have not said--I never could say it--"Let the day perish wherein Love
was born!" I forget nothing of you: you are clear to me,--all but one
thing: why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent
different ways. And yet so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow
is yours: I wet your face with my tears and cry, "Sleep well."

To-night also, Beloved, sleep well! Night and morning I make you my
prayer.

LETTER LXXVII.

My own one beloved, my dearest dear! Want me, please want me! I will keep
alive for you. Say you wish me to live,--not come to you: don't say that
if you can't--but just wish me to live, and I will. Yes, I will do
anything, even live, if you tell me to do it. I will be stronger than all
the world or fate, if you have any wish about me at all. Wish well,
dearest, and surely the knowledge will come to me. Wish big things of me,
or little things: wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better because of it.
Wish anything of me: only not that I should love you better. I can't,
dearest, I can't. Any more of that, and love would go out of my body and
leave it clay. If you would even wish _that_, I would be happy at finding
a way to do your will below ground more perfectly than any I found on it.
Wish, wish: only wish something for me to do. Oh, I could rest if I had
but your little finger to love. The tyranny of love is when it makes no
bidding at all. That you have no want or wish left in you as regards me
is my continual despair. My own, my beloved, my tormentor and comforter,
my ever dearest dear, whom I love so much!

LETTER LXXVIII.

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me.
Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your
arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only
our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting
for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend
that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in
sharp stabs of pain: they must go _somewhere_ for me to be delivered of
them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you,
if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and
shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I _will_ die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you.
I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness tha