never stayed to ask myself how this would end, or whither it would
lead me. The mere act of loving was too sweet for questioning. What
cared I for the uncertainties of the future, having hope to live upon in
the present? Was it not enough "to feed for aye my lamp and flames of
love," and worship her till that worship became a religion and a rite?

And now, longing to achieve something which should extort at least her
admiration, if not her love, I wished I were a soldier, that I might win
glory for her--or a poet, that I might write verses in her praise which
should be deathless--or a painter, that I might spend years of my life
in copying the dear perfection of her face. Ah! and I would so copy it
that all the world should be in love with it. Not a wave of her brown
hair that I would not patiently follow through all its windings. Not the
tender tracery of a blue vein upon her temples that I would not lovingly
render through its transparent veil of skin. Not a depth of her dark
eyes that I would not study, "deep drinking of the infinite." Alas!
those eyes, so grave, so luminous, so steadfast:--

"Eyes not down-dropt, not over-bright, but fed
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,"

--eyes wherein dwelt "thought folded over thought," what painter need
ever hope to copy them?

And still she never dreamed how dear she had grown to me. She never
knew how the very air seemed purer to me because she breathed it. She
never guessed how I watched the light from her window night after
night--how I listened to every murmur in her chamber--how I watched and
waited for the merest glimpse of her as she passed by--how her lightest
glance hurried the pulses through my heart--how her coldest word was
garnered up in the treasure-house of my memory! What cared she, though
to her I had dedicated all the "book and volume of my brain;" hallowed
its every page with blazonings of her name; and illuminated it, for love
of her, with fair images, and holy thoughts, and forms of saints
and angels

"Innumerable, of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings?"

Ah me! her hand was never yet outstretched to undo its golden
clasps--her eye had never yet deigned to rest upon its records. To her I
was nothing, or less than nothing--a fellow-student, a fellow-lodger,
a stranger.

And yet I loved her "with a love that was more than love"--with a love
dearer than life and stronger than death--a lov