Letter 4012: It is the nature of things that anxiety should turn to joy and complaint should become praise whenever our desires...

It is the nature of childbirth that anxiety passes over into joy and complaint is changed into praises, whenever the things longed for are granted. I was uncertain in my mind what your Eminence's so prolonged silence might mean, but now that it is given me to obtain what I wished for, I myself, on your behalf, search out a respectable kind of excuse. See what serene attentiveness can accomplish: as if everything had flowed for me according to my wish, so, appeased by a simple gift, I have pardoned the wrongs. You have here something from which you may take up the model of dutiful love and borrow for friendship's sake examples of constancy. If you follow me, no greater number of faults draws you back from our union, and a single good deed will absolve the failings of your companion. Do you reproach me, brother, with silence, do you reproach me with forgetfulness? Where was that disposition of yours, when neither the conversations I put forth earned a reply, nor did you come forward as a forerunner to command the diligence of my pen? Where was that lack of restraint with letters, which was not kept up toward everyone in Liguria? While displaying my pages, as a comfort for my grief, to many who were traveling far from longing for you, you both prolonged your silence toward me and afforded to them, against my wishes, a conversation - because such is the reckoning of human affairs, that for a great kinship an equal zeal should always exist. Forgetful of that order, you chose to join certain unskilled matters with letters, thinking that things separated by the whole length of the road could come together into affection. What did your persuasive speech, fitted together out of carefully labored phrases, accomplish, when it addressed men ignorant of the good arts, while the one who loves was set aside? But of this elsewhere: I do not wish to banish into recital the multitude of your excesses, since I have been soothed by a brief satisfaction. For I would have used sparingness in setting those things forth, did I not believe that you know this remains concerning offenses - that what is covered over, and what bursts out into speech, is removed. My lord, I beg, that hereafter you not aspire toward those things which you have learned to be ill-managed as though a scorner of correction, but frequently direct sweet pages to me, so that the eloquent man's dowry may increase, while it keeps the sacred bonds of concord.