on the stairs; and lest so frequent a correspondence should appear
suspicious to my mother, I would run into my room and bolt my door, so
as to devour the pages at leisure, without fear of interruption. How
many tears and kisses I impressed on the paper! Alas, when many years
afterwards I opened the volume of these letters, how many words effaced
by my lips, and that my tears or my transports had washed or torn out,
were wanting to the sense of many sentences!





LII.


After breakfast I used to retire to my upper room, to read my letter
over again and to answer it. These were the most feverish and
delightful hours in the day. I would take four sheets of the largest
and thinnest paper that Julie had sent me on purpose from Paris, and
whose every page, commencing very high up, ending very low down,
crossed, and written on the margin, contained thousands of words. These
sheets I covered every morning, and found them too scanty and too soon
filled for the passionate and tumultuous overflow of my thoughts. In
these letters there was no beginning, no middle, no end, and no
grammar; nothing, in short, of what is generally understood by the word
style. It was my soul laid bare before another soul expressing, or
rather stammering forth, as well as it could, the conflicting emotions
that filled it, with the help of the inadequate language of men. But
such language was not made to express unutterable things; its imperfect
signs and empty terms, its hollow speeches and its icy words, were