I completely altered my habits from that day, from respect for my poor
mother's repeated sacrifices, and the concentration of all my thoughts
in this one desire,--to see once more my love, and to prolong, as much
as possible, by the strictest economy, the allotted time I was to spend
with Julie. I became as calculating and as sparing of the little gold I
took with me as an old miser. It seemed as though the most trifling sum
I spent was an hour of my happiness, or a drop of my felicity that I
wasted. I resolved to live like Jean Jacques Rousseau, on little or
nothing, and to retrench from my vanity, my dress, or my food, all that
I wished to bestow on the rapture of my soul. I was not, however,
without an undefined hope of making some use of my talents in the cause
of my love. These were as yet made known to a few friends only by some
verses; but in the last three months I had written during my sleepless
nights a little volume of poetry, amatory, melancholy, or pious,
according as my imagination spoke to me in tender or in serious notes.
The whole had been copied out with care in my best handwriting, and
shown to my father, who was an excellent critic, though somewhat
severe; a few friends, too, had favorably judged some fragments. I had
bound up my poetical treasure in green, a color of good omen for my
hopes of fame; but I had not shown it to my mother, whose chaste and
pious purity of mind might have taken alarm at the more antique than
Christian voluptuousness of some of my elegies. I hoped that the simple
grace and the winged enthusiasm of my poetry might please some
intelligent publisher, who would buy my volume, or at least consent to
print it at his own expense; and that the public taste, attracted by
the novelty of a style springing from the heart, and nursed in the
woods, would, perhaps, confer on me a humble fortune and a name.