I adore them, and my choice must please them; they must find a son in you.
Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding their amiability,--how far can they bend under a family yoke, and put up with its little miseries?
That is a text I have meditated upon.

Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward! Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way; and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter.

I thought of all in my long, long meditations.

Do I not know that eminent men like you have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions of your soul that women rush to buy?
Yet still I cried to myself, "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you tell me are so cold.

Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossi of egoism and poetry?
Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me.