On May 4, 1896, and May 4, 1897, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote rambling letters to Alice Ruth Moore, whom he later married in 1898. When Paul wrote both letters, he was separated from Alice by a long distance. In 1896, he was in Dayton and she was in New Orleans, and they had not yet met in person. Alice's family was planning to relocate to the Boston area, so Paul hinted that they might pass through Dayton on the way north. A few days earlier, Alice had sent a brief letter to Paul, so he began by criticizing her brevity.
Your short letters are showing entirely too much consideration for my eyesight. I protest against your abject self-sacrifice. I am perfectly willing to read longer letters than the ones you have been writing to me. Don't curb your powers of expression as you have been doing; don't harness down your voluminous vocabulary; don't bridle your careening wit -- don't. "Some p'n might bus'!" I want to hear from you. I don't want a note. I want a letter and if you can't write me a letter you just try again!
Wonder if people on their way from New Orleans to Boston couldn't pass through Dayton some way -- my geography don't tell me and I thought perhaps you could. It would be lovely if some folks could and would so as to brighten the heart of certain other folks.
Paul Laurence Dunbar to Alice Ruth Moore, May 4, 1896. Paul Laurence Dunbar Papers, Ohio History Connection (Microfilm edition, Roll 8).
The following year, Paul was visiting England and Alice was living in Brooklyn, where she was a public school teacher. They had seen each other only once (at Paul's going-away party in February) and gotten engaged on the same night. After that brief encounter, Paul once again had to communicate with Alice by mail.
It grows harder and harder to write to you because I cannot help telling you the monotonous story of my love and I fear that you will grow tired of hearing it. I know now what the poets mean by the pain of loving, as well as I know what that fool was driving at, who said, "absence makes the heart grow fonder." I would that I were at your side this very moment; but though I am far away, the consciousness of our deep mutual love bears me up under many trying circumstances.
I hope you are writing some too. Don't let that miserable school kill out every other ambition. I shall be glad when I can take you entirely away from it, and give you that leisure which is more congenial to successful composition.
Paul Laurence Dunbar to Alice Ruth Moore, May 4, 1897. Paul Laurence Dunbar Papers, Ohio History Connection (Microfilm edition, Roll 5).