Love's Pilgrimage eBook

Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must concentrate all your faculties upon that—­get for yourself that precious habit of being “instant in prayer”, and “strenuous for the bright reward”.  As Wordsworth has it, “Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness!” Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you, that for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to yourself that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not care for it.  I shall have to talk to you that way—­perhaps not so often as I do to myself, because I do not think you are really in your heart such a very dull and sodden creature as I am.

I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for each other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold each other in our arms.  But we shall get the better of that, as of everything else; and that is not the problem now.  You must learn to strive, learn to master yourself; you must prove your power so.  Do not care how rude you have to be to those people; look upon the things about you as a kind of dream-world, and know that your own soul’s life is the one real thing for you.  And don’t write any more about how circumstances hold you back.  When you have got to work you will know that you are given your soul for no purpose but to fight circumstances; that they are the things to make you fight.  When they are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still the same necessity of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a race without the spurs.

You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire is so awake in you that you can’t go idle many moments without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock.  And when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing again, and again.  Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.

I must stop.  Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you?  Dear me—­and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind.  I shall have, I see, to prove some of my powers, by not writing letters to you when I should be at the book.

I see that it takes four or five days for letters to come and go between us; and so if we write often, our letters will be crossing.  Four or five days is time enough for us to change our moods a dozen times, so our correspondence will be apt to be complicated!

III

MY DEAREST THYRSIS: 

It has worried me somewhat to-day that you might be utterly disappointed in the letter I wrote you.  It was a wild jumble of words, but I was fighting all sorts of uncomfortable things within me.  To-day I have been anything but despairing, and have “gone at” the German.  In fact, I quite lost myself in it, and believe I understand thoroughly the construction of the first poem.  Wonderful accomplishment!