I hear that you are going quite away; and my eyes bless this chance to have embraced you once again. Your face is the kindest I have ever seen: even your silence, while I looked at you, seemed a grace instead of a cruelty. What kindness, I say to myself, even if it be mistaken kindness, must have sealed those dear lips not to tell me of my unworth!
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.