t not how
uselessly I have obeyed you. Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment
to support it? Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up? This
may be the passion of others; it is not mine. Months have passed since
we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is the first
token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die. But do you
think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and gladdened my eyes
with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed that I was by? Ah,
Isabel, your heart should have told you of it; mine would, had you been
so near me!

You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
heart are therefore idle? No. I write to you a thousand burning lines:
I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my thoughts, my
actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper. I send them not
to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come to your name, I
pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her power," and lo! "you are
by my side!"

Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I feel
a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.

Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
once forbidden a single direction, but we have none. At least, to me you
are everything. Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged into one
great and eternal thought, and that is you!

Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold
and stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
softer than a child. There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable. You smile
at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.

But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
noblest Isabel, you are ill! I am the cause, and you conceal it from
me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
balance,--it is in vain to deny it. I heard from others of your impaired
health; I have witnessed it myself. Do you remember last ni