sh water dispersed in little runlets, the different effects of the
atmosphere, this whole world of infinity which laps you round, and which
God has made so various, will recall to you the infinite sameness of
your soul's life. But at least I shall be there, my Renee, and in me you
will find a heart which no social pettiness shall ever corrupt, a heart
all your own.

Monday.

My dear, my Spaniard is quite adorably melancholy; there is something
calm, severe, manly, and mysterious about him which interests me
profoundly. His unvarying solemnity and the silence which envelops him
act like an irritant on the mind. His mute dignity is worthy of a fallen
king. Griffith and I spend our time over him as though he were a riddle.

How odd it is! A language-master captures my fancy as no other man has
done. Yet by this time I have passed in review all the young men of
family, the attaches to embassies, and the ambassadors, generals, and
inferior officers, the peers of France, their sons and nephews, the
court, and the town.

The coldness of the man provokes me. The sandy waste which he tries to
place, and does place, between us is covered by his deeprooted pride; he
wraps himself in mystery. The hanging back is on his side, the boldness
on mine. This odd situation affords me the more amusement because the
whole thing is mere trifling. What is a man, a Spaniard, and a teacher
of languages to me? I make no account of any man whatever, were he a
king. We are worth far more, I am sure, than the greatest of them. What
a slave I would have made of Napoleon! If he had loved me, shouldn't he
have felt the whip!

Yesterday I aimed a shaft at M. Henarez which must have touched him to
the quick. He made no reply; the lesson was over, and he bowed with a
glance at me, in which I read that he would never return. This suits
me capitally; there would be something ominous in starting an imitation
_Nouvelle Heloise_. I have just been reading Rousseau's, and it has left
me with a strong distaste for love. Passion which can argue and moralize
seems to me detestable.

Clarissa also is much too pleased with herself and her long, little
letter; but Richardson's work is an admirable picture, my father tells
me, of English women. Rousseau's seems to me a sort of philosophical
sermon, cast in the form of letters.

Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books
tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false an