Why is it? why can no two of us have sorrows quite in common? What can be nearer together than our wills to be one? In joy we are; and yet, though I reach and reach, and sadden if you are sad, I cannot make your sorrow my own.
I suppose sorrow is of the earth earthy: and all that is of earth makes division. Every joy that belongs to the body casts shadows somewhere. I wonder if there can enter into us a joy that has no shadow anywhere? The joy of having you has behind it the shadow of parting; is there any way of loving that would make parting no sorrow at all? To me, now, the idea seems treason! I cling to my sorrow that you are not here: I send up my cloud, as it were, to catch the sun's brightness: it is a kite that I pull with my heart-strings.
To the sun of love the clouds that cover absence must look like white flowers in the green fields of earth, or like doves hovering: and he reaches down and strokes them with his warm beams, making all their feathers like gold.
Some clouds let the gold come through; mine, now.—That cloud I saw away to the right is coming this way toward me. I can see the shadow of it now, moving along a far-off strip of road: and I wonder if it is your cloud, with you under it coming to see me again!
When you come, why am I any happier than when I know you are coming? It is the same thing in love. I have you now all in my mind's eye; I have you by heart; have I my arms a bit more round you then than now?
How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, there should be disappearances and reappearances: and faces now and then showing a change!—You, actually, the last time you came, looking a day older than the day before! What was it? Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a wrinkle in the art of dying? Or had you turned over some new leaf, and found it withered on the other side?
I could not see how it was: I heard you coming—it was spring! The door opened:—oh, it was autumnal! One day had fallen away like a leaf out of my forest, and I had not been there to see it go!
At what hour of the twenty-four does a day shed itself out of our lives? Not, I think, on the stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow. Some people, perhaps, would say—with the first sleep; and that the "beauty-sleep" is the new day putting out its green wings. I think it must be not till something happens to make the new day a stronger impression than the last. So it would please me to think that your yesterday dropped off as you opened the door; and that, had I peeped and seen you coming up the stairs, I should have seen you looking a day younger.
That means that you age at the sight of me! I think you do. I, I feel a hundred on the road to immortality, directly your face dawns on me.