d found them too scanty and too soon
filled for the passionate and tumultuous overflow of my thoughts. In
these letters there was no beginning, no middle, no end, and no
grammar; nothing, in short, of what is generally understood by the word
style. It was my soul laid bare before another soul expressing, or
rather stammering forth, as well as it could, the conflicting emotions
that filled it, with the help of the inadequate language of men. But
such language was not made to express unutterable things; its imperfect
signs and empty terms, its hollow speeches and its icy words, were
melted, like refractory ore, by the concentrated fire of our souls, and
cast into an indescribable language, vague, ethereal, flaming and
caressing, like the licking tongues of fire that had no meaning for
others, but which we alone understood, as it was part of ourselves.
These effusions of my heart never ended and never slackened. If the
firmament had been a single page, and God had bid me fill it with my
love, it could not have contained one-half of what spoke within me! I
never stopped till the four sheets were filled; yet I always seemed to
have said nothing, and in truth I had said nothing,--for who could ever
tell what is infinite?

LIII.

These letters, which were without any pitiful pretensions to talent on
my part, and were a delight and not a labor, might have been of
marvellous service to me at a later period, if fate had destined me to
address my fellow men, or to depict the shades, the transports, or the
pains of passion, in works of imagination. Unknown to myself, I
struggled desperately as Jacob wrestled with the angel, against the
poorness, the rigidity, and the resistance of the language I was forced
to use, as I knew not the language of the skies. The efforts that I
made to conquer, bend, smooth, extend, spiritualize, color, inflame, or
moderate expressions; the wish to render by words the nicest shades of
feeling the most ethereal aspirations of thought, the most irresistible
impulses, and the most chaste reserve of passion; to express looks,
attitudes, sighs, silence, and even the annihilation of the heart
adoring the invisible object of its love,--all these efforts, I repeat,
which seemed to bend my pen beneath my fingers like a rebellious
instrument, made me sometimes find the very word, expression, or cry
that I required to give a voice to the unutterable. I had used no
language, but I had cried forth the cry