BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [22 JULY 1911]
BRACERS 17233. ALS. Morrell papers #153, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

<letterhead>
Trinity College,
Cambridge.1
Sat. night.

My Beloved

Your letter reached me tonight, and gave me more joy than I can express. I cannot post a letter till tomorrow evening, but my heart is so full that I must write now. I feel such a thankfulness for every word in your letter. It will take me a little time yet to feel that the danger is past, but my reason tells me it is. I am so glad you feel I understand — that is real and will always be so. I do live in your feelings very completely. Sometimes I am afraid of not being true to my own nature, because I seem to lose myself in you. But I don’t think there is any real risk of that.

I love you much more than before. But I have a sense of yearning, of reaching out to you, which is new, and has something of pain, tho’ not a pain I should wish to be without. I want more absolute union than is possible for two separate souls — I want something infinite, unattainable, absolute — I can’t quite tell you — it is something mystical I want, something not of this earth. In this finite world we reach out to the infinite — the more of good we have, the more we see the heavenly kingdom where mortals may not enter. The sadness of the sunset is over all things that are subject to time and chance — what deserves to be eternal is so fleeting and so powerless. No unalloyed joy is so well worth feeling as this melancholy. It is the inmost heart of our love — the something infinite in Man that enables him to long for an infinite and eternal love. Love is so strange and so full of mystery that I do not know whether I have understood what I feel, but I think it is what I have tried to express. — I can hardly believe it was only yesterday I left you. It seems as if it had been in some previous existence. — Now it has struck two, and I must go to bed. Goodnight, my star.

Sunday morning. Your two letters of yesterday reached me this morning and gave me unspeakable happiness. I don’t know whether to send this to London or Peppard, but I am sending it to London on the chance of your going there tomorrow. — It was too hot for paying calls yesterday, and I had too much business to do, but today I shall try to see at least Verrall. Various people came to see me last night and stayed till nearly one. I see there is a remarkably good review of Principia Mathematica in this week’s Spectator2 — it says all the things I most like to have said. I haven’t got a copy or I would send you one. Today I am lunching with Waterlow. I am still very busy with proofs — I want to get them done tonight so as to be free for the shilling shocker when I get to Ipsden.

• 1

  [document] Document 000153. Proofread against a colour scan of the original. The letter ends without a signature or initial.

• 2

  Spectator[James Strachey], “The Foundations of Mathematics”, The Spectator, 107 (22 July 1911): 665, 667.