tell
now: so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there
be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and
discovering in it more than you knew before.

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your
eye! Beloved, _then_, however faded the ink may have grown, I think the
spirit of my love will remain fresh in it:--I kiss you on the lips with
every word. The thought of "good-by" is never to enter here: it is _A
reviderci_ for ever and ever:--"Love, love," and "meet again!"--the words
we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember, when all the
world for us was a garden.

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,--little things they must be--I
will: and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their
littleness will make them doubly welcome:--just as to know that you were
once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom you plagued when a boy,
was to me a darling discovery: all at once I caught my childhood's
imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and
eyes.

Good-night, good-night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory:
the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it--if ever!

Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time
would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot
give. Good-night, dearest.

LETTER LXIX.

Beloved: I remember my second birthday. I am quite sure of it, because my
third I remember so infinitely well.--Then I was taken in to see Arthur
lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my
arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of
his small body.

I think from the first I was told of him as my "brother": cousin I have
never been able to think him. But all this belongs to my third: on my
second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I
would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something
there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness
across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a
door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and
flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying.

I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the
rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite