After breakfast I used to retire to my upper room, to read my letter over again and to answer it. These were the most feverish and delightful hours in the day. I would take four sheets of the largest and thinnest paper that Julie had sent me on purpose from Paris, and whose every page, commencing very high up, ending very low down, crossed, and written on the margin, contained thousands of words. These sheets I covered every morning, and found them too scanty and too soon filled for the passionate and tumultuous overflow of my thoughts. In these letters there was no beginning, no middle, no end, and no grammar; nothing, in short, of what is generally understood by the word style. It was my soul laid bare before another soul expressing, or rather stammering forth, as well as it could, the conflicting emotions that filled it, with the help of the inadequate language of men. But such language was not made to express unutterable things; its imperfect signs and empty terms, its hollow speeches and its icy words, were melted, like refractory ore, by the concentrated fire of our souls, and cast into an indescribable language, vague, ethereal, flaming and caressing, like the licking tongues of fire that had no meaning for others, but which we alone understood, as it was part of ourselves. These effusions of my heart never ended and never slackened. If the firmament had been a single page, and God had bid me fill it with my love, it could not have contained one-half of what spoke within me! I never stopped till the four sheets were filled; yet I always seemed to have said nothing, and in truth I had said nothing,--for who could ever tell what is infinite? LIII.