Dearest Friend

Letter 1,41 - to Leander, bishop of Spain. April 591.

"I have sent codices to your Fraternity, so very dear to me, and I have inserted a note below about them. But those things which had been said in my Exposition on the blessed Job, and which you write should be sent to you, because I had made these remarks with words and senses that flow through my Homilies, I was keen anyway to change them into the form of books, which are now still being written down by the copyists. And if the haste of the letter's carrier had not restricted me, I should have wanted to send all of it to you without any restriction. Most of all because I wrote this work itself for your Reverence, so that I might seem to have worn myself out on my work, for him whom I love before all others.
Furthermore, if you know how to allow yourself some time from your ecclesiastical occupation, you know how it is now. Although still absent in body, I always see you present before me, because I carry an image of your face imprinted in the depth of my heart.
May God guard you in safety, my most dear and reverend brother."

Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 160..