estrings, say!--so much and no more! Now this is so wrong, as to
make me impatient sometimes in feeling it to be your impression: I
asked for silence--but _also_ and chiefly for the putting away of ...
you know very well what I asked for. And this was sincerely done, I
attest to you. You wrote once to me ... oh, long before May and the
day we met: that you 'had been so happy, you should be now justified
to yourself in taking any step most hazardous to the happiness of your
life'--but if you were justified, could _I_ be therefore justified in
abetting such a step,--the step of wasting, in a sense, your best
feelings ... of emptying your water gourds into the sand? What I
thought then I think now--just what any third person, knowing you,
would think, I think and feel. I thought too, at first, that the
feeling on your part was a mere generous impulse, likely to expand
itself in a week perhaps. It affects me and has affected me, very
deeply, more than I dare attempt to say, that you should persist
_so_--and if sometimes I have felt, by a sort of instinct, that after
all you would not go on to persist, and that (being a man, you know)
you might mistake, a little unconsciously, the strength of your own
feeling; you ought not to be surprised; when I felt it was more
advantageous and happier for you that it should be so. _In any case_,
I shall never regret my own share in the events of this summer, and
your friendship will be dear to me to the last. You know I told you
so--not long since. And as to what you say otherwise, you are right in
thinking that I would not hold by unworthy motives in avoiding to
speak what you had any claim to hear. But what could I speak that
would not be unjust to you? Your life! if you gave it to me and I put
my whole heart into it; what should I put but anxiety, and more
sadness than you were born to? What could I give you, which it would
not be ungenerous to give? Therefore we must leave this subject--and I
must trust you to leave it without one word more; (too many have been
said already--but I could not let your letter pass quite silently ...
as if I had nothing to do but to receive all as matter of course
_so_!) while you may well trust _me_ to remember to my life's end, as
the grateful remember; and to feel, as those do who have felt sorrow
(for where these pits are dug, the water will stand), the full price
of your regard. May God bless you, my dearest friend. I shall send
this letter after I h