oming; only a man can know that deep delight. Your least
movement gives me greater pleasure than a mother even can feel as
she sees her child asleep or at play. I love you with every kind
of love in one. The grace of your least gesture is always new to
me. I fancy I could spend whole nights breathing your breath; I
would I could steal into every detail of your life, be the very
substance of your thoughts--be your very self.

"Well, we shall, at any rate, never part again! No human alloy
shall ever disturb our love, infinite in its phases and as pure as
all things are which are One--our love, vast as the sea, vast as
the sky! You are mine! all mine! I may look into the depths of
your eyes to read the sweet soul that alternately hides and shines
there, to anticipate your wishes.

"My best-beloved, listen to some things I have never yet dared to
tell you, but which I may confess to you now. I felt a certain
bashfulness of soul which hindered the full expression of my
feelings, so I strove to shroud them under the garbs of thoughts.
But now I long to lay my heart bare before you, to tell you of the
ardor of my dreams, to reveal the boiling demands of my senses,
excited, no doubt, by the solitude in which I have lived,
perpetually fired by conceptions of happiness, and aroused by you,
so fair in form, so attractive in manner. How can I express to you
my thirst for the unknown rapture of possessing an adored wife, a
rapture to which the union of two souls by love must give frenzied
intensity. Yes, my Pauline, I have sat for hours in a sort of
stupor caused by the violence of my passionate yearning, lost in
the dream of a caress as though in a bottomless abyss. At such
moments my whole vitality, my thoughts and powers, are merged and
united in what I must call desire, for lack of a word to express
that nameless delirium.

"And I may confess to you now that one day, when I would not take
your hand when you offered it so sweetly--an act of melancholy
prudence that made you doubt my love--I was in one of those fits
of madness when a man could commit a murder to possess a woman.
Yes, if I had felt the exquisite pressure you offered me as
vividly as I heard your voice in my heart, I know not to what
lengths my passion might not have carried me. But I can be silent,
and suffer a great deal. Why speak of this anguish when my visions
are to become realitie