, lest I might be unworthy of your friendship or love.  Suspicions of you I never had.

Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds, flying only by twilight?

But even my doubts have been thoughts, Beloved,—­sure of you if not always of myself.  And if I have looked for you only with doubtful vision, yet I have always seen you in as strong a light as my eyes could bear:—­ blue-moonlight.  Beloved, is not twilight:  and blue-moonlight has been the light I saw you by:  it is you alone who can make sunlight of it.

This I read yesterday has lain on my mind since as true and altogether beautiful, with the beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it was a minor poet who wrote it.  It is of a wood where Apollo has gone in quest of his Beloved, and she is not yet to be found: 

      “Here each branch
    Sway’d with a glitter all its crowded leaves,
    And brushed the soft divine hair touching them
    In ruffled clusters....

      Suddenly the moon
    Smoothed herself out of vapor-drift and made
    The deep night full of pleasure in the eye
    Of her sweet motion.  Not alone she came
    Leading the starlight with her like a song: 
    And not a bud of all that undergrowth
    But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge
    As the light steeped it:  over whose massed leaves
    The portals of illimitable sleep
    Faded in heaven.”

That is love in its moonrise, not its sunrise stage:  yet you see.  Beloved, how it takes possession of its dark world, quite as fully as the brighter sunlight could do.  And if I speak of doubts, I mean no twilight and no suspicions:  nor by darkness do I mean any unhappiness.

My blue-moon has come, leading the starlight with her like a song.  Am I not happy enough to be patiently yours before you know it?  Good things which are to be, before they happen are already true.  Nothing is so true as you are, except my love for you and yours for me.  Good-night, good-night.

Sleep well, Beloved, and wake.

Q.

Beloved:  I heard somebody yesterday speak of you as “charming”; and I began wondering to myself was that the word which could ever have covered my thoughts of you?  I do not know whether you ever charmed me, except in the sense of charming which means magic and spell-binding. That you did from the beginning, dearest.  But I think I held you at first in too much awe to discover charm in you:  and at last knew you too much to the depths to name you by a word so lightly used for the surface of things.  Yet now a charm in you, which is not all you, but just a part of you, comes to light, when I see you wondering whether you are really loved, or whether, Beloved, I only like you rather well!

Well, if you will be so “charming,” I am helpless:  and can do nothing, nothing, but pray for the blue-moon to rise, and love you a little better because you have some of that divine foolishness which strikes the very wise ones of earth, and makes them kin to weaker mortals who otherwise might miss their “charm” altogether.