pleasure
to see the pattern of your new dress. Can it be a matter of
indifference to me to know what you wear? If your lofty brow is
knit? If our writers amuse you? If Canalis' songs delight you? I
read the books you read. Even to your boating on the lake every
incident touched me. Your letter is as lovely, as sweet as your
soul! Oh! flower of heaven, perpetually adored, could I have lived
without those dear letters, which for eleven years have upheld me
in my difficult path like a light, like a perfume, like a steady
chant, like some divine nourishment, like everything which can
soothe and comfort life.

"Do not fail me! If you knew what anxiety I suffer the day before
they are due, or the pain a day's delay can give me! Is she ill?
Is _he_? I am midway between hell and paradise.

"_O mia cara diva_, keep up your music, exercise your voice,
practise. I am enchanted with the coincidence of employments and
hours by which, though separated by the Alps, we live by precisely
the same rule. The thought charms me and gives me courage. The
first time I undertook to plead here--I forget to tell you this--I
fancied that you were listening to me, and I suddenly felt the
flash of inspiration which lifts the poet above mankind. If I am
returned to the Chamber--oh! you must come to Paris to be present
at my first appearance there!

"30th, Evening.

"Good heavens, how I love you! Alas! I have intrusted too much to
my love and my hopes. An accident which should sink that
overloaded bark would end my life. For three years now I have not
seen you, and at the thought of going to Belgirate my heart beats
so wildly that I am forced to stop.--To see you, to hear that
girlish caressing voice! To embrace in my gaze that ivory skin,
glistening under the candlelight, and through which I can read
your noble mind! To admire your fingers playing on the keys, to
drink in your whole soul in a look, in the tone of an _Oime_ or an
_Alberto_! To walk by the blossoming orange-trees, to live a few
months in the bosom of that glorious scenery!--That is life. What
folly it is to run after power, a name, fortune! But at Belgirate
there is everything; there is poetry, there is glory! I ought to
have made myself your steward, or, as that dear tyrant whom we
cannot hate proposed to me, live there as _cavaliere servente_,
only our