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Page 25
Dearest: How, when, and where is there any use wrangling as to
which of us loves the other the best ("the better," I believe, would be
the more grammatical phrase in incompetent Queen's English), and why in
that of all things should we pretend to be rivals? For this at least
seems certain to me, that, being created male and female, no two lovers
since the world began ever loved each other quite in the _same_ way: it
is not in nature for it to be so. They cannot compare: only to the best
that is in them they _do_ love each after their kind,--as do we for
certain!
Be sure, then, that I am utterly contented with what I get (and you,
Beloved, and you?): nay, I wonder forever at the love you have given me:
and if I will to lay mine at your feet, and feel yours crowning my
life,--why, so it is, you know; you cannot alter it! And if you insist
that your love is at _my_ feet, I have only to turn Irish and reply that
it is because I am heels over head in love with you:--and, mark you,
that is no pretty attitude for a lady that you have driven me into in
order that I may stick to my "crown"!
Go to, dearest! There is one thing in which I can beat you, and that is
in the bandying of words and all verbal conjurings: take this as the
last proof of it and rest quiet. I know you love me a great great deal
more than I have wit or power to love you: and that is just the little
reason why your love mounts till, as I tell you, it crowns me (head or
heels): while mine, insufficient and groveling, lies at your feet, and
will till they become amputated. And I can give you, but won't, sixty
other reasons why things are as I say, and are to be left as I say. And
oh, my world, my world, it is with you I go round sunwards, and you make
my evenings and mornings, and will, till Time shuts his wings over us!
And now it is doleful business I have to write to you....
I have dropped to sleep over all this writing of things, and my cheek down
on the page has made the paper unwilling to take the ink again:--what a
pretty compliment to me: and, if you prefer it, what an easy way of
writing to you! I can send you such any day and be as idle as I like. And
you will decide about all the above exactly as you and I think best (or
should it be "better" again, being only between us two?). When you get
this, blow your beloved self a kiss in the glass for me,--a great big
shattering blow that shall astonish Mercury behind his window-pane.
Good-night, my best--or "better," for that is what I most want you to be.
LETTER XXV.
My Own Beloved: And I never thanked you yesterday for your dear words
about the resurrection pie; that comes of quarreling! Well, you must prove
them and come quickly that I may see this restoration of health and
spirits that you assure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you to
sleep; but I suppose that is what you mean.
Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning: listen to this
and guess where it comes from:
"When March with variant winds was past,
And April had with her silver showers
Ta'en leif at life with an orient blast;
And lusty May, that mother of flowers,
Had made the birds to begin their hours,
Among the odours ruddy and white,
Whose harmony was the ear's delight:
"In bed at morrow I sleeping lay;
Methought Aurora, with crystal een,
In at the window looked by day,
And gave me her visage pale and green;
And on her hand sang a lark from the splene,
'Awake ye lovers from slumbering!
See how the lusty morrow doth spring!'"
Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue! That is
Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit
altered by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I had not had to
leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay
outside this century? That shows the permanent element in all good
poetry, and in all good joy in things also. In the four centuries since
that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of
certain words, as for instance "spleen," which now means irritation and
vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite--what we should call, I
suppose, "a full heart." It is what I am always saying--a good digestion
is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are
capable of: and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it
is now of the miserable ones. Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a
full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off
without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same
code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not
poetry at all as we try to make it out to be.
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