"O my Linda! I am nearer to thee again, but the distance between us seems to me here in the stillness so vast! O Linda, I love thee with pangs, both when near and when far,--O with what yet unfelt pangs should I lose thee? Why am I, then, so certain of thy love? Or so uncertain? Softly does thy heart speak to me. _Soft_ music or love is like a _distant_,--and the distant again is like the soft. Has the sublime pedestal of the thunder-god beside me agitated me so much, or do I think too vividly of the hollow, dead Herculaneum under me, where one city is one coffin? Weeping and oppressed, I look over the sea to the still island whereon thou dwellest. O that it is so long before we see each other again; that thou dost not draw every thought immediately out of my heart and I out of thine! Why does the delay of thy letter prefigure at once greater pains, ah, the greatest, before my soul? Why do I think; the deepest lines of pain upon our brow, the wrinkles of life, are only little lines out of the monstrous building-plan which the world-spirit draws, unconcerned what brows and joys his line of bliss painfully cuts through? If this line should one day go through our love--O forgive this premature pang! in this life, this alternation of transient showers and sunbeams, it may well be permitted." Here he was interrupted by joy and Dian, attended by an Ischian, who brought a letter from Linda, and came to take his back with him. He read it passionately, and added to his own these few more words as a tear of joy: "Day after to-morrow I come upon the island. What is the earth in comparison with a heart? Thou art mighty; thou holdest my whole blooming existence high into the heavens, and it falls upon thee, if it falls. Farewell! I fear verily neither the hot oil nor the flame of Psyche." Here is Linda's letter:-- "We have both been living very quietly since our agreeable runaway has been revelling about on mountains and in palaces. We have talked almost too much about him, besides sending for the prattling Agata to tell us something about his journey. Your Julia is full of blessings and helps for Linda. Never did I see before such a clear, determined, sharply discerning and yet cold nature, which only loves in giving, rather than gives in loving. She will never, it is true, feel the pangs which Venus Urania sends her chosen ones; but she is a born mother, and a born sister; and I ask her sometimes, why hast thou not all brothers and all orphans?