I promise you therefore no quarter; I shall make no sacrifice of my ideal for your sake. As I wrote you, I mean to be absolutely one with you, and I expect you to be the same. You shall have (if you wish it) all of my soul--I shall live my life with you and think all my thoughts aloud--study to give you _everything_ that I have. And God only, who knows my heart, knows what utter love for you lies in those words, what utter trust of you--how I think of you as being purity and holiness itself. To offer to take any other being into my soul, to lay bare all the secret places of it to its gaze, all the weaknesses as well as all the strength, and all that is vain as well as all that is sacred! You cannot know how I feel about my heart, but this you may know, that no one else has had a glimpse of it, you are the first and the last; and so sure am I of you that I dare to say it, _all_ my life will I live in your presence, and trust to your sympathy and truth--and feel that I am false to love if I do not. If there were anything in my heart so foul that I feared to speak of it, I should give you that first, as the sacrifice of love; or any vanity or foible--such things are really hardest to have others know, so great is our conceit. If I could talk to you to-night, I should do just as I did up on the hill in the moonlight--frighten you, and make you wonder if there was _any_ woman who wished to bear such a burden; and perhaps the saddest thing of all to me is that I do not bear it--instead I bear the gnawing of a conscience bitter and ashamed of itself. And could you bear _that_ burden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before God, a coward and a dastard! I have not done my work! I have not borne the pain He calls me to bear, I have not wrested out the strength He put in my secret heart! And here I am chattering, _talking_ about work to you! And these things are like a nightmare to me; they turn all my life’s happiness to gall. And you are taking upon yourself this same burden--coming to help me to get rid of it. Or if you do not wish to, for God’s sake, and mine, and yours, don’t come near me--you have come too near as it is! Can you not see that when I am face to face with these fearful things--and you come and ask me to give my life to you, to worship you with the best faculties I possess--that I have no right to say yes? You once told me you were happy because I called you “mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich”; well, you are not in the least that. The name that I give you, and that you may keep, is “the beautiful possibility of a soul”. Remember a phrase I told you at the very beginning of our love, of the peril of “ceasing to love perfection and coming to love a woman.” And read Shelley’s sad note to “Epipsychidion”! VIII Dear Corydon: You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love you; and you ask “How do you know that because you love beauty, you will love _me_?”