gladdened my eyes with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed
that I was by? Ah, Isabel, your heart should have told you of it;
mine would, had you been so near me!

You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
heart are therefore idle? No. I write to you a thousand burning
lines: I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my
thoughts, my actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper.
I send them not to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come
to your name, I pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her
power," and lo! "you are by my side!"

Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I
feel a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.

Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
once forbidden a single direction, but we have none. At least, to me
you are everything. Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged
into one great and eternal thought, and that is you!

Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold and
stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
softer than a child. There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable. You smile
at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.

But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
noblest Isabel, you are ill! I am the cause, and you conceal it from