Emily!--Emily!--how I love to repeat and to linger over that beautiful
name! If to see, to address, and, more than all, to touch you, has been
a rapture, what word can I find in the vocabulary of happiness to express
the realisation of that hope which now burns within me--to mingle our
youth together into one stream, wheresoever it flows; to respire the same
breath; to be almost blent in the same existence; to grow, as it were, on
one stem, and knit into a single life the feelings, the wishes, the being
of both!

To-night I shall see you again: let one day more intervene, and--I cannot
conclude the sentence. As I have written, the tumultuous happiness of
hope has come over me to confuse and overwhelm everything else. At this
moment my pulse riots with fever; the room swims before my eyes;
everything is indistinct and jarring--a chaos of emotions. Oh! that
happiness should ever have such excess!

When Emily received and laid this letter to her heart, she felt nothing
in common with the spirit which it breathed. With that quick transition
and inconstancy of feeling connmon in women, and which is as frequently
their safety as their peril, her mind had already repented of the
weakness of the last evening, and relapsed into the irresolution and
bitterness of her former remorse. Never had there been in the human
breast a stronger contest between conscience and passion;--if, indeed,
the extreme softness (notwithstanding its power) of Emily's attachment
could be called passion it was rather a love that had refined by the
increase of its own strength; it contained nothing but the primary guilt
of conceiving it, which that order of angels, whose nature is love, would
have sought to purify away. To see him, to live with him, to count the
variations of his countenance and voice, to touch his hand at moments
when waking, and watch over his slumbers when he slept--this was the