t tell you how full of vagary the correspondence we have fallen
into seems to me. I deliberately attempted to write you into passion and
for months you deliberately continued to convict yourself out of your
own mouth, and we did not see that it was tragic and comic and
preposterous. Could we personify this our dealing, we would do well to
call it a kind of Caliban. And the tentacles we threw out, clawing at
everything, stealing for prop to our little theory all of man and God!
It is the conceit of us that I find utterly hopeless of grace. So I drop
my role of omniscience. I take my form off the hub, believing the system
will maintain its gravity though I go my private way, and I promise to
let you alone. Forgive me, and God bless you. Ah, yes, and many happy
returns of the day. All my heart in the blessing and the wish.

I did some remembering to-day, dear lad. When you were born, I was five
years younger than you are now, yet I felt myself old. "If we were as
old as we feel, we would die of old age at twenty-one." My life seemed
all behind me, long, turbulent, packed with pain, useless. I spoke of
myself as if all were over. "It had been full of purpose, but what came
of it? A few rhymes and a spoilt hope." To my morbid fancy your having
come to be was a signal for me to go. I had no thought of dying, yet I
accepted you as the proof of my failure. In the exacting eyes of the
genius of the race I was insolvent. You were not mine. I looked into
Time, and saw none of me there.

Yet the letter I wrote to your parents was sincere,--how else? And that
night and the next and the next, I wrote "Gentleman Adventurers," which
the critics called the epitome of all that is balladesque. One pitied
the dead because they could go forth no more on water and under sky.
This poem, written in a mood which beneficent nature sends on the
too-sick spirit, has served for more than a quarter of a century as the
complete and accepted catalogue of the reasons for living. Well, I must
not laugh at it. It may be true that the passion of my heart incarnated
itself in it beyond the rest, that my one song sang itself out those
first three days of your life. If so, it is true that love is never
cheated of its fruit, and that the joy which might have been for the
individual oozes out of him to the race, that the strength which would
have settled upon itself in the calm of satisfied hope, filters through
him outwards.

Good night, lad. My hand is on