Letter LXVII

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still,
IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want,
to know something of the life in between,--I could put these letters
that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day
have I been truly, that is to say willingly, out of your heart. When
Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes
him to see their child, which till then he had never seen--and its
likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to
you in all that I leave here written?

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and
am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be
sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that
it will not reach you.

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I
wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy
unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things
set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked
out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a
ghost, it will take your shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as
trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth.
Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it
for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country
that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts on the
bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the
lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts
of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts
of hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, and those none.
Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.