LETTER THIRTY-THREE
My Dear Wife,
Being hard tasked on board the Harlequin to get my time off my hands (for day and night I am utterly alone here) I have resolved to write you a love letter. It is many days, some of them, I hope, happy ones, since my last love letter, and in their wintry sweep over my head they have let fall some flakes of snow, and then they have somewhat withered, and in their course they have hurried us over a dreary wide distance of billowy sea, severing us, perhaps for ever, from our native home. But many, many darker days than the darkest we have known could not blight or chill that life of love in my heart which dictated that last letter and which dictates this. Yes, Clarinda, my own first (for I have a second now) dear Clarinda, if ever a heart was constant in its love, that heart is yours in mine. I have questioned myself on this matter often and deeply, and my soul has returned one only answer—'I love her truly, passionately love her!' My imagination has often of late conjured up before me my beloved as I first knew her in the spring of womanhood, and I have listened again to her first fond words to me—me, a poor and friendless boy, to whom then none other had ever spoken fondly; and all her faults (for faults I tell her most lovingly she has) were lost in the beauty of her pure and deep affection. And, oh! I feel that, though I was greatly rich and loaded with honour and courted and flattered by the world (which, happily, I never shall be), still there would be one whose smile to me was like the common sunshine, without which I could not live to enjoyment.
And this is my love letter to my dear wife and companion, to whom I am now, for ever and ever, with a heart full of love,