how manage most skilfully to make good the first favourable impression which vanity whispered I had already produced? I determined to write to her.
How different was the writing of that letter, to the writing of those once-treasured pages of my romance, which I had now abandoned forever! How slowly I worked; how cautiously and diffidently I built up sentence after sentence, and doubtingly set a stop here, and laboriously rounded off a paragraph there, when I toiled in the service of ambition! Now, when I had given myself up to the service of love, how rapidly the pen ran over the paper; how much more freely and smoothly the desires of the heart flowed into words, than the thoughts of the mind! Composition was an instinct now, an art no longer. I could write eloquently, and yet write without pausing for an expression or blotting a word—It was the slow progress up the hill, in the service of ambition; it was the swift (too swift) career down it, in the service of love!
There is no