ou should pay it back to
His world. I thank you for some of it already."

And she feels how kind he is,--how gently and kindly he speaks to her. In
his next letter he alludes with much feeling to her idea of the
poem-novel:

"The Poem you propose to make; the fresh, fearless, living work you
describe, is the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or any one who
is a poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to
be rendered God or man; it is what I have been all my life intending
to do, and now shall be much nearer doing since you will be along with
me. And you can do it, I know and am sure,--so sure that I could find
it in my heart to be jealous of your stopping on the way even to
translate the Prometheus...."

The lovers, for such they already are, however unconsciously to both, fall
into a long discussion of Prometheus, and the Greek drama in general, and
in another letter, with allusion to his begging her to take her own good
time in writing, she half playfully proffers that it is her own bad time
to which she must submit. "This implacable weather!" she writes; "this
east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!... There will
be a May and June if we live to see such things," and then she speaks of
seeing him besides, and while she recognizes it is morbid to shrink and
grow pale in the spirit, yet not all her fine philosophy about social
duties quite carries her through. But "if he thinks she shall not like to
see him, he is wrong, for all his learning." What pathos of revelation of
this brave, celestial spirit, tenanting the most fragile of bodies, is
read in the ensuing passage:

"What you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of
your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full
with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow
for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness I was
secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world
who have not seen more, known more, of society, than I, who am hardly
to be called young now. I grew up in the country, had no social
opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in
reveries.... Books and dreams were what I lived in--and domestic life
seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass.... Why,
if I live on and escape this seclusion, do you not