ion in a veil of
happiness. I have been blessed by Heaven's mercy
with the power to know that you love me. Were you
not what you are, I could not venture to startle
you thus with a truth which, perhaps, you have
hardly confessed in waking reality to yourself; but
you are one of those who are coy of no truth that
could be found to have lain without alarm in your
own bosom, and, with those beloved hands pressed
together with the earnestness of the clasp of
prayer, you will say, 'yes! I love him!'

"I leave you, now, not to put our love to trial,
and still less in the ordinary meaning of the
phrase, to prepare to wed you. The first is little
needed, angels in heaven well know. The second is a
thought which will be in time, when I have done the
work on which I am newly bent by the inspiration of
love--_the making myself what you think me to be_.
Oh, Stephania! to feel encouraged, as God has given
me strength to feel, that I may yet be this--that I
may yet bring you a soul brought up to the standard
you have raised, and achieve it by effort in
self-denial, and by the works of honor and goodness
that are as possible to a man in obscurity and
poverty as to his brother in wealth and
distinction--this is to me new life, boundless
enlargement of sphere, food for a love of which,
alas! I was not before worthy.

"I have told you unreservedly what my station in
life is--what my hopes are, and what career I had
marked out for struggle. I shall go on with the
career, though the prizes I then mentally saw have
since faded in value almost as much as my purpose
is strengthened. Fame and wealth, my pure,
Stephania, are to you as they now can only be to
me, larger trusts of service and duty; and if I
hope they will come while other aims are sought, it
is because they will confer happiness on parents
and friends who mistakenly suppose them necessary
to the winner of your heart. I hope to bring them
to you. I know that I shall come as welcome without
them.

"While I write--while my courage and hope throb
loud in the pulses of my bosom--I can think even