(Written in the Winter)
My good Friend,I received your letter this morning,and I kiss the rod not only with submission,but gratitude.Your reproofs of me and your defences of her are the only things that save my soul from perdition.
She is my heart's idol;and believe me those words of yours applied to the dear saint--"To lip a chaste one and suppose her wanton"--were balm and rapture to me.I have LIPPED HER,God knows how often,and oh!is it even possible that she is chaste,and that she has bestowed her loved "endearments"on me (her own sweet word)out of true regard?That thought,out of the lowest depths of despair,would at any time make me strike my forehead against the stars.Could I but think the love "honest,"I am proof against all hazards.She by her silence makes my dark hour;and you by your encouragements dissipate it for twenty-four hours.Another thing has brought me to life.Mrs.-----is actually on her way here about the divorce.Should this unpleasant business (which has been so long talked of)succeed,and I should become free,do you think S.L.will agree to change her name to?If she WILL,she SHALL;and to call her so to you,or to hear her called so by others,would be music to my ears,such as they never drank in.Do you think if she knew how I love her,my depressions and my altitudes,my wanderings and my constancy,it would not move her?She knows it all;and if she is not an INCORRIGIBLE,she loves me,or regards me with a feeling next to love.I don't believe that any woman was ever courted more passionately than she has been by me.As Rousseau said of Madame d'Houptot (forgive the allusion)my heart has found a tongue in speaking to her,and I have talked to her the divine language of love.Yet she says,she is insensible to it.Am I to believe her or you?You--for I wish it and wish it to madness,now that I am like to be free,and to have it in my power to say to her without a possibility of suspicion,"Sarah,will you be mine?"When I sometimes think of the time I first saw the sweet apparition,August 16,1820,and that possibly she may be my bride before that day two years,it makes me dizzy with incredible joy and love of her.Write soon.
