That is all I ask , dear lady , and I ask that only in my own heart . I am content to love you and be forgotten . It is sweeter to love you and be forgotten than it would be to love any other woman and live in her lifelong remembrance : so humble has love made me , sweet , so great is my sense of my own unworthiness . Yet love must find expression in some fashion , dear , else it is only pain , and hence these letters to you which you will never read . I put all my heart into them ; they are the best and highest of me , the buds of a love that can never bloom openly in the sunshine of your life . I weave a chaplet of them , dear , and crown you with it . They will never fade , for such love is eternal . It is a whole summer since I first met you . I had been waiting for you all my life before and did not know it . But I knew it when you came and brought with you a sense of completion and fulfilment . This has been the precious year of my life , the turning-point to which all things past tended and all things future must look back . Oh , my dear , I thank you for this year ! It has been your royal gift to me , and I shall be rich and great forever because of it . Nothing can ever take it from me , nothing can mar it . It were well to have lived a lifetime of loneliness for such a boon -- the price would not be too high . I would not give my one perfect summer for a generation of other men 's happiness . There are those in the world who would laugh at me , who would pity me , Una . They would say that the love I have poured out in secret at your feet has been wasted , that I am a poor weak fool to squander all my treasure of affection on a woman who does not care for me and who is as far above me as that great white star that is shining over the sea . Oh , my dear , they do not know , they can not understand . The love I have given you has not left me poorer .
It has enriched my life unspeakably ; it has opened my eyes and given me the gift of clear vision XXXXX those things that matter ; it has been a lamp held before my stumbling feet whereby I have avoided snares and pitfalls of baser passions and unworthy dreams .
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