Walter Bagehot to Elizabeth Wilson.

My Dearest Eliza,

I fear you will think the answer I wrote yesterday to your most kind and delicious letter,
was very superficial, but I wrote it at once while people were talking and bothering me.
I have now read yours over and over more times than I should admit. I awoke in the middle of the night and immediately lit a candle to read it a few more times.

It has given me more pleasure than I ever received from a letter, and infinitely more than I thought it possible I could receive from one.
I fancy it is not now an effort to you to write to me-at least it reads as if it was written without effort. Yet it tells me things which with your deep and reserved nature it must have cost you much to put it on paper.

I wish indeed I could feel worthy of your affections-my reason, if not my imagination, is getting to believe you when you whisper to me that I have it. My delight is at times intense. You must not suppose because I tell you of the wild, burning pain which I have felt, and at times, though I am and out to be much soothed, still feel, that my love for you has been mere suffering.

Even at the worst there was a wild, delicious excitement which I would never have lost for the world. At first, and before the feeling was very great, it was a simple pleasure to me to come to Claverton, and the charm of our early intellectual talks and particularly since the day at the conservatory, the feeling has been too eager not to have a good deal of pain in it, and the tension of mind has really been very great at times, still the time that I have known and loved you is immensely the happiest I have ever known.

My spirits always make me cheerful in a superficial way, but they do not satisfy and somehow life, even before I was engaged to you was gentler and sweeter, and literature had a new value since you liked my writing, and everything has had a glow upon it.

Though I have come to Claverton the last few times with the notion that the gloss would go-that I should burst out and you would be tranquil and kind and considerate and refuse, and I should never see you again. I had a vision of the thing which i keep by me. As it has not happened I am afraid this is egotistical-indeed I know it is-but I'm not sure egotism is bad in letters. I must write about what I feel for you.

It is odd how completely our feelings change. No one can tell the effort it was for me to tell you I loved you-why I do not know, but it made me gasp for breath, and now it is absolute pleasure for me to tell you and bore you with it in every form.

I should like to write it in big letters, "I love you!" all across the page by way of emphasis. I know you will think me very childish and be shaken in your early notion that I am intellectual but I cannot help it. This is my state of mind.