ed my heart, enlightened
all nature, heaven, and earth, and showed me to myself. I understood
the nothingness of this world when I felt how it vanished before a
single spark of true life. I loathed myself as I looked back into the
past, and compared it with the purity and perfection of the one I
loved. I entered into the heaven of my soul, as my heart and eyes
fathomed the ocean of beauty, tenderness, and purity which expanded
hourly in the eyes, in the voice, and in the discourse, of the heavenly
creature who had manifested herself to me. How often did I kneel before
her, my head bowed to the earth in the attitude and with the feeling of
adoration! How often did I beseech her, as I would a being of another
order, to cleanse me in her tears, absorb me in her flame, or to inhale
me in her breath,--so that nothing of myself should be left in me, save
the purifying water with which she had cleansed me, the flame that had
consumed me, or the new breath that she had infused into my new being;
so that I might become her, or she might become me, and that God
himself in calling us to him should not distinguish or divide what the
miracle of love had transformed and mingled!... Oh, if you have a
brother or a son, who has never understood virtue, pray that he may
love as I did! As long as he loves thus, he will be capable of every
sacrifice or heroic devotion to equal the ideal of his love; and when
he no longer loves, he will still retain in his soul a remembrance of
celestial delights, which will make him turn with disgust from the
waters of vice, and his eye will be often secretly uplifted towards the
pure spring at which he once knelt to drink. I cannot tell the feeling
of salutary shame which oppressed me in the presence of the one I
loved; but her reproaches were so tender, her looks so gentle, though
penetrating, her pardon so divine, that in humbling myself before her I
did not feel myself abased, but rather raised and dignified. I almost
mistook for my own and inward light, what was only the reverberation in
me of her splendor and purity. Involuntarily I compared her to all the
other women I had approached, except Antonina, who appeared to me like
Julie in her artless infancy; and save my mother, whom she resembled in
her virtue and maturity, no woman in my eyes could bear the slightest
comparison. A single look of hers seemed to throw all my past life into
shade. Her discourse revealed to me depths of feelings and refineme