LETTER XXXIII.


GRAYSMILL, March 5th.

Thank you, sweet one, for the eight dear pages. I feel ashamed of
the scrap I sent you the day before yesterday. I never felt so lazy
in my life as I feel now. One thing is certain, happiness is not
altogether good. Blake says somewhere, "Damn braces, bless relaxes."
Perhaps he was right.

I am losing myself completely. Every time I part from him I feel
that he has taken yet a little more of me away. He absorbs me, heart
and soul. I do not complain. I feel a little ashamed of myself from
time to time, when I realise how callous I have become to everything
else, when, no matter what book I take down from the shelf, I find I
cannot read half a page connectedly; otherwise I am perfectly
content that it should be so. Impersonal things--Nature, Music--have
perhaps strengthened their hold on me; because they flatter my
selfishness, so to speak, they are always in tune with my heart.
Gabriel more than makes up for my degeneracy; of course that should
be, seeing that he has taken unto himself all my intellectual
faculties!

He is writing a simply astounding poem; he reads it to me as it
grows. I tell him he is much more in love with it than with me! When