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Rh wished to inspire. Or perhaps, to put it more simply—vanity, like all social vices, craves for novelty; and I had at least the merit of being a stranger. Yet I could not have written a line about her for the world; we write from the memory of love, not its presence. How could I have borne to embody in her image the sorrows which give interest to poetry? If I had been Petrarch, Laura would never have been immortalised in my verse—I should have hated the very glory I myself had created: what, lay my heart bare for the general remark, the common pity! No; the statue I should raise to Love would be like that of Harpocrates, with his finger on his lip. "In a few days what a gulf opened between my former and present self! I had been content, industrious, devoted to that literature which was at once my hope and my honour. Now, I was idle, restless; I wrote—the pen fell from my hand; I read—the book dropped by my side, and I was lost in some reverie, in which her image was paramount—all  my former occupations were at an end; I seemed not to have an idea in the world that did not centre in her. "All the morning was merged in the moment when, after a thousand of those small disappointments with which 'Circumstance, that unspiritual god,' delights to mock our plans, I perhaps handed her from her carriage to some shop. Every evening was devoted to the chance of meeting her; and, alas! whether I did or did not see her, I