Bright Star: Campion's 'Letter To Alice Nelson-Lover'

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Related Prose Bright Star: Campion's Film About the Life and Love of Keats Dear Dainty Delicious Darling: Poets' Love Letters Letter to Alice Nelson-Dunbar by Paul Laurence Dunbar Letter to Constance Wilcock by Charles Olson Letter to Gertrude Chataway by Lewis Carroll Letter to Martha Blount by Alexander Pope Letter to Nora Barnacle [excerpt] by James Joyce Letter to Peter Doyle by Walt Whitman Letter to Susan Huntington Dickinson by Emily Dickinson Letter to W. B. Yeats by Maud Gonne Selected Love Letters to Frieda Weekley by D. H. Lawrence Two Love Notes to Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Do understand me, my love, in this. I have so much of you in my heart that I must turn Mentor when I see a chance of harm befalling you. I would never see any thing but Pleasure in your eyes, love on your lips, and Happiness in your steps. I would wish to see you among those amusements suitable to your inclinations and spirits; so that our loves might be a delight in the midst of Pleasures agreeable enough, rather than a resource from vexations and cares. But I doubt much, in case of the worst, whether I shall be philosopher enough to follow my own Lessons: if I saw my resolution give you a pain I could not.

Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you? I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart. So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its
I am at the diligent use of my faculties here, I do not pass a day without sprawling some blank verse or tagging some rhymes; and here I must confess, that, (since I am on that subject,) I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel. I have seen your Comet, and only wish it was a sign that poor Rice would get well whose illness makes him rather a melancholy companion: and the more so as so to conquer his feelings and hide them from me, with a forc'd Pun.

I kiss'd your Writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey. What was your dream? Tell it me and I will tell you the interpretation threreof.

Ever yours, my love!

Do not accuse me of delay—we have not here any opportunity of sending letters every day. Write speedily.

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July 15, 1819

Shanklin, Thursday