ate; the dew of
the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened
my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling
me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What
torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all
other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel
that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my
life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you
food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the
universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; and
this happiness was within my touch, yet I could not enjoy
it. Of what plans did I not dream? What vision did not arise
from this sad heart? Sometimes, as I gazed on you, I went so
far as to form desires as mad as they were guilty: sometimes
I could have wished that there were no living creatures on
earth but you and me; sometimes, feeling that there was a
divinity mocking my wicked transports, I could have wished
that divinity annihilated, if only, locked in your arms, I
might have sunk from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God
and of the world. Even now--shall I say it?--even now, when
eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to appear
before the inexorable Judge--at the very moment when my
mother may be rejoicing to see my virginity devour my
life--even now, by a terrible contradiction, I carry with me
the regret that I have not been yours!"

At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it
looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great
love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than
literature--life--it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the
nethermost Hell.

[Sidenote: _Rene._]

_Rene_[24] has greater fame and no doubt exercised far more influence;
indeed in this respect _Atala_ could not do much, for it is not the
eternal, but the temporal, which "influences." But, in the same humble
opinion, it is extremely inferior. The French Werther[25] (for the
attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is hardly, if at all, veiled)
is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose father dies. He
lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be "more kin than
kind," and a sister Amelie, to whom he is fondly, but fraternally,
attached. Rene has begun the trick of disappointment early, and,