FullReads

“I leave you, to return to Europe. My brother and my friends will tell you I am mad and inexcusable, and look upon you as a victim. They will say that, to have been a painter, were nothing to the career that I might mark out for my ambition, if ambition I must have, in politics. Politics in a country where distinction is a pillory! But I could not live here. It is my misfortune that my tastes are so modified by that long and compulsory exile, that life, here, would be a perpetual penance. This unmixed air of merchandise suffocates me. Our own home is tinctured black with it. You yourself, in this rural Paradise you have conjured up, move in it like a cloud. The counting-house rings in your voice, calculation draws together your brows, you look on everything as a means, and know its cost; and the calm and means-forgetting fruition, which forms the charm and dignity of superior life, is utterly unknown to you. What would be my happiness with such a wife? What would be yours with such a husband? Yet I consider the incompatibility between us as no advantage on my part–on the contrary, a punishment, and of your inflicting. What shall I be, anywhere, but a Tantalus–a fastidious ennuye, with a thirst for the inaccessible burning in my bosom continually!

“I pray you let us avoid another meeting before my departure. Though I cannot forgive you as a lover, I can think of you with pleasure as a cousin, and I give you as your due (‘damages,’ the law would phrase it,) the portion of myself which you thought most important when I offered you my all. You would not take me without the fortune, but perhaps you will be content with the fortune without me. I shall immediately take steps to convey to you this property of Revedere, with an income sufficient to maintain it, and I trust soon to hear that you have found a husband better worthy of you than your cousin–

“Philip Ballister.”