An Englishwomans Love-Letters | Page 8

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.
There's a foot gone over my grave! The angel of the resurrection with
his mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!--Nothing else than the
gallop-a-gallop of your horse:--it sounds like a kettle boiling over!
So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the while we talk; and comes
out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and sent
off the moment your back is turned. No, better!--to be slipped into your
pocket and carried home to yourself by yourself. How, when you get to
your destination and find it, you will curse yourself that you were not a

speedier postman!

LETTER X.
Dearest: Did you find your letter? The quicker I post, the quicker I need
to sit down and write again. The grass under love's feet never stops
growing: I must make hay of it while the sun shines.
You say my metaphors make you giddy.--My clear, you, without a
metaphor in your composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to
complain; your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you
pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you
as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like
blackbirds: and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and
when I open it they sing "Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in the most scared
way!
Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, "I hope
you don't keep these miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours with
them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours." You added that
I was better occupied--and here I am "better occupied" even as you bid
me.
But one can jump best from a spring-board: and how could I jump as
far as your arms by letter, if I had not yours to jump from?
So you see they are kept, and my disobedience of you has begun: and I
find disobedience wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law
which you knew I should disobey:--that is the way the