of my soul; and I was heard.
When I rose from my chair, after this desperate but delightful struggle
against words, pen, and paper, I remembered that, spite of the winter
cold in my room, the perspiration stood upon my forehead, and I used to
open the window to cool my fevered brow.

LIV.

My letters were not only a cry of love, they were more frequently full
of invocations, contemplation, dreams of the future, prospects of
heaven, consolations, and prayers.

My love, which by its nature was debarred from all those enjoyments
which relax the heart by satisfying the senses, had opened afresh
within me all the springs of piety that had been dried up or polluted
by vile pleasures. I felt in my heart all the purity and elevation of
divine love. I strove to bear away with me to heaven, on the wings of
my excited and almost mystical imagination, that other suffering and
discouraged soul. I spoke of God, who alone was perfect enough to have
created her superhuman perfection of beauty, genius, and tenderness;
great enough to contain our boundless aspirations; infinite and
inexhaustible enough to absorb and whelm in himself the love he had
lighted in us, so that his flame, in consuming us one by the other,
might make us both exhale ourselves in him. I comforted Julie under the
sacrifice that necessity obliged us to make of complete happiness here
below; I pointed out to her the merit of this self-denial of an instant
in the eyes of the Eternal Remunerator of our actions. I blessed the
mournful and sublime purity of such sacrifices, since they would one
day obtain for us a more immaterial and angelic union in the eternal
atmosphere of pure spirits. I went so far as to speak of myself as
happy in my abnegation, and to sing the hymns of the martyrdom of love
to which we were by love, by greater love, condemned. I entreated Julie
not to think of my grief and not to give way to sorrow herself. I
showed a courage and a contempt for terrestrial happiness that I
possessed, alas! very often only in words. I offered up to her, as a
holocaust, all that was human in me. I elevated myself to the
immateriality of angels, so that she might not suspect a suffering or a
desire in my adoration. I besought her to seek in a tender and
sustaining religion, in the shelter of the church, in the mysterious
faith of Christ, the God of tears, in kneeling and in invocation,--the
hopes, the consolations, and the delights that I had tasted in my