Dearest, I trust you: I could not have dreamed you to myself, therefore you must be true, quite independently of me. You as I saw you once with open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make yourself, Beloved, not to be what you are: you have called my soul to life if for no other reason than to bear witness of you, come what may. No length of silence can make a truth once sounded ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing it makes its way to the stars: dispersed or removed it cannot be lost. I too, for truth's sake, may have to be dispersed out of my present self which shuts me from you: but I shall find you some day,--you who made me, you who every day make me! A part of you cut off, I suffer pain because I _am_ still part of you. If I had no part in you I should suffer nothing. But I do, I do. One is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still feels it,--not the pleasure of it but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of me now? Because I am suffering, you shall not think I am entirely miserable. But here and now I am all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at times to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point at which it assuages itself and becomes healing: that pain is not endurance wasted; but that I and my weary body have a goal which will give a meaning to all this, somehow, somewhere: never, I begin to fear, here, while this body has charge of me. Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry: and having worn myself out with it and ended, I kiss your lips and bless God that I have known you. I have not said--I never could say it--"Let the day perish wherein Love was born!" I forget nothing of you: you are clear to me,--all but one thing: why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent different ways. And yet so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow is yours: I wet your face with my tears and cry, "Sleep well." To-night also, Beloved, sleep well! Night and morning I make you my prayer. LETTER LXXVII.