o ----? If she WILL, she
SHALL; and to call her so to you, or to hear her called so by others,
would be music to my ears, such as they never drank in. Do you think if
she knew how I love her, my depressions and my altitudes, my wanderings
and my constancy, it would not move her? She knows it all; and if she
is not an INCORRIGIBLE, she loves me, or regards me with a feeling
next to love. I don't believe that any woman was ever courted more
passionately than she has been by me. As Rousseau said of Madame
d'Houptot (forgive the allusion) my heart has found a tongue in speaking
to her, and I have talked to her the divine language of love. Yet she
says, she is insensible to it. Am I to believe her or you? You--for I
wish it and wish it to madness, now that I am like to be free, and to
have it in my power to say to her without a possibility of suspicion,
"Sarah, will you be mine?" When I sometimes think of the time I first
saw the sweet apparition, August 16, 1820, and that possibly she may be
my bride before that day two years, it makes me dizzy with incredible
joy and love of her. Write soon.

LETTER V

My dear Friend, I read your answer this morning with gratitude. I have
felt somewhat easier since. It shewed your interest in my vexations,
and also that you know nothing worse than I do. I cannot describe the
weakness of mind to which she has reduced me. This state of suspense is
like hanging in the air by a single thread that exhausts all your
strength to keep hold of it; and yet if that fails you, you have nothing
in the world else left to trust to. I am come back to Edinburgh about
this cursed business, and Mrs. ---- is coming from Montrose next week.
How it will end, I can't say; and don't care, except as it regards the
other affair. I should, I confess, like to have it in my power to make
her the offer direct and unequivocal, to see how she'd receive it. It
would be worth something at any rate to see her superfine airs upon the
occasion; and if she should take it into her head to turn round her
sweet neck, drop her eye-lids, and say--"Yes, I will be yours!"--why
then, "treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing could touch me further."
By Heaven! I doat on her. The truth is, I never had any pleasure, like
love, with any one but her. Then how can I bear to part with her? Do
you know I like to think of her best in her morning-gown and mob-cap--it
is so she has oftenest come into my room and ench