But do you think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and gladdened my eyes with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed that I was by?
Ah, Isabel, your heart should have told you of it; mine would, had you been so near me! You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and heart are therefore idle?
No.

I write to you a thousand burning lines: I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my thoughts, my actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper.

I send them not to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come to your name, I pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her power," and lo! "you are by my side!" Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I feel a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.
Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are once forbidden a single direction, but we have none.

At least, to me you are everything.

Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged into one great and eternal thought, and that is you! Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold and stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and softer than a child.