These letters, which were without any pitiful pretensions to talent on
my part, and were a delight and not a labor, might have been of
marvellous service to me at a later period, if fate had destined me to
address my fellow men, or to depict the shades, the transports, or the
pains of passion, in works of imagination. Unknown to myself, I
struggled desperately as Jacob wrestled with the angel, against the
poorness, the rigidity, and the resistance of the language I was forced
to use, as I knew not the language of the skies. The efforts that I
made to conquer, bend, smooth, extend, spiritualize, color, inflame, or
moderate expressions; the wish to render by words the nicest shades of
feeling the most ethereal aspirations of thought, the most irresistible
impulses, and the most chaste reserve of passion; to express looks,
attitudes, sighs, silence, and even the annihilation of the heart
adoring the invisible object of its love,--all these efforts, I repeat,
which seemed to bend my pen beneath my fingers like a rebellious
instrument, made me sometimes find the very word, expression, or cry
that I required to give a voice to the unutterable. I had used no
language, but I had cried forth the cry of my soul; and I was heard.
When I rose from my chair, after this desperate but delightful struggle
against words, pen, and paper, I remembered that, spite of the winter
cold in my room, the perspiration stood upon my forehead, and I used to
open the window to cool my fevered brow.