GRAYSMILL, November 26th.
Bless you for all your words! Yes, you must come out to me next
spring, and then we three can be friends together: three should be
more beautiful than two, in such harmony as ours would be. I take it
for granted that you and Gabriel will care for each other; it would
be a great grief to me if you did not. I hate people I like not to
like each other; nothing hurts more--except, perhaps, to oneself
dislike a friend's friend.
My Greek is getting on; I am fearfully industrious, and have even
pinned up the declensions, written out in a large hand, on my
bedroom wall, so that I can learn them whilst I dress.
Gabriel is quite pleased with his pupil, and I have begun to teach
him Italian. He reads it very well, but cannot speak it at all at
present. We had a long talk, the other day, about his future. I
think it will be quite impossible for him to continue this mode of
life very long; I find that I am not so happy about him as I was at
first. Sometimes I think I should like to give him half my
money--how ridiculous it seems that such a thing should be out of
the question!--and let him lead the tranquil life of study and
contemplation that he loves, send him to other lands where he might
wander up and down in the sunshine, seeing the world and all its
beauties,--he that has eyes to see, a heart to feel. But then, at
other times, I feel that I should like to strip him even of the
little he has, and hurl him into the very vortex of life, see him
struggle and fight and come out a conqueror. I see in him the germs
of so much greatness that I cannot believe he was meant to dream his
days away on the heather. It was right of him, certainly, to break
from a course of life he felt himself unable to pursue, and right it
is also that he should pause now, and breathe, and feel his wings.
But it will soon be time for energy and action. We are not here for
ourselves only; there is so much to be done. And if I am often
discontented with myself for the futility of my dreams, for sitting
here a mere spectator, as it were, of struggles that I long to
share, yet know not how, greater still is my impatience at the sight
of one wasting his days in mere speculation, who, having all the
strength, the manhood, that I lack, might leap into the very thick
of the fight, Truth's warrior.
He tells me that he has written a great deal, and has promised to
bring me a bundle of poems to read at my leisure. "You must
understand," said he, "that you will be the only one to whom I ever
showed them." I feel very proud.
To revert to what I said above, I believe, too, that it is very bad
for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his
natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends
itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the
confines of lunacy.
Good-bye, dear love.
Your EMILIA.