so that I might become her, or she might become me, and that God
himself in calling us to him should not distinguish or divide what the
miracle of love had transformed and mingled!... Oh, if you have a
brother or a son, who has never understood virtue, pray that he may
love as I did! As long as he loves thus, he will be capable of every
sacrifice or heroic devotion to equal the ideal of his love; and when
he no longer loves, he will still retain in his soul a remembrance of
celestial delights, which will make him turn with disgust from the
waters of vice, and his eye will be often secretly uplifted towards the
pure spring at which he once knelt to drink. I cannot tell the feeling
of salutary shame which oppressed me in the presence of the one I
loved; but her reproaches were so tender, her looks so gentle, though
penetrating, her pardon so divine, that in humbling myself before her I
did not feel myself abased, but rather raised and dignified. I almost
mistook for my own and inward light, what was only the reverberation in
me of her splendor and purity. Involuntarily I compared her to all the
other women I had approached, except Antonina, who appeared to me like
Julie in her artless infancy; and save my mother, whom she resembled in
her virtue and maturity, no woman in my eyes could bear the slightest
comparison. A single look of hers seemed to throw all my past life into
shade. Her discourse revealed to me depths of feelings and refinements
of passion, which transported me into unknown regions, where I seemed
to breathe for the first time the native air of my own thoughts. All
the levity, fickleness, and vanity, the aridity, irony, and bitterness,
of the evil days of my youth, disappeared, and I scarcely recognized
myself. When I left her presence I felt myself good, and thought myself
pure. Once more I felt enthusiasm, prayer, inward piety, and the warm
tears which flow not from the eyes, but well out like a secret spring
from beneath our apparent aridity, and cleanse the heart without
enervating it. I vowed never to descend from the celestial but by no