There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the poet John Keats. While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of love-worthiness--the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come. But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone. So Swift go my days--oh Swift, Swift! _By the blood of dead Americans_ To-morrow Since I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe: a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and cheerfulness, French splendor of valor. It has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its ‘headlines.’ It has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American. It makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious personal shame. We are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans. But we assume it is by accident. We lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun trample by proxy on our neck. It was for America to declare war in the same hour the _Lusitania_ passengers met murder. We were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready. Not ready has no right thing to do with it. They were not ready at Lexington. I long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a day of death and honor. It too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this flawed song of myself. _To express me_ To-morrow I suppose I’m very lonely. It is luck--luck from the stars--not to be beset by clusters of people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, ‘cheerful’ people, people who say ‘pardon me’: all the damning sorts scattered about obstructing one’s view of the horizons. But for want of--other, _other_ people--I am intensely lonely. When I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set me apart. But I stood then as it’s given Youth to stand--on High Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see that plainly now.