I don't know that these thoughts will be of much use to you. They may sound somewhat too philosophical. But I have more or less purposely put them in a philosophical form, because we are not thus so {73} easily led astray into vague pleasant feelings, which we sometimes get from rhetoric. But I do wish I could put a little more of my feelings into this cold paper, and cruel, unsympathetic ink. For what I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a moment to me; it is the one thing which I intensely long to realise. To my mind life is love, and love is life. Love is not sentimental affection, simply the readiness to die for a person. But love is the laying down of life for a person, absolutely renouncing your life for another. It means living the best life you can conceive of for the sake of one you love; knowing for certain that your life is flowing into that other person, though you may never see him again in this world. Love is purifying yourself that another may be pure. Love for one person, if it be true love, leads you at once to God, for 'God is Love.' I do not know what that means, but I do know that the little meaning I can see in it explains everything. As we love, God is there; we see God, we are in God. So we are led on from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made, and whose image we never so clearly reflect as when we love most. I could go on talking on this subject almost for ever, but I think I had better not tax your patience. {74} _To W. A. B._ Christ's College, Cambridge: July 5, 1892. How very jolly for you to get out right away into the country! I hope some day to be able to do the same. But I think, on the whole, _I_ am better suited for retiring from the world than you are! If it were right to wish it, I might almost wish to exchange places with you. But yet I don't. It is very curious--I dare say you have thought of it--how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into, if you could. One admires many people, and would like to have their goodness, their intellect, or their beauty or strength--but how few of them one would really be: to cease at once to be yourself, and suddenly to be some one else--to look at life with _their_ eyes, to have _their_ past, _their_ hopes for the future, _their_ sins, _their_ inmost thoughts, _their_ anxieties. There is only about one man in the world, whom I know, whom I would like to be--and even of that I am not sure. It is the wonderful sense of personality. We abuse 'me'; we often vaguely say we would rather be some one else; yet very few of us wish to lose 'me': and most of us perhaps never will.