sacrifice appalls me. But even then you force yourself
before me, and I feel that one glance from your eye is more to me
than all. If you could bear with me,--if you could soothe me,--if
when a cloud is on me you could suffer it to pass away unnoticed,
and smile on me the moment it is gone,--O Julia! there would be then
no extreme of poverty, no abasement of fortune, no abandonment of
early dreams which would not seem to me rapture if coupled with the
bliss of knowing that you are mine. Never should my lip, never
should my eye tell you that there is that thing on earth for which I
repine or which I could desire. No, Julia, could I flatter my heart
with this hope, you would not find me dream of unhappiness and you
united. But I tremble, Julia, when I think of your temper and my
own; you will conceive a gloomy look from one never mirthful is an
insult, and you will feel every vent of passion on Fortune or on
others as a reproach to you. Then, too, you cannot enter into my
nature; you cannot descend into its caverns; you cannot behold, much
less can you deign to lull, the exacting and lynx-eyed jealousy that
dwells there. Sweetest Julia! every breath of yours, every touch of
yours, every look of yours, I yearn for beyond all a mother's
longing for the child that has been torn from her for years. Your
head leaned upon an old tree (do you remember it, near ------?), and
I went every day, after seeing you, to kiss it. Do you wonder that
I am jealous? How can I love you as I do and be otherwise! My
whole being is intoxicated with you!

................

"This then, your pride and mine, your pleasure in the admiration of
others, your lightness, Julia, make me foresee an eternal and
gushing source of torture to my mind. I care not; I care for
nothing so that you are mine, if but for one hour."

It seems that, despite the strange, sometimes the unloverlike and
fiercely selfish nature of these letters from Brandon, something of a
genuine tone of passion,--perhaps their originality,--aided, no doubt,
by some uttered eloquence of the writer and some treacherous inclination
on the part of the mistress, ultimately conquered; and that a union so
little likely to receive the smile of a prosperous star was at length
concluded. The letter which terminated the correspondence was