. . . I have a letter at home; and when I came home from
school, I went leisurely over it.
"This evening I have spent in a little social party,--a dozen or so,--
and I have been zealously talking all the evening. When I came to my
cold, lonely room, there was your letter lying on the dressing-table.
It touched me with a sort of painful pleasure, for it seems to me
uncertain, improbable, that I shall ever return and find you as I have
found your letter. Oh, my dear G-----, it is scarcely well to love
friends thus. The greater part that I see cannot move me deeply. They
are present, and I enjoy them; they pass and I forget them. But those
that I love differently; those that I LOVE; and oh, how much that word
means! I feel sadly about them. They may change; they must die; they
are separated from me, and I ask myself why should I wish to love with
all the pains and penalties of such conditions? I check myself when
expressing feelings like this, so much has been said of it by the
sentimental, who talk what they could not have felt. But it is so
deeply, sincerely so in me, that sometimes it will overflow. Well,
there is a heaven,--a heaven,--a world of love, and love after all is
the life-blood, the existence, the all in all of mind."
This is the key to her whole life. She was impelled by love, and did
what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love.
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