Chapter LXVIII: Letter LXVIII

Dearest: The thought keeps troubling me how to give myself to you most, if you should ever come back for me when I am no longer here. These poor letters are all that I can leave: will they tell you enough of my heart?

Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and it is there already! My heart, dearest, only moves in the wish to be what you desire.

Yet I am conscious that I cannot give, unless you shall choose to take: and though I write myself down each day your willing slave, I cry my wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear me.

Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is little you know of it. My wish would be to have every year of my life blessed by your consciousness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you have, truly, to remember: though I think five summers at least came to flower, and withered in that one.

I wish you knew my whole life: I cannot tell it: it was too full of infinitely small things. Yet what I can remember I would like to tell now: so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and discovering in it more than you knew before.

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your eye! Beloved, _then_, however faded the ink may have grown, I think the spirit of my love will remain fresh in it:--I kiss you on the lips with every word. The thought of "good-by" is never to enter here: it is _A reviderci_ for ever and ever:--"Love, love," and "meet again!"--the words we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember, when all the world for us was a garden.

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,--little things they must be--I will: and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their littleness will make them doubly welcome:--just as to know that you were once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom you plagued when a boy, was to me a darling discovery: all at once I caught my childhood's imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and eyes.

Good-night, good-night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory: the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it--if ever!

Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot give. Good-night, dearest.