Letter XXXIX

These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite
glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to
distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the
Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!

Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What
I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I
write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you
to share everything.

Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!
Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I
think you have some southern blood in you.

Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you
are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my
ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a
foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.
used to call him "John Bull let loose."

My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green
fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the
other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding
under the monastery walls.

All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect
me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with
you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything
included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to
be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.