Love's Pilgrimage eBook

I want to tell you what I feel, how utterly and absolutely I am yours, and how any image that comes between you and me enrages me.  If only you knew how I give myself up to you in thought, word, and deed!—­My one reason for acting now, is that I may show you something I have done, my one thought is to be what you would wish me.  No one, no one understands, or ever will, what is in your heart and in mine—­to be locked there for ages.  There I have placed all my power of love and religion and hope of the life that is to be.  To you I give all my trust, all my worship, you are the one link that binds me to myself and to God.  Without you I feel now that I should be a poor wanderer.

You give me my feeling of wholeness, of the possibility of completion, that I never had before.  In my best and truest moments I know that with you I can be what I have hoped.  With you before my eyes I have a grim resolution to conquer or die.  The one thing I am sure of always is my love for you.  It might be possible for you to stop loving me; but I, now that I have begun, shall continue to love you to the day I die—­and after, I hope.  I do not love you for what you can give me, I love you because you are you, I must love you now no matter what you are.  I believe Shakespeare was right when he said that “love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds.”  I do not believe that a person can really love more than once.

I must go to my German again and leave you.  Do you love me?  Do you love me?  Do you love me?

II

My dearest Corydon: 

I received a letter from you before dinner, and as usual had one of my flights of emotion, and thought of many things to write to you.  Now I am up on the mountain-side, trying to recall them.  Dearest, you are, as always, more precious to me.  I am glad to see that you are suffering some, and I think that it is well that you have to be away from me for awhile, to fight some of your own soul’s battles.  You see that I am in my stern humor; as convinced as ever that the soul is to be deepened only by effort, and that the great glory of life cannot be bought or stolen, or even given for love, but must be earned.

I will tell you what I have been doing since you left.  I spent three whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances like yours—­only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed.  I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming.  He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine—­but he does not get free.  And always the book would be hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what I ought to have been.

Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite worn me out.  When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of savage joy of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before.  In the reckless mood that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could keep so forever.