adoring the invisible object of its love,--all these efforts, I repeat,
which seemed to bend my pen beneath my fingers like a rebellious
instrument, made me sometimes find the very word, expression, or cry
that I required to give a voice to the unutterable. I had used no
language, but I had cried forth the cry of my soul; and I was heard.
When I rose from my chair, after this desperate but delightful struggle
against words, pen, and paper, I remembered that, spite of the winter
cold in my room, the perspiration stood upon my forehead, and I used to
open the window to cool my fevered brow.




LIV.


My letters were not only a cry of love, they were more frequently full
of invocations, contemplation, dreams of the future, prospects of
heaven, consolations, and prayers.

My love, which by its nature was debarred from all those enjoyments
which relax the heart by satisfying the senses, had opened afresh
within me all the springs of piety that had been dried up or polluted
by vile pleasures. I felt in my heart all the purity and elevation of
divine love. I strove to bear away with me to heaven, on the wings of
my excited and almost mystical imagination, that other suffering and
discouraged soul. I spoke of God, who alone was perfect enough to have
created her superhuman perfection of beauty, genius, and tenderness;
great enough to contain our boundless aspirations; infinite and
inexhaustible enough to absorb and whelm in himself the love he had