I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet, bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a Latin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: Does Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?) I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little. Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled up, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet, that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand forbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads, fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aerial vision and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips had all the fragrance of humanity. Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words, you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away. With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses: VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS