iss your lips and eyes: my mind melts into
kisses when I think of you. However weak the rest of me grows, my love
shall remain strong and certain. If I could look at you again, how in a
moment you would fill up the past and the future and turn even my grief
into gold! Even my senses then would forget that they had ever been
starved. Dear "share of the world," you have been out of sight, but I
have never let you go! Ah, if only the whole of me, the double doubting
part of me as well, could only be so certain as to be able to give wings
to this and let it fly to you! Wish for it, and I think the knowledge
will come to me!

Good-night! God brings you to me in my first dream: but the longing so
keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.

LETTER LXXXIII.

I am frightened, dearest, I am frightened at death. Not only
for fear it should take me altogether away from you instead of to you,
but for other reasons besides,--instincts which I thought gone but am
not rid of even yet. No healthy body, or body with power of enjoyment in
it, wishes to die, I think: and no heart with any desire still living
out of the past. We know nothing at all really: we only think we
believe, and hope we know; and how thin that sort of conviction gets
when in our extremity we come face to face with the one immovable fact
of our own death waiting for us! That is what I have to go through. Yet
even the fear is a relief: I come upon something that I can meet at
last; a challenge to my courage whether it is still to be found here in
this body I have worn so weak with useless lamentations. If I had your
hand, or even a word from you, I think I should not be afraid: but
perhaps I should. It is all one. Good-by: I am beginning at last to feel
a meaning in that word which I wrote at your bidding so long-ago. Oh,
Beloved, from face to feet, good-by! God be with you wherever you go and
I do not!

LETTER LXXXIV.

Dearest: I am to have news of you. Arthur came to me last night, and told
me that, if I wished, he would bring me word of you. He goes to-morrow. He
put out the light that I might not see his face: I felt what was there.

You should know this of him: he has been the dearest possible of human
beings to me since I lost you. I am almost not unblessed when I have him
to speak to. Yet we can say so little together. I guess all he means. An
endless wish to give me comfort:--and I stay selfish. The knowledge that
he woul