Beloved: Whether I have sorry or glad things to think about, they are
accompanied and changed by thoughts of you. You are my diary:--all goes to
you now. That you love me is the very light by which I see everything.
Also I learn so much through having you in my thoughts: I cannot say how
it is, for I have no more knowledge of life than I had before:--yet I am
wiser, I believe, knowing much more what lives at the root of things and
what men have meant and felt in all they have done:--because I love you,
dearest. Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have more joy and more
fear in me than I had before. And if this seems to be all about myself,
it is all about you really, Beloved!
Last week one of my dearest old friends, our Rector, died: a character you
too would have loved. He was a father to the whole village, rather stern
of speech, and no respecter of persons. Yet he made a very generous
allowance for those who did not go through the church door to find their
salvation. I often went only because I loved him: and he knew it.
I went for that reason alone last Sunday. The whole village was full of
closed blinds: and of all things over him Chopin's Funeral March was
played!--a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief,
desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it
cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all.
Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke
dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the
Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my
life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass,
and youth slain in its high places.
After service a sort of processional instinct drew people up to the house:
they waited about till permission was given, and went in to look at their
old man, lying in high state among his books. I did not go. Beloved, I
have never yet seen death: you have, I know. Do you, I wonder, remember
your father better than I mine:--or your brother? Are they more living
because you saw them once not living? I think death might open our eyes to
those we lived on ill terms with, but not to the familiar and dear. I do
not need you dead, to be certain that your heart has mine for its true
inmate and mine yours.