ss
of vulgar desire? Am I aught but flame? A flame as pure and holy as the
rays of your soul which first kindled it, and now feed it unceasingly
through your beaming eye! Ah, Julie, estimate yourself more worthily,
and weep not over sorrows which you imagine you inflict on me! I do not
suffer. My life is one perpetual overflow of happiness, filled by you
alone,--a repose of sense, a sleep of which you are the dream. You have
transformed my nature. I suffer? Oh, would that I could sometimes
suffer, that I might have somewhat to offer unto God, were it but the
consciousness of a privation, the bitterness of a tear, in return for
all he has given me in you! To suffer for you, might, perchance, be the
only thing which could add one drop to that cup of happiness which it
is given me to quaff. To suffer thus, is it to suffer, or to enjoy? No;
thus to live, is, in truth, to die, but it is to die some years earlier
to this wretched life, to live beforehand of the life of heaven."

LXXXI.

She believed it, and I myself believed it, as I spoke and raised my
hands imploringly towards her. We would part after such converse as
this, each preserving, to feed on it separately till the morrow, the
impression of the last look, the echo of the last tone, that were to
give us patience to live through the long, tedious day. When I had
crossed the threshold, I would see her open her window, lean forth amid
her flowers on the iron bar of the balcony, and follow my receding
figure as long as the misty vapors of the Seine allowed her to discern
it on the bridge. Again and again would I turn to send back a sigh and
a lingering look, and strive to tear away my soul, which would not be
parted from her. It seemed as if my very being were riven asunder,--my
spirit to return and dwell with her, while my body alone, as a mere
machine, slowly wended its way through the dark and deserted streets to
the door of the hotel where I dwelt.

LXXXII.

Thus passed away, without other change than that afforded by my
studies, and our ever-varying impressions, the delightful months of
winter. They were drawing to a close. The early splendors of spring
already began to glance fitfully from the roofs upon the damp and
gloomy wilderness of the streets of Paris. My friend V----, recalled by
his mother, was gone, and had left me alone in the little room where he
had harbored me during my stay. He was to return in the autumn, and had
paid for the l