What letters and what ardor! What tones and accents! What fire and
purity combined, like light and transparency in a diamond, like passion
and bashfulness on the brow of the young girl who loves! What powerful
simplicity! What inexhaustible effusions! What sudden revivals in the
midst of languor! What sounds and songs! Then there would be sadness,
recurring like the unexpected notes at the end of an air; caressing
words, which seemed to fan the brow like the breath of a fond mother
bending over her smiling child; a voluptuous lulling of half-whispered
words, and hushed and dreamy sentences, which wrapped one in rays and
murmurs, stillness and perfume, and led one gently by the soft and
soothing syllables to the repose of love, the still sleep of the soul,
unto the kiss upon the page which said farewell! The farewell and the
kiss both silently received, as the lips silently impressed them. I
have seen those letters all again; I have read over, page by page, this
correspondence, bound up and classed, after death, by the pious hand of
friendship; one letter answering the other from the first note down to
the last word written by the death-struck hand, to which love still
imparted strength. I have read them o'er, and burned them with tears,
in secret, as if I committed a crime, and snatching twenty times the
half-consumed page from the flames to read it once again. Why did I
thus destroy? Because their very ashes would have been too burning for
this world, and I have scattered them to the winds of heaven.