P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well), and find I _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance!
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 30th, 1915. */
After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, I think, one can feel--the joy in short that you allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion!
I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. But I think--if you won't feel me over-contentious for it--that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully,
/# Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras, February 22, 1915. #/
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 3rd, 1915. */
Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M. Séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two _livraisons_ of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me. It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for I myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as I should stare at a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road--where we haven't come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear in the _Times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make communication with almost all others impossible, they living and thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort, which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church, the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the "fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend du Breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of them; Séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that. But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own, little waste as I see you allowing yourself.