"Since the earthquake I have been somewhat ill. I have, perhaps, not been accustomed to love, and so to die. I take a philosophical book,—for poets just now take too violent a hold of me,—and fancy I am still following it, when I have been long since flown away over the sea. I am reading at this moment the life of the glorious Guyon. She knows what love is,—that godlike affection for the godlike, that losing of self in God, that eternal living and abiding steadfast in one great idea,—that growing sanctification through love, and that growing love through sanctification! The book falls out of my hands, I close my eyes, I dream and weep and love thee. O Albano, come earlier. What wilt thou now seek on mountains and ruins? Shall we not come hither again? But you roving men! Only women love, whether it be God, or yourselves, alas! Guyon, the holy Thérèse, the somewhat prosaic Bourignon, loved God as no man ever did (except the holy Fénelon); man deals with the highest being not much better than with the fairest. Albano, if thou hast any other longing than I, if thou desirest more on earth than me, more in Paradise than me, then say so, that I may leave off and die. Truly, when thou embracest thy sister, then I am jealous and long to be thy sister, and thy friend Schoppe, and thy father, and everything that thou lovest, and thy very self, if thou lovest it, and thy whole heaven and thy whole thou in me, thy I in thee.
"I will tell you something of my history. I went for a long time in silence over the earth; I saw courts, nations, and lands, and found that most men are only people. What did it concern me? One must never say of anything, that is bad, but only, that is stupid, and think no more of it. What I do not love has for me no existence, and instead of hating or despising it long, I have forgotten it. I was scolded at as proud and fantastic, and could not satisfy any one. But I kept and cherished my inner being, for no ideal must be given up, else the holy fire of life goes out, and God dies without resurrection. I saw men, and found always the simple distinction among them, that some were fine, intelligent, and delicate, without spirit or enthusiasm, and the rest very hearty and enthusiastic with shallow rudeness, but all selfish; although when their heart is full, and not on the wane, they, even like the full moon, show the fewest spots. Beside the teachings of my great mother, beside your great father, no one of them could hold up his head. Your Roquairol one could neither love nor hate, nor respect nor fear, although one could come very near to all these at once.
"It had a great effect, too, that I was always travelling: travelling often keeps one colder. When I look toward the coast, and think that a great Roman was now in Baja, now in Germany, now in Gaul, now in Rome, and that to him the earth was a great city, then I easily comprehend how to him men became masses. Travelling is an employment that we women always miss. Men have always something to do, and send the soul outward; women must stay all day at home with their hearts. In Switzerland I (as the Princess Idoine does) imposed upon myself a little economy, and I know how by means of little objects which one daily attains one consoles one's self for the high one which lies, like a god's throne, on an eminence.
"So I came just in this still week of life to the mer-de-glace in Montanvert. Of picturesque mountains, plains, dells, I had seen my fill in Spain, and of ice-mountains in Switzerland. But a sea of ice at that height, a solitary, primeval, blue-green sea surrounded with red rocks, a broad waste full of restless, upheaving, tempestuous billows, which a sudden death, a Medusa's head, had so, in the midst of life, frozen stiff and fast! At that time a storm, which at any other time would have been frightful to me, swept up the mountain with flames; I hardly noticed it, my soul hung musingly on the stillness of a petrified storm, on the repose of—ice! I shuddered, wept unusually all the way down the mountain, and the same week laid my economical play-work aside and continued my travels.
"I made, however, no storm-prayers, but dwelt down below there without complaint in the rainy hollow of a dark, cold existence. Then fate brought me to Epomeo, and there the gods willed that the scene should be changed.
"But now it must remain as it is. When a singular being has said to a singular being, 'Thou art the one!' then do they exist only through and for each other. The Psyche with her lamp will not feel it, if the lamp catches and consumes her locks and her hand and her heart, while she blissfully gazes upon the slumbering Cupid; but when the hot drop of oil escapes from the lamp and touches the god, and he awakes and angrily flies away from her forever—forever—Ah, thou poor Psyche! Of what avail to thee is death in the dissolved ice-sea? Has, then, no man ever yet experienced the pain of lost love, that he may know what a thousand times harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman? Who of them has fidelity, the genuine, which is neither a virtue nor a sensation, but the very fire which eternally animates and sustains the kernel of existence?
"I am sick, Albano, else I know not how I come by these gloomy ideas. I am so tranquil in my innermost heart; I have shown only the chords, not the tune. We must work and look, not upon the future, but upon the next coming present. If the time should ever, ever appear—I have neither remorse nor patience—the time when thou lovedst me no more, heartily—ah! I should be stiller, stronger, briefer than now: and what could there be beyond, except to die either for the loved one or—by him?
"Come soon, sweet one! It is very beautiful around us; it has rained, all the world is in jubilee, and sees the sun-drops, and has gathered itself a heavenly drink. I, too, have set out in haste for thee dishes and vases. Come; I will bring thee the olive-leaf and the myrtle-twig, and wind around thy head roses and violets. Come. Once I little thought that I should look so often toward Posilippo.
L."
"P. S.—The rival also looks toward Posilippo, and rejoices in the thought of thy return. Yet do not hurry anything. Adio, caro.