“Common affection might have been satisfied with common usages.  I believed that you read my heart, and knew its devotion, its unalienable fidelity towards you.  I never loved any but you.  You came the embodied image of my fondest dreams.  The praise of men, power and high aspirations attended your career.  Love for you invested the world for me in enchanted light; it was no longer the earth I trod—­the earth, common mother, yielding only trite and stale repetition of objects and circumstances old and worn out.  I lived in a temple glorified by intensest sense of devotion and rapture; I walked, a consecrated being, contemplating only your power, your excellence;

  For O, you stood beside me, like my youth,
  Transformed for me the real to a dream,
  Cloathing the palpable and familiar
  With golden exhalations of the dawn.

’The bloom has vanished from my life’—­there is no morning to this all investing night; no rising to the set-sun of love.  In those days the rest of the world was nothing to me:  all other men—­I never considered nor felt what they were; nor did I look on you as one of them.  Separated from them; exalted in my heart; sole possessor of my affections; single object of my hopes, the best half of myself.

“Ah, Raymond, were we not happy?  Did the sun shine on any, who could enjoy its light with purer and more intense bliss?  It was not—­it is not a common infidelity at which I repine.  It is the disunion of an whole which may not have parts; it is the carelessness with which you have shaken off the mantle of election with which to me you were invested, and have become one among the many.  Dream not to alter this.  Is not love a divinity, because it is immortal?  Did not I appear sanctified, even to myself, because this love had for its temple my heart?  I have gazed on you as you slept, melted even to tears, as the idea filled my mind, that all I possessed lay cradled in those idolized, but mortal lineaments before me.  Yet, even then, I have checked thick-coming fears with one thought; I would not fear death, for the emotions that linked us must be immortal.

“And now I do not fear death.  I should be well pleased to close my eyes, never more to open them again.  And yet I fear it; even as I fear all things; for in any state of being linked by the chain of memory with this, happiness would not return—­even in Paradise, I must feel that your love was less enduring than the mortal beatings of my fragile heart, every pulse of which knells audibly,

  The funeral note
  Of love, deep buried, without resurrection. 
  No—­no—­me miserable; for love extinct there is no resurrection!

“Yet I love you.  Yet, and for ever, would I contribute all I possess to your welfare.  On account of a tattling world; for the sake of my—­of our child, I would remain by you, Raymond, share your fortunes, partake your counsel.  Shall it be thus?  We are no longer lovers; nor can I call myself a friend to any; since, lost as I am, I have no thought to spare from my own wretched, engrossing self.  But it will please me to see you each day! to listen to the public voice praising you; to keep up your paternal love for our girl; to hear your voice; to know that I am near you, though you are no longer mine.