epigrams on Dumas and Victor Hugo and my beloved Lamartine. Though his
talk was showy, and dazzled me at first, I soon got rather tired of it,
even the first time we met. Since then I have seen him very often, not
only at M. Savarin's, but he calls here at least every other day, and we
have become quite good friends. He gains on acquaintance so far that one
cannot help feeling how much he is to be pitied. He is so envious! and
the envious must be so unhappy. And then he is at once so near and so
far from all the things that he envies. He longs for riches and luxury,
and can only as yet earn a bare competence by his labours. Therefore he
hates the rich and luxurious. His literary successes, instead of
pleasing him, render him miserable by their contrast with the fame of the
authors whom he envies and assails. He has a beautiful head, of which he
is conscious, but it is joined to a body without strength or grace. He
is conscious of this too,--but it is cruel to go on with this sketch.
You can see at once the kind of person who, whether he inspire affection
or dislike, cannot fail to create an interest, painful but compassionate.

You will be pleased to hear that Dr. C. considers my health so improved
that I may next year enter fairly on the profession for which I was
intended and trained. Yet I still feel hesitating and doubtful. To give
myself wholly up to the art in which I am told I could excel must
alienate me entirely from the ambition that yearns for fields in which,
alas! it may perhaps never appropriate to itself a rood for culture,--
only wander, lost in a vague fairyland, to which it has not the fairy's
birthright. O thou great Enchantress, to whom are equally subject the
streets of Paris and the realm of Faerie, thou who hast sounded to the
deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human life," and hast
taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far its courses are
guided by orbs in heaven,--canst thou solve this riddle which, if it
perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real distinction between