friends as my life has hitherto won
to itself, to consider well the direct purport of this letter. If you,
born in a grade so much higher than mine, feel that it is unwarrantable
insolence in me to aspire to the hand of my patron's grandchild, say so
plainly; and I remain not less grateful for your friendship than I was
to your goodness when dining for the first time at your father's palace.
Shy and sensitive and young, I felt that his grand guests wondered why I
was invited to the same board as themselves. You, then courted, admired,
you had sympathetic compassion on the raw, sullen boy; left those, who
then seemed to me like the gods and goddesses of a heathen Pantheon, to
come and sit beside your father's protege and cheeringly whisper to
him such words as make a low-born ambitious lad go home light-hearted,
saying to himself, "Some day or other." And what it is to an ambitious
lad, fancying himself lifted by the gods and goddesses of a Pantheon, to
go home light-hearted muttering to himself, "Some day or other," I doubt
if even you can divine.

But should you be as kind to the presumptuous man as you were to the
bashful boy, and say, "Realized be the dream, fulfilled be the object of
your life! take from me as her next of kin, the last descendant of your
benefactor," then I venture to address to you this request. You are in
the place of mother to your sister's child, act for her as a keeper now,
to prepare her mind and heart for the coming change in the relations
between her and me. When I last saw her, six months ago, she was still
so playfully infantine that it half seems to me I should be sinning
against the reverence due to a child, if I said too abruptly, "You are
woman, and I love you not as child but as woman." And yet, time is
not allowed to me for long, cautious, and gradual slide from the
relationship of friend into that of lover. I now understand what the
great master of my art once said to me, "A career is a destiny." By one
of those merchant princes who now at Manchester, as they did once at
Genoa or Venice, reign alike over those two civilizers of the world
which to dull eyes seem antagonistic, Art and Commerce, an offer is made
to me for a picture on a subject which strikes his fancy: an offer so
magnificently liberal that his commerce must command my art; and the
nature of the subject compels me to seek the banks of the Rhine as
soon as may be. I must have all the hues of the foliage in the meridian