#espitolary

Your letter made me endlessly happy. In it, my dear, you are particularly sweet and lovely and if you were here now and as loving as you are in your letter, you would be amazed at what I would do to thank you, with a woman’s nicest  kind of gentleness and kindness.

It’s a cold weird moonlight night—a tearing north wind ... I never saw such a night—whistling and rumbling wind—the bare dusty moonlight—uneven gusts of wind ... It’s terrible—and yet I like it.

… how much I don't know of this [world], how much I dislike it, and how hurt I have been in it !

The sooner one tries to become accomplished in a certain position in life and a certain field and adopts a relatively independent way of thinking and acting, and the more one keeps to set rules, the stronger in character one will grow, and that does not mean becoming narrowminded. It is a wise thing to do this, because life is short and time passes quickly. If one is accomplished in one single thing, understanding one single thing well, then one has insight into and knowledge of many other things into the bargain.

Love is the best and the noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and is sure of himself, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be.

If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one’s love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger.

It is splendid that we can tell each other everything – the deep, the beautiful, and the marvelous, but also the difficult and sad things. And we can be grateful there are so few sad things to tell each other, and so many infinitely joyful ones.