I never stayed to ask myself how this would end, or whither it would lead me.  The mere act of loving was too sweet for questioning.  What cared I for the uncertainties of the future, having hope to live upon in the present?  Was it not enough “to feed for aye my lamp and flames of love,” and worship her till that worship became a religion and a rite?

And now, longing to achieve something which should extort at least her admiration, if not her love, I wished I were a soldier, that I might win glory for her—­or a poet, that I might write verses in her praise which should be deathless—­or a painter, that I might spend years of my life in copying the dear perfection of her face.  Ah! and I would so copy it that all the world should be in love with it.  Not a wave of her brown hair that I would not patiently follow through all its windings.  Not the tender tracery of a blue vein upon her temples that I would not lovingly render through its transparent veil of skin.  Not a depth of her dark eyes that I would not study, “deep drinking of the infinite.”  Alas! those eyes, so grave, so luminous, so steadfast:—­

     “Eyes not down-dropt, not over-bright, but fed
      With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,”

—­eyes wherein dwelt “thought folded over thought,” what painter need ever hope to copy them?

And still she never dreamed how dear she had grown to me.  She never knew how the very air seemed purer to me because she breathed it.  She never guessed how I watched the light from her window night after night—­how I listened to every murmur in her chamber—­how I watched and waited for the merest glimpse of her as she passed by—­how her lightest glance hurried the pulses through my heart—­how her coldest word was garnered up in the treasure-house of my memory!  What cared she, though to her I had dedicated all the “book and volume of my brain;” hallowed its every page with blazonings of her name; and illuminated it, for love of her, with fair images, and holy thoughts, and forms of saints and angels

     “Innumerable, of stains and splendid dyes
     As are the tiger-moth’s deep damask’d wings?”

Ah me! her hand was never yet outstretched to undo its golden clasps—­her eye had never yet deigned to rest upon its records.  To her I was nothing, or less than nothing—­a fellow-student, a fellow-lodger, a stranger.

And yet I loved her “with a love that was more than love”—­with a love dearer than life and stronger than death—­a love that, day after day, struck its roots deeper and farther into my very soul, never thence to be torn up here or hereafter.

CHAPTER XLIII.

ON A WINTER’S EVENING.

After a more than usually severe winter, the early spring came, crowned with rime instead of primroses.  Paris was intensely cold.  In March the Seine was still frozen, and snow lay thickly on the house-tops.  Quiet at all times, the little nook in which I lived became monastically still, and at night, when the great gates were closed, and the footsteps of the passers-by fell noiselessly upon the trodden snow, you might have heard a whisper from one side of the street to the other.  There was to me something indescribably delightful about this silent solitude in the heart of a great city.