Geist, mein bess'res Ich"; well, you are not in the least that. The
name that I give you, and that you may keep, is "the beautiful
possibility of a soul". Remember a phrase I told you at the very
beginning of our love, of the peril of "ceasing to love perfection
and coming to love a woman." And read Shelley's sad note to
"Epipsychidion"!

VIII

Dear Corydon:

You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love
you; and you ask "How do you know that because you love beauty, you
will love _me_?"

I have been thinking a good deal about this; I do not believe,
Corydon, that a man more haunted by the madness of desire ever lived
upon earth than I. And when I get at the essence of myself, I do not
believe that I am a kind man; I think that a person with less
patience for human hearts never existed, perhaps with less feeling.
There is only one thing in the world that I can be sure of, or that
you can, my fidelity to my ideal! I know that however often I may
fail or weaken, however many mistakes I may make, my hunger for the
things of the soul will _never_ leave me, and that night and day I
shall work for them. I do not believe I have the right to promise
you anything else, I have no right to dream of anything else; this
is not my pleasure, as I feel it, it is a frenzy, it is that to
which some blind and nameless and merciless impulse drives me. And I
may try to persuade myself all my life that I love you, Corydon, and
nothing else, and want nothing else; and all the time in the depths