Thyrsis:

God did not endow me with your tongue, or else it would not be the
great effort it is to me to tell you some of the thoughts that have
rushed through my mind in the last hour.

It is an hour since I began to read your letter of Horrible Truth.
Now it seems to me it might have been in the last year, in the last
century. Actually I feel like a stranger to myself; and my movements
are very slow. First, I will tell you that I believe in God, oh, so
implicitly--this thought gives me infinite hope. I long to let you
know as much of my heart as I can, if I am to be your life-companion,
as I firmly believe I am to be. I have such a strange calmness now,
and I imagine that I must feel very much the way Rip Van Winkle did
when he awoke. I want to try to show you my heart--it is right that
I should try, is it not?

Know that I have placed much faith and trust in you, in anything
that you did. If you opened one door to me and told me it led to the
great and permanent truth, I believed you absolutely. If you hauled
me back and put me through an opposite one, telling me that there my
road lay, I believed you with equal faith. Now, now, at the end of
an hour, I am, through you, convinced of one door, the only and true
entrance; and I am as sure as I am that the sun is shining at this
moment, that nothing in God's world can ever again make me lose
sight of it. I have found that _you_ can lose sight of it,
Thyrsis,--something shows me that I have in the last month been more
right than you. Yes, I have, Thyrsis, though you may not know it.
And the reason I couldn't stay right was because I am not strong
enough to grasp my good impulses, and keep hold of them: because I