If you should personally not please me, I shall never marry.

I can live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your friend.

Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I have appreciated it, and that suffices me.

In that is all my future.

Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of his judgment and a source of his wealth.