[Postmark: May 18, 1846]
Sunday.
(Day before to-morrow!)
How kind to write and help me through the gloomy
day with a light! I could certainly feel my way in the
dark and reach to-morrow without very important stumbling,
but now I go cheerfully on, spite of a little headache and
weariness. Need you ? I should hate life apart from you.
Knowing what I say, I should hate it — the life of my soul
as seen from that of the mere body . . to which, to
the necessities of which, no human being ever ministered
before, and which, now that I have known you, I myself
cannot provide for, — or could not were you removed, —
even after the imperfect fashion of former times. If you
ask Mrs. Jameson she will tell you, if she has thought it
worth remembering, that I once, two or three years ago,
explained to her that I could not believe in ‘love’ nor
understand it, — nor be subject to it consequently. I said
-‘all you describe as characteristics of the passion — I
should expect to find in men more easily and completely — ‘
now I know better, and my year’s life spent in this knowledge
makes all before it look pale and all after, if an after
could come, look black.
Why do I write so ? I am rather dull, this horrible day,
and cling to you the closelier.
All you write about Art is most true. Carlyle has turned
and forged, reforged on his anvil that fact ‘that no age ever
appeared heroic to itself’ . . and so, worthy of reproduction-
in Art by itself . . I thought after Carlyle’s endeavours
nobody could be ignorant of that, — nobody who was
obliged to seek the proof of it out of his own experience.
The cant is, that ‘ an age of transition ‘ is the melancholy
thing to contemplate and delineate — whereas the worst things
of all to look back on are times of comparative standing
still, rounded in their important completeness. So the
young England imbeciles hold that ‘ belief ‘ is the admirable
point — in what they judge comparatively immaterial ! The
other day I took up a book two centuries old in which
‘ glory ‘, ‘ soldiering ‘, ‘ rushing to conquer ‘ and the rest,
were most thoroughly * believed in ‘ —and if by some
miracle the writer had conceived and described some unbeliever,
unable to ‘ rush to conquer the Parthians ‘ &c, it
would have been as though you found a green bough inside
a truss of straw.
But you know —
And I know one thing, one — but one — I love you,
shall love you ever, living and dying your own —