that truehearted women act usually so?  Can it be necessary for me to tell you that I could not have acted so, and did not?  And shall I shrink from telling you besides ... you, who have been generous to me and have a right to hear it ... and have spoken to me in the name of an affection and memory most precious and holy to me, in this same letter ... that neither now nor formerly has any man been to my feelings what you are ... and that if I were different in some respects and free in others by the providence of God, I would accept the great trust of your happiness, gladly, proudly, and gratefully; and give away my own life and soul to that end.  I would do it ... not, I do ... observe! it is a truth without a consequence; only meaning that I am not all stone—­only proving that I am not likely to consent to help you in wrong against yourself.  You see in me what is not:—­that, I know:  and you overlook in me what is unsuitable to you ... that I know, and have sometimes told you.  Still, because a strong feeling from some sources is self-vindicating and ennobling to the object of it, I will not say that, if it were proved to me that you felt this for me, I would persist in putting the sense of my own unworthiness between you and me—­not being heroic, you know, nor pretending to be so.  But something worse than even a sense of unworthiness, God has put between us! and judge yourself if to beat your thoughts against the immovable marble of it, can be anything but pain and vexation of spirit, waste and wear of spirit to you ... judge!  The present is here to be seen ... speaking for itself! and the best future you can imagine for me, what a precarious thing it must be ... a thing for making burdens out of ... only not for your carrying, as I have vowed to my own soul.  As dear Mr. Kenyon said to me to-day in his smiling kindness ...  ’In ten years you may be strong perhaps’—­or ‘almost strong’! that being the encouragement of my best friends!  What would he say, do you think, if he could know or guess...! what could he say but that you were ... a poet!—­and I ... still worse! Never let him know or guess!

And so if you are wise and would be happy (and you have excellent practical sense after all and should exercise it) you must leave me—­these thoughts of me, I mean ... for if we might not be true friends for ever, I should have less courage to say the other truth.  But we may be friends always ... and cannot be so separated, that your happiness, in the knowledge of it, will not increase mine.  And if you will be persuaded by me, as you say, you will be persuaded thus ... and consent to take a resolution and force your mind at once into another channel.  Perhaps I might bring you reasons of the class which you tell me ‘would silence you for ever.’  I might certainly tell you that my own father, if he knew that you had written to me so, and that I had answered you—­so, even,