If your reply is favorable I change my life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the folly to call happiness.

Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown, is what you dream it to be,--a fusion of feelings, a perfect accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of heart more precious far than what we call fidelity.

Can we say that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good, the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar ?--for to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.
I cannot speak to you any more of myself; not of my past life, nor of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side, filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed--an effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word "sacrifice." You have already rendered me forgetful, if not ungrateful; does that satisfy you?
Oh, speak! Say to me one word, and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully.
Our life will be, for me at least, that "felicity untroubled" which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,--a poem far superior to his Inferno.

Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of a dreamed existence; it is you.

Yes, dear, I feel within me the power to love, and to love endlessly,--to march to the grave with gentle slowness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls.