myself as your lowly bondman. Yes, were you dishonored and lost,
to use your own words, my heart would only cling the more closely to you
for your self-sought misery. It would be my care to staunch your wounds,
and my prayers should importune God with the story of your innocence and
your wrongs.

Did I not tell you that the feelings of my heart for you are not a
lover's only, that I will be to you father, mother, sister, brother--ay,
a whole family--anything or nothing, as you may decree? And is it not
your own wish which has confined within the compass of a lover's feeling
so many varying forms of devotion? Pardon me, then, if at times the
father and brother disappear behind the lover, since you know they are
none the less there, though screened from view. Would that you could
read the feelings of my heart when you appear before me, radiant in your
beauty, the centre of admiring eyes, reclining calmly in your carriage
in the Champs-Elysees, or seated in your box at the Opera! Then would
you know how absolutely free from selfish taint is the pride with which
I hear the praises of your loveliness and grace, praises which warm
my heart even to the strangers who utter them! When by chance you have
raised me to elysium by a friendly greeting, my pride is mingled with
humility, and I depart as though God's blessing rested on me. Nor does
the joy vanish without leaving a long track of light behind. It breaks
on me through the clouds of my cigarette smoke. More than ever do I feel
how every drop of this surging blood throbs for you.

Can you be ignorant how you are loved? After seeing you, I return to
my study, and the glitter of its Saracenic ornaments sinks to nothing
before the brightness of your portrait, when I open the spring that
keeps it locked up from every eye and lose myself in endless musings or
link my happiness to verse. From the heights of heaven I look down
upon the course of a life such as my hopes dare to picture it! Have you
never, in the silence of the night, or through the roar of the town,
heard the whisper of a voice in your sweet, dainty ear? Does no one of
the thousand prayers that I speed to you reach home?

By dint of silent contemplation of your pictured face, I have succeeded
in deciphering the expression of every feature and tracing its
connection with some grace of the spirit, and then I pen a sonnet to
you in Spanish on the harmony of the twofold beauty in which nature
has clothed you. These s