I have retained the sweetest, the tenderest, the most grateful recollection of that event. Before I made my name, Mr. Ives's family was the only one that bore me good-will and welcomed me with genuine affection. Poor, unknown, proscribed, with neither beauty nor attraction, I was offered an assured future, a country, a charming wife to take me out of my loneliness, a mother almost as beautiful to fill the place of my old mother, a father full of information, loving and cultivating literature, to replace the father of whom Heaven had bereaved me: what did I bring to set off against all that? No illusion could possibly enter into the choice they made of me; there was no doubt that I was loved. Since that time, I have met with but one attachment sufficiently lofty to inspire me with the same confidence. As to any interest of which I may subsequently have been the object, I have never been able to make out whether outward causes, a noisy fame, official finery, the glamour of a high literary or political position were not the covering which attracted the attentions shown to me. For the rest, if I had married Charlotte Ives, my part on earth would have been changed: buried in an English county, I should have become a sporting gentleman; not a single line would have fallen from my pen; I should even have forgotten my language, for I wrote in English, and my ideas were beginning to take shape in English in my head. Would my country have lost much by my disappearance? If I could put on one side that which has consoled me, I would say that I should already have numbered days of calm, instead of the troubled days that have fallen to my share. The Empire, the Restoration, the divisions and quarrels of France: what would all that have mattered to me? I should not each morning have to palliate faults, to contend with errors. Is it certain that I possess a real talent, and that that talent is worth the sacrifice of my whole life? Shall I outlast my tomb? If I do go beyond it, in the transformation which is now being brought about, in a changed world occupied with very different things, will there be a public to hear me? Shall I not be a man of the past, unintelligible to the new generations? Will not my ideas, my opinions, my very style seem tedious and antiquated to a scornful posterity? Will my shade be able to say, as the shade of Virgil said to Dante: "_Poeta fui e cantai_: I was a poet and I sang?"[192] * [Sidenote: I return to London.]