n heart, and to have examined nature as through a glass--you, whose
thoughts stand forth like armies marshalled in defence of truth, bold
and dauntless, and without a stain upon their glittering armour;--are
you, at your age, and with your advantages, to bury yourself amidst
books and scrolls? Do you forget that action is the grand career for men
who think as you do? Will this word-weighing and picture-writing--the
cold eulogies of pedants--the listless praises of literary idlers,
content all the yearnings of your ambition? You were not made solely for
the closet; 'The Dreams of Pindus, and the Aonian Maids' cannot endure
through the noon of manhood. You are too practical for the mere poet,
and too poetical to sink into the dull tenor of a learned life. I have
never seen you, yet I know you--I read your spirit in your page; that
aspiration for something better and greater than the great and the
good, which colours all your passionate revelations of yourself and
others--cannot be satisfied merely by ideal images. You cannot be
contented, as poets and historians mostly are, by becoming great only
from delineating great men, or imagining great events, or describing
a great era. Is it not worthier of you to be what you fancy or relate?
Awake, Maltravers, awake! Look into your heart, and feel your proper
destinies. And who am I that thus address you?--a woman whose soul is
filled with you--a woman in whom your eloquence has awakened, amidst
frivolous and vain circles, the sense of a new existence--a woman who
would make you, yourself, the embodied ideal of your own thoughts and
dreams, and who would ask from earth no other lot than that of following
you on the road of fame with the eyes of her heart. Mistake me not; I
repeat that I have never seen you, nor do I wish it; you might be
other than I imagine, and I should lose an idol, and be left without
a worship. I am a kind of visionary Rosicrucian: it is a spirit that I
adore, and not a being like myself. You imagine, perhaps, that I have
some purpose to serve in this--I have no object in administering to your
vanity; and if I judge you rightly, this letter is one that might make
you vain without a blush. Oh, the admiration that does not spring from
holy and profound sources of emotion--how it saddens us or disgusts!
I have had my share of vulgar homage, and it only makes me feel doubly
alone. I am richer than you are--I have youth--I have what they call
beauty. And neither ri