I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil was to care for the world’s early-blooming flowers. But what was our first great parent to me?
| There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies show— |
and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia’s cheek that the poet described as “rose leaves floating in the purest milk”? And was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could “die of a rose in aromatic pain”? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in prophecy of your many divine properties.
Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself—think of that!—me, for these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions! I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under the covers and think of the day’s work.
I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet, bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a Latin quotation on my lips—At tuba terribili, like as not. (Query: Does Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)
I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little. Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled up, with your great cloak twisted about your body—all except your feet, that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand forbidden thoughts—I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads, fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aërial vision and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips had all the fragrance of humanity.
Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words, you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away. With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:
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