shame and bodily weakness and mental fever, until my ambition has
won a certain height, and my disdain of human pettiness rioted in
the external sources of fortune, as well as an inward fountain of
bitter and self-fed consolation. Yet, oh, Julia! I know not if
even this would have supported me, if at that epoch of life, when I
was most wounded, most stricken in body, most soured in mind, my
heart had not met and fastened itself to yours. I saw you, loved
you; and life became to me a new object. Even now, as I write to
you, all my bitterness, my pride, vanish; everything I have longed
for disappears; my very ambition is gone. I have no hope but for
you, Julia; beautiful, adored Julia! when I love you, I love even my
kind. Oh, you know not the power you possess over me! Do not
betray it; you can yet make me all that my boyhood once dreamed, or
you can harden every thought, feeling, sensation, into stone.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"I was to tell you why I look not for happiness in our union. You
have now seen my nature. You have traced the history of my life, by
tracing the history of my character. You see what I surrender in
gaining you. I do not deny the sacrifice. I surrender the very
essentials of my present mind and soul. I cease to be worldly. I
cannot raise myself, I cannot revive my ancestral name; nay, I shall
relinquish it forever. I shall adopt a disguised appellation. I
shall sink into another grade of life. In some remote village, by
means of some humbler profession than that I now follow, we must
earn our subsistence, and smile at ambition. I tell you frankly,
Julia, when I close the eyes of my heart, when I shut you from my
gaze, this sacrifice appalls me. But even then you force yourself
before me, and I feel that one glance from your eye is more to me