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"If I should head this page I write to you 'Goddess and Queen, and
Empress of my deepest soul,' what more should I be saying than 'My
Love' and 'My Clorinda,' since these express all the soul of man
could crave for or his body desire. The body and soul of me so long
for thee, sweetheart, and sweetest beautiful woman that the hand of
Nature ever fashioned for the joy of mortals, that I have had need
to pray Heaven's help to aid me to endure the passing of the days
that lie between me and the hour which will make me the most
strangely, rapturously, happy man, not in England, not in the world,
but in all God's universe. I must pray Heaven again, and indeed do
and will, for humbleness which shall teach me to remember that I am
not deity, but mere man--mere man--though I shall hold a goddess to
my breast and gaze into eyes which are like deep pools of Paradise,
and yet answer mine with the marvel of such love as none but such a
soul could make a woman's, and so fit to mate with man's. In the
heavy days when I was wont to gaze at you from afar with burning
heart, my unceasing anguish was that even high honour itself could
not subdue and conquer the thoughts which leaped within me even as
my pulse leaped, and even as my pulse could not be stilled unless by
death. And one that for ever haunted--ay, and taunted--me was the
image of how your tall, beauteous body would yield itself to a
strong man's arm, and your noble head with its heavy tower of hair
resting upon his shoulder--the centres of his very being would be
thrilled and shaken by the uplifting of such melting eyes as surely
man ne'er gazed within on earth before, and the ripe and scarlet bow
of a mouth so beauteous and so sweet with womanhood. This beset me
day and night, and with such torture that I feared betimes my brain
might reel and I become a lost and ruined madman. And now--it is no
more forbidden me to dwell upon it--nay, I lie waking at night,
wooing the picture to me, and at times I rise from my dreams to
kneel by my bedside and thank God that He hath given me at last what
surely is my own!-for so it seems to me, my love, that each of us is
but a part of the other, and that such forces of Nature rush to meet
together in us, that Nature herself would cry out were we rent
apart. If there were aught to rise like a ghost between us, if
there were aught that could sunder us--noble soul, let us but swear
that it shall weld us but the closer together, and that locked in
each other's arms its blows shall not even make our united strength
to sway. Sweetest lady, your lovely lip will curve in smiles, and
you will say, 'He is mad with his joy--my Gerald' (for never till my
heart stops at its last beat and leaves me still, a dead man, cold
upon my bed, can I forget the music of your speech when you spoke
those words, 'My Gerald! My Gerald.') And indeed I crave your
pardon, for a man so filled with rapture cannot be quite sane, and
sometimes I wonder if I walk through the palace gardens like one who
is drunk, so does my brain reel. But soon, my heavenly, noble love,
my exile will be over, and this is in truth what my letter is to
tell you, that in four days your lacqueys will throw open your doors
to me and I shall enter, and being led to you, shall kneel at your
feet and kiss the hem of your robe, and then rise standing to fold
her who will so soon be my very wife to my throbbing breast."
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