Some day you will understand that I can sometimes feel about myself that I am utterly hateful, utterly false, utterly shallow and _bad_; and that to get away from myself would be all that I desire in life. I cannot imagine my having such opinion of you; but some dissatisfaction--just a little--I may have. Only let us love perfection, you and I, with all our souls, and I think our love for each other may safely be allowed to take care of itself. Remember the two ships in Clough’s poem, which parted, but sailed by the compass, and reached the same port.
I shall spend no more time comforting you about this.
And dear Corydon, when you are angry at my doubting your power, and say that I do not know you, I can only reply--Why of course I don’t, and neither do you. You find your own self out little by little--why get angry with me because I don’t know it until you tell me? You are a grown woman compared to what you were three months ago; and this character that you ask me to know--well, it takes years of hard labor to prove a character.
Do you ever realize how much _faith_ in you I have? As utterly different is your whole life, as if you had been in another world; and through all the wilderness that I have travelled, I hope to drag you. But I cannot carry you, or take you; I must trust in the frenzy of your grip upon me. There is nothing else you could have that I would trust. You might be wonderfully clever and wonderfully wise--and I could do nothing with you. Do you remember Beethoven’s saying, that he would like to take a certain woman, if he had time, and marry her and break her heart, so that she might be able to sing?
Ah dear heart, I wish you could read in my words what I feel! I wonder if I am dreaming when I live in this ideal of what a woman’s love can be--so complete and so utter a surrender, so complete a forgetting, a losing of the self, so complete a living in another heart! I am not afraid to ask just this from a woman--from you! For I have enough heart’s passion to satisfy every thirst that you may feel. Ah, Corydon, I want you! I am drunk with the thought of _making_ a woman to love. I wonder if any man ever thought of that before! Artists go about the world with the great hunger of their hearts, and expecting to find by chance another soul like the one they have spent years in making beautiful and swift and strong; but has anyone ever thought that instead of writing books that no one understands, he might be making another kind of an artwork--one that would be alive, and with sacred possibilities of its own?