_Boston_, July 30th, 8 (or thereabouts) P.M. [1839]
_Beloved_,
There was no letter from you to-day; and this circumstance, in
connection with your mention of a headache on Sunday, made me
apprehensive that my Dove is not well. Yet surely she would write, or
cause to be written, intelligence of the fact (if fact it were) to the
sharer of her well-being and ill-being. Do, dearest, give me the
assurance that you will never be ill without letting me know, and then
I shall always be at peace, and will not disquiet myself for the
non-reception of a letter; for really, I would not have you crowd your
other duties into too small a space, nor dispense with anything that
it is desirable to do, for the sake of writing to me. If you were not
to write for a whole year, I still should never doubt that you love me
infinitely; and I doubt not that, in vision, dream, or reverie, our
wedded souls would hold communion throughout all that time.
Therefore I do not ask for letters while you are well, but leave all
to your own heart and judgment; but if anything, bodily or mental,
afflicts my Dove, her beloved _must_ be told.
And why was my dearest wounded by that silly sentence of mine about
"indifference"? It was not well that she should do anything but smile
at it. I knew, just as certainly as your own heart knows, that my
letters are very precious to you--had I been less certain of it, I
never could have trifled upon the subject. Oh, my darling, let all
your sensibilities be healthy--never, never, be wounded by what ought
not to wound. Our tenderness should make us mutually susceptible of
happiness from every act of each other, but of pain from none; our
mighty love should scorn all little annoyances, even from the object
of that love. What misery (and what ridiculous misery too) would it
be, if, because we love one another better than all the universe
besides, our only gain thereby were a more exquisite sensibility to
pain for the beloved hand and a more terrible power of inflicting it!
Dearest, it never shall be so with us. We will have such an infinity
of mutual faith, that even real offenses (should they ever occur)
shall not wound, because we know that something external from yourself
or myself must be guilty of the wrong, and never our essential
selves. My beloved wife, there is no need of all this preachment now;
but let us both meditate upon it, and talk to each other about it;--so
shall there never come any cloud across our inward bliss--so shall one
of our hearts never wound the other, and itself fester with the sore
that it inflicts. And I speak now, when my Dove is not wounded nor
sore, because it is easier than it might be hereafter, when some
careless and wayward act or word of mine may have rubbed too roughly
against her tenderest of hearts. Dearest, I beseech you grant me
freedom to be careless and wayward--for I have had such freedom all my
life. Oh, let me feel that I may even do you a little wrong without
your avenging it (oh how cruelly) by being wounded.
(Rest of letter missing)