XXIV
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Dear, I’m sorry about your sleeping so badly. All I can do is to pass on to you my own remedy, which is to repeat poetry to myself. It is better than counting sheep and all that kind of thing.

“But suppose I don’t know any poetry?”

Well, of course, you do; but there is no harm in learning more, and especially so if, in order not to tire you in the wrong way, it is all very short, never more than eight lines. The epigrammatic things that are like miniatures in painting. What do you think of that? Here is a quatrain that touches immediately on your case:—

Invoking life, I feel the surging tide
Of countless wants ordained to be denied;
Invoking sleep, I feel the hastening stream
Of minor wants merged in a want supreme.

You see, I have already begun to collect these little jewels, and, difficult as it is to find perfection (even Landor is often disappointing), I am in great hopes of getting together a really beautiful necklace of them, and then perhaps we will print them privately in a little book for the weary, and the wakeful and the elect. You might even learn Omar: say, two quatrains a day. It’s the loveliest melancholy stuff and can’t do you any harm, because you have your belief in the goodness of things all fixed and unshakeable, and you couldn’t get at the red wine if you wanted to. If you haven’t an Omar I shall send you one.

Ah, Love! could’st thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s desire!

Wouldn’t we just? But then you don’t think the scheme as sorry as I often am forced to.

R. H.