Ah, fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,
Or the death they bear,
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
With the wings of care!
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
Shall mine cling to thee!
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
It may bring to thee!--SHELLEY.
LETTER FROM ALGERNON MORDAUNT TO ISABEL ST. LEGER.
You told me not to write to you. You know how long, but not how
uselessly I have obeyed you. Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment
to support it? Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up? This
may be the passion of others; it is not mine. Months have passed since
we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is the first
token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die. But do you
think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and 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
me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
balance,--it is in vain to deny it. I heard from others of your impaired
health; I have witnessed it myself. Do you remember last night, when you
were in the room with your relations, and they made you sing,--a song
too which you used to sing to me, and when you came to the second stanza
your voice failed you, and you burst into tears, and they, instead of
soothing, reproached and chid you, and you answered not, but wept on?
Isabel, do you remember that a sound was heard at the window and a
groan? Even they were startled, but they thought it was the wind, for
the night was dark and stormy, and they saw not that it was I: yes, my
devoted, my generous love, it was I who gazed upon you, and from whose
heart that voice of anguish was wrung; and I saw your cheek was pale and
thin, and that the canker at the core had preyed upon the blossom.
Think you, after this, that I could keep silence or obey your request?
No, dearest, no! Is not my happiness your object? I have the vanity
to believe so; and am I not the best judge how that happiness is to be
secured? I tell you, I say it calmly, coldly, dispassionately,--not
from the imagination, not even from the heart, but solely from the
reason,--that I can bear everything rather than the loss of you; and
that if the evil of my love scathe and destroy you, I shall consider
and curse myself as your murderer! Save me from this extreme of misery,
my--yes, my Isabel! I shall be at the copse where we have so often met
before, to-morrow, at noon. You will meet me; and if I cannot convince
you, I will not ask you to be persuaded. A. M.
And Isabel read this letter, and placed it at her heart, and felt less
miserable than she had done for months; for, though she wept, there
was sweetness in the tears which the assurance of his love and the
tenderness of his remonstrance had called forth. She met him: how could
she refuse? and the struggle was past. Though not “convinced” she was
“persuaded;” for her heart, which refused his reasonings, melted at his
reproaches and his grief. But she would not consent to unite her fate
with him at once, for the evils of that step to his interests
were immediate and near; she was only persuaded to permit their
correspondence and occasional meetings, in which, however imprudent they
might be for herself, the disadvantages to her lover were distant and
remote. It was of him only that she thought; for him she trembled; for
him she was the coward and the woman; for herself she had no fears, and
no forethought.
And Algernon was worthy of this devoted love, and returned it as it was
given. Man’s love, in general, is a selfish and exacting sentiment: it
demands every sacrifice and refuses all. But the nature of Mordaunt was
essentially high and disinterested, and his honour, like his love, was
not that of the world: it was the ethereal and spotless honour of a
lofty and generous mind, the honour which custom can neither give nor
take away; and, however impatiently he bore the deferring of a union, in
which he deemed that he was the only sufferer, he would not have uttered
a sigh or urged a prayer for that union, could it, in the minutest or
remotest degree, have injured or degraded her.
These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful; these are
the shrines which sanctify love; these are the diviner spirits for whom
there is kindred and commune with everything exalted and holy in heaven
and earth. For them Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her hidden
spells; for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still woods
have a murmur for their ears; for them there is strange music in the
wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the voices
of the birds: their souls drink, and are saturated with the mysteries of
the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times believed to
be God Himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted vision, and its
dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts; the Moon and the
Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and golden dreams; and
it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening Star, felt in the inmost
sanctuary of his soul its mysterious harmonies with his most worshipped
hope, his most passionate desire, and dedicated it to--LOVE.