Friday Evening.
February 2, 1846.
Something, you said yesterday, made me happy — ‘that your liking for me did not come and go’ — do you remember? Because there was a letter, written at a crisis long since, in which you showed yourself awfully, as a burning mountain, and talked of ‘making the most of your fire-eyes,’ and of having at intervals ‘deep black pits of cold water’! — and the lava of that letter has kept running down into my thoughts of you too much, until quite of late — while even yesterday I was not too well instructed to be ‘happy,’ you see! Do not reproach me! I would not have ‘heard your enemy say so’ — it was your own word! And the other long word idiosyncrasy seemed long enough to cover it; and it might have been a matter of temperament, I fancied, that a man of genius, in the mystery of his nature, should find his feelings sometimes like dumb notes in a piano . . . should care for people at half past eleven on Tuesday, and on Wednesday at noon prefer a black beetle. How you frightened me with your ‘fire-eyes’! ‘making the most of them’ too! and the ‘black pits,’ which gaped . . . where did they gape? who could tell? Oh — but lately I have not been crossed so, of course, with those fabulous terrors — lately that horror of the burning mountain has grown more like a superstition than a rational fear! — and if I was glad . . . happy . . . yesterday, it was but as a tolerably sensible nervous man might be glad of a clearer moonlight, showing him that what he had half shuddered at for a sheeted ghoule, was only a white horse on the moor. Such a great white horse! — call it the ‘mammoth horse’ — the ‘real mammoth,’ this time!
Dearest, did I write you a cold letter the last time? Almost it seems so to me! the reason being that my feelings were near to overflow, and that I had to hold the cup straight to prevent the possible dropping on your purple underneath. Your letter, the letter I answered, was in my heart . . . is in my heart — and all the yeses in the world would not be too many for such a letter, as I felt and feel. Also, perhaps, I gave you, at last, a merely formal distinction — and it comes to the same thing practically without any doubt! but I shrank, with a sort of instinct, from appearing (to myself, mind) to take a security from your words now (said too on an obvious impulse) for what should, would, must, depend on your deliberate wishes hereafter. You understand — you will not accuse me of over-cautiousness and the like. On the contrary, you are all things to me, . . . instead of all and better than all! You have fallen like a great luminous blot on the whole leaf of the world . . . of life and time . . . and I can see nothing beyond you, nor wish to see it. As to all that was evil and sadness to me, I do not feel it any longer — it may be raining still, but I am in the shelter and can scarcely tell. If you could be too dear to me you would be now — but you could not — I do not believe in those supposed excesses of pure affections — God cannot be too great.
Therefore it is a conditional engagement still — all the conditions being in your hands, except the necessary one, of my health. And shall I tell you what is ‘not to be put in doubt ever‘? — your goodness, that is . . . and every tie that binds me to you. ‘Ordained, granted by God’ it is, that I should owe the only happiness in my life to you, and be contented and grateful (if it were necessary) to stop with it at this present point. Still I do not — there seems no necessity yet.
May God bless you, ever dearest: —
Your own Ba.