_ LETTER XVIII
GRAYSMILL, November 26th.
Bless you for all your words! Yes, you must come out to me next spring, and then we three can be friends together: three should be more beautiful than two, in such harmony as ours would be. I take it for granted that you and Gabriel will care for each other; it would be a great grief to me if you did not. I hate people I like not to like each other; nothing hurts more--except, perhaps, to oneself dislike a friend's friend.
My Greek is getting on; I am fearfully industrious, and have even pinned up the declensions, written out in a large hand, on my bedroom wall, so that I can learn them whilst I dress.
Gabriel is quite pleased with his pupil, and I have begun to teach him Italian. He reads it very well, but cannot speak it at all at present. We had a long talk, the other day, about his future. I think it will be quite impossible for him to continue this mode of life very long; I find that I am not so happy about him as I was at first. Sometimes I think I should like to give him half my money--how ridiculous it seems that such a thing should be out of the question!--and let him lead the tranquil life of study and contemplation that he loves, send him to other lands where he might wander up and down in the sunshine, seeing the world and all its beauties,--he that has eyes to see, a heart to feel. But then, at other times, I feel that I should like to strip him even of the little he has, and hurl him into the very vortex of life, see him struggle and fight and come out a conqueror. I see in him the germs of so much greatness that I cannot believe he was meant to dream his days away on the heather. It was right of him, certainly, to break from a course of life he felt himself unable to pursue, and right it is also that he should pause now, and breathe, and feel his wings. But it will soon be time for energy and action. We are not here for ourselves only; there is so much to be done. And if I am often discontented with myself for the futility of my dreams, for sitting here a mere spectator, as it were, of struggles that I long to share, yet know not how, greater still is my impatience at the sight of one wasting his days in mere speculation, who, having all the strength, the manhood, that I lack, might leap into the very thick of the fight, Truth's warrior.
He tells me that he has written a great deal, and has promised to bring me a bundle of poems to read at my leisure. "You must understand," said he, "that you will be the only one to whom I ever showed them." I feel very proud.
To revert to what I said above, I believe, too, that it is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy.
Good-bye, dear love.
Your EMILIA. _