LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

experience to find one’s own work again in a strange hand-
writing. Read the verses as though they were strange, and you
will feel in your innermost self how very much they are yours.—
It has been a joy for me to read this sonnet and your letter many
times ; I thank you for them both.

And you must not let yourself be misled, in your solitude, by
the fact that there is something in you which wants to escape
from it. This very wish will, if you use it quietly and pre-
eminently and like a tool, help to spread your solitude over wide
country. People have (with the help of convention) found the
solution of everything in ease and the easiest side of ease;
but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult: everything
living holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself
according to its own character 4iid is an individual in_its own
right, strives to be so at any cost_and against all Qppositioh.’:fi
We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a
certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary, for
solitude is difficult ; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one
more reason for our doing it.

To love is also good : for love is difficult.? Fondness between
humafiwfiéilfgé?ffiéfi is perhaps the most difficult task that is set
us, the ultimate thing, the final trial and test, the work for which
all other work is only preparation. Therefore young people,
who are beginners in everything, cannot know love yet: they
have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their strength
gathered about their lonely, fearful, upward beating heart, they
must learn to love. But apprenticeship is always a long, secluded
time, and therefore loving is for a long while, far into life—:
solitude, heightened and deepened aloneness for him who loves.
Loving in the first instance is nothing that can be called losing,
surrendering and uniting oneself to another (for what would a
union be, of something unclarified and unreadyj, still inferior— 2),
it is a sublime occasion for the individual to mature, to grow into
something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s
sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that

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