Ah, the divinest joys and the most
cruel anguish are mingled in my destiny! Oh, that love would kill me;
and that you might survive to love after me, as your nature and your
heart should love! In dying, I shall be less wretched than I am while
feeling that I live by your sacrifices, and doom your youth and your
love to a perpetual death!"
"Oh, blaspheme not against such ineffable joy!" I exclaimed, placing my
trembling hands beneath her eyes to receive her fast dropping tears.
"What base idea have you conceived of him whom God has thought worthy
to meet, to understand, and to love you? Are there not more oceans of
tenderness and love in this tear which falls warm from your heart, and
which I carry to my lips as the life's blood of our tortured love, than
in the thousand sated desires and guilty pleasures in which are
engulfed such vile attachments as you regret for me? Have I ever seemed
to you to desire aught else than this twofold suffering? Does it not
make of us both voluntary and pure victims? Is it not an eternal
holocaust of love, such as, from Heloise to us, the angels can scarce
have witnessed? Have I ever once reproached the Almighty, even in the
madness of my solitary nights, for having raised me by you, and for
you, above the condition of man? He has given me in you, not a woman to
be polluted by the embrace of these mortal arms, but an impalpable and
sacred incarnation of immaterial beauty.
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