I was journeying the next day, alone, toward Venice. I had left written adieux for the party at Vallambrosa, pleading to my friends an unwillingness to bear the pain of a formal separation. Betwixt midnight and morning, however, I had written a parting letter for Stephania, which I had committed to the kind envoying of Father Ludovic, and thus it ran:—
"When you read this, Stephania, I shall be alone with the thought of you, traveling a reluctant road, but still with a burthen in my heart which will bring me to you again, and which even now envelopes my pang of separation in a veil of happiness. I have been blessed by Heaven's mercy with the power to know that you love me. Were you not what you are, I could not venture to startle you thus with a truth which, perhaps, you have hardly confessed in waking reality to yourself; but you are one of those who are coy of no truth that could be found to have lain without alarm in your own bosom, and, with those beloved hands pressed together with the earnestness of the clasp of prayer, you will say, 'yes! I love him!'
"I leave you, now, not to put our love to trial, and still less in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, to prepare to wed you. The first is little needed, angels in heaven well know. The second is a thought which will be in time, when I have done the work on which I am newly bent by the inspiration of love—the making myself what you think me to be. Oh, Stephania! to feel encouraged, as God has given me strength to feel, that I may yet be this—that I may yet bring you a soul brought up to the standard you have raised, and achieve it by effort in self-denial, and by the works of honor and goodness that are as possible to a man in obscurity and poverty as to his brother in wealth and distinction—this is to me new life, boundless enlargement of sphere, food for a love of which, alas! I was not before worthy.
"I have told you unreservedly what my station in life is—what my hopes are, and what career I had marked out for struggle. I shall go on with the career, though the prizes I then mentally saw have since faded in value almost as much as my purpose is strengthened. Fame and wealth, my pure, Stephania, are to you as they now can only be to me, larger trusts of service and duty; and if I hope they will come while other aims are sought, it is because they will confer happiness on parents and friends who mistakenly suppose them necessary to the winner of your heart. I hope to bring them to you. I know that I shall come as welcome without them.
"While I write—while my courage and hope throb loud in the pulses of my bosom—I can think even happily of separation. To leave you, the better to return, is bearable—even pleasurable—to the heart's noonday mood. But I have been steeped for a summer, now, in a presence of visible and breathing loveliness, (that you cannot forbid me to speak of, since language is too poor to out-color truth,) and there will come moments of depression—twilights of deepening and undivided loneliness—hours of illness, perhaps—and times of discouragement and adverse cloudings over of Providence—when I shall need to be remembered with sympathy, and to know that I am so remembered. I do not ask you to write to me. It would entail difficulties upon you, and put between us an interchange of uncertainties and possible misunderstandings. But I can communicate with you by a surer medium, if you will grant a request. The habits of your family are such that you can, for the first hour after midnight, be always alone. Waking or sleeping, there will then be a thought of me occupying your heart, and—call it a fancy if you will—I can come and read it on the viewless wings of the soul.
"I commend your inexpressible earthly beauty, dear Stephania, and your still brighter loveliness of soul, to God's angel, who has never left you. Farewell! You will see me when I am worthy of you—if it be necessary that it should be first in heaven, made so by forgiveness there.
Cell of St. Eusebius, Vallambrosa—day-breaking."