BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [24 JULY 1911]
BRACERS 17238. ALS. Morrell papers #158, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

In the train.
<letterhead>
Peppard Cottage
Henley-On-Thames1^, 2
Monday aftern.

My Dearest Dearest

Your dear letter reached me this morning just after my lecturees had gone. I was glad of it. I don’t wonder you are terribly tired. I am slightly tired, but very full of energy and longing to write. I only wish I were done with the s. s. and could get on to prisons. I have turned to Mat Arnold and read over my favourites in him — he is sometimes very good. I feel Ipsden will be the ideal conditions for what I want to write. If they will let me have a key and spend half the night walking about, it will be best of all.

If I can do something great it will set your conscience at rest. If it turns out as I hope, it might be to our time what Sartor Resartus was to an earlier generation. I believe together we have the capacity for it.

I have made friends further with Hill, who I find after all is not a believing Christian but he finds Christians more in sympathy with him. I find it is likely we may become very devoted friends. There is a strength and a possibility of good and evil in him which attracts me immensely. He has a great love of mankind — if he hadn’t he would commit all sorts of crimes. He is one of the very few in Cambridge to whom one can speak simply and sincerely of one’s ideals and purposes. I feel too that I have something to give him that he needs and desires — chiefly confidence in his best. He has come into rooms on my staircase.

I am mildly curious to see what Ipsden is like. I am sure I shall like it.

Dearest I am longing for you more than I can say. I love you with an utterly boundless love. Very solemnly, but with all the strength and energy of my nature. Oddly enough, altho’ I don’t think I feel selfishly towards you, I don’t very actively desire that you should be happy. I seem to feel happiness not a sufficiently important thing to desire for you. I desire that your life should be great, that there should be ways for you to accomplish your purpose, that all your nobility should be brought forth and made manifest. If happiness comes to you, it is well. If not, most of those who attempt to live greatly have to forego much happiness. I have not so successfully tamed the wish for my own happiness. When I am away from you it becomes very imperious. But indeed happiness is the best of the gifts you give me.

Goodbye till tomorrow my dearest Dearest Dearest. It is utterly beyond me to tell you how I love you and how I reverence you. I am humble where you are concerned, and humility is not easy to me. Goodbye my Life.

Your
B.

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