My own one beloved, my dearest dear!  Want me, please want me!  I will keep alive for you.  Say you wish me to live,—­not come to you:  don’t say that if you can’t—­but just wish me to live, and I will.  Yes, I will do anything, even live, if you tell me to do it.  I will be stronger than all the world or fate, if you have any wish about me at all.  Wish well, dearest, and surely the knowledge will come to me.  Wish big things of me, or little things:  wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better because of it.  Wish anything of me:  only not that I should love you better.  I can’t, dearest, I can’t.  Any more of that, and love would go out of my body and leave it clay.  If you would even wish that, I would be happy at finding a way to do your will below ground more perfectly than any I found on it.  Wish, wish:  only wish something for me to do.  Oh, I could rest if I had but your little finger to love.  The tyranny of love is when it makes no bidding at all.  That you have no want or wish left in you as regards me is my continual despair.  My own, my beloved, my tormentor and comforter, my ever dearest dear, whom I love so much!

LETTER LXXVIII.

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me.  Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your arms!  I ache and ache, not to belong to you.  I do:  I must.  It is only our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting for their master.  They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend that they believe you will come.  Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses?  They go out of me in sharp stabs of pain:  they must go somewhere for me to be delivered of them only with so much suffering.  Oh, how this should make me hate you, if that were possible:  how, instead, I love you more and more, and shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I will die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you.  I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the poets have written.  They go through me like ghosts:  I am haunted by them:  but they are bloodless things.  It seems when I listen to all the other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in me.  Nobody ever loved as I love since the world began.

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I feel in myself only the dregs left:  and still in them is the fire and the suffering.

No:  but I will be better:  it is better to have known you than not.  Give me time, dearest, to get you to heart again!  I cannot leave you like this:  not with such words as these for “good-night!”