between you and me--not being heroic, you know, nor
pretending to be so. But something worse than even a sense of
unworthiness, _God_ has put between us! and judge yourself if to beat
your thoughts against the immovable marble of it, can be anything but
pain and vexation of spirit, waste and wear of spirit to you ...
judge! The present is here to be seen ... speaking for itself! and the
best future you can imagine for me, what a precarious thing it must be
... a thing for making burdens out of ... only not for your carrying,
as I have vowed to my own soul. As dear Mr. Kenyon said to me to-day
in his smiling kindness ... 'In ten years you may be strong
perhaps'--or 'almost strong'! that being the encouragement of my best
friends! What would he say, do you think, if he could know or
guess...! what _could_ he say but that you were ... a poet!--and I ...
still worse! _Never_ let him know or guess!

And so if you are wise and would be happy (and you have excellent
practical sense after all and should exercise it) you must leave
me--these thoughts of me, I mean ... for if we might not be true
friends for ever, I should have less courage to say the other truth.
But we may be friends always ... and cannot be so separated, that your
happiness, in the knowledge of it, will not increase mine. And if you
will be persuaded by me, as you say, you will be persuaded _thus_ ...
and consent to take a resolution and force your mind at once into
another channel. Perhaps I might bring you reasons of the class which
you tell me 'would silence you for ever.' I might certainly tell you
that my own father, if he knew that you had written to me _so_, and
that I had answered you--_so_, even, would not forgive me at the end
of ten years--and this, from none of the causes mentioned by me here
and in no disrespect to your name and your position ... though he does
not over-value poetry even in his daughter, and is apt to take the
world's measures of the means of life ... but for the singular reason
that he never _does_ tolerate in his family (sons or daughters) the
development of one class of feelings. Such an objection I could not
bring to you of my own will--it rang hollow in my ears--perhaps I
thought even too little of it:--and I brought to you what I thought
much of, and cannot cease to think much of equally. Worldly thoughts,
these are not at all, nor have been: there need be no soiling of the
heart with any such:--and I will say, in reply to