Oh, if I could see once into the brain of it all!  No one but myself knows how good you are:  how can I, then, be so unworthy of you?  Did you think I would not surrender to anything you fixed, that you severed us so completely, not even allowing us to meet, and giving me no way to come back to you though I might come to be all that you wished?  Ah, dear face, how hungry you have made me!—­the more that I think you are not yet so happy as I could wish,—­as I could make you,—­I say it foolishly:—­yet if you would trust me, I am sure.

Oh, how tired loving you now makes me! physically I grow weary with the ache to have you in my arms.  And I dream, I dream always, the shadows of former kindness that never grow warm enough to clasp me before I wake.—­Yours, dearest, waking or sleeping.

LETTER LXIII.

Do you remember, Beloved, when you came on your birthday, you said I was to give you another birthday present of your own choosing, and I promised?  And it was that we were to do for the whole day what I wished:  you were not to be asked to choose.

You said then that it was the first time I had ever let you have your way, which was to see me be myself independently of you:—­as if such a self existed.

You will never see what I write now; and I did not do then any of the things I most wished:  for first I wished to kneel down and kiss your hands and feet; and you would not have liked that.  Even now that you love me no more, you would not like me to do such a thing.  A woman can never do as she likes when she loves—­there is no such thing until he shows it her or she divines it.  I loved you, I loved you!—­that was all I could do, and all I wanted to do.

You have kept my letters?  Do you read them ever, I wonder? and do they tell you differently about me, now that you see me with new eyes?  Ah no, you dare not look at them:  they tell too much truth!  How can love-letters ever cease to be the winged things they were when they first came?  I fancy mine sick to death for want of your heart to rest on; but never less loving.

If you would read them again, you would come back to me.  Those little throats of happiness would be too strong for you.  And so you lay them in a cruel grave of lavender,—­“Lavender for forgetfulness” might be another song for Ophelia to sing.

I am weak with writing to you, I have written too long:  this is twice to-day.

I do not write to make myself more miserable:  only to fill up my time.

When I go about something definite, I can do it:—­to ride, or read aloud to the old people, or sit down at meals with them is very easy; but I cannot make employment for myself—­that requires too much effort of invention and will:  and I have only will for one thing in life—­to get through it:  and no invention to the purpose.  Oh, Beloved, in the grave I shall lie forever with a lock of your hair in my hand.  I wonder if, beyond there, one sees anything?  My eyes ache to-day from the brain, which is always at blind groping for you, and the point where I missed you.