[Postmark: July 16, 1846]
Thursday.
I should be doing your own dear face (which I see so perfectly through the distance) — too great a wrong if I so much
as answered the charge of ‘ not remembering.’ I see the
face smile above the hand that writes ! As if one may not
say that a division, a wound, smarts more on the first day,
and aches more on the next ! As if I do not prefer the
fresh sharp regret to the settling of . . what I trust in God
and you I never shall feel ! However, if it will please you
to know, I do feel to-day as earnest a longing to be with
you again as if your two letters were not here, — as if
Tuesday lay only an hour behind instead of the two
long days !
I think your Father’s words on those two occasions,
very kind, — very ! They confuse, — perhaps humble me . .
that is not the expression, but it may stay. I dare say he
is infinitely kind at bottom — I think so, that is, on my own
account, — because, come what will or may, I shall never
see otherwise than with your sight. If he could know me,
I think he would soon reconcile himself to all of it, — know
my heart’s purposes toward you. But that is impossible —
and with the sincere will to please him by any exertion or
sacrifice in my power, I shall very likely never have the
opportunity of picking up a glove he might drop. In old
novels, the implacable father is not seldom set upon by a
round dozen of ruffians with blacked faces from behind a
hedge, and just as the odds prove too many, suddenly a
stranger (to all save the reader) leaps over an adjacent ditch,
&c. ‘ Sir, under Providence, I owe you my life ! ‘ &c. &c.
How does Dumas improve on this in ‘ Monte Cristo ‘ — are
there ‘ new effects ? ‘ Absurdity ! Yet I would fain . .
fain ! you understand.
To talk about my ‘ spoiling you for other conversers ‘
is . . oh, leap over hedge and ditch, somebody, to the
rescue ! If I praise myself for anything in our intimacy it
is that I never . . but I won’t go into it. And putting my
own experience aside and in its place, it strikes me that
what Ba ranks as a ‘ third-rate man ‘ may pass justly for a
paragon and marvel among men as the world has a right to
class them. I am quite sure if I had been present and
much had uttered itself about mullions . . somebody would
have looked a very babe in knowledge, and perhaps made
Ba blush for him and her own waste of love and praise —
So he retreats where he may keep it all in virtue of being
what he is ever is, and shall be, her own R.
The river-voyage is not only the cheaper but by far the
more interesting . . all to consider is the fatigue to you ;
what else ?
I am very well to-day. Rachel’s ‘ Phedre ‘ was admirable
last night ; quite through Racine up to Euripides the
declaration-scene with Hippolytus exquisite . . I must
tell you —