My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love — do you know what — all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived — and now it seems to me that in the mailbox where it was lying, in the sack where it was shaking, all the other letters absorbed, just by touching it, your unique charm and that that day all Germans received strange wonderful letters — letters that had gone mad because they had touched your handwriting. The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation — a week’s, ten days’ — what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you. I wake at night and know that you are together with me, — I sense your sweet long legs, your neck through your hair, your trembling eyelashes — and then such happiness, such simmering bliss follows me in my dreams that I simply suffocate . . .

I hope you must be enjoying to receive a letter from me. I may tell you that I enjoy to receive your letter ten times more. In prison life, a letter from dear ones is a great luxury.

No one other than I has read your letter. As always, even now, I carry your letters with me. How blissful it will it be for me, having gone beyond the city walls in May, thinking about my approaching journey, to pull out a letter of yours and assure myself sincerely that you love me, or at least to gaze at the hand and the writing of him, whom only I am able to love!

"Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came, — the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon, — that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure, — he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.

The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to wh

She sent him scented letters, And he received them with a strange delight. Just like his wife But how she was before the tears, And how she was before the years flew by, And how she was when she was beautiful.

This is how you must imagine your letters arriving, and me carrying them off to read in peace, and saying 'oh darling Virginia', and smiling to myself, and reading them all over again. Whereas mine just come with the postman.

To find accidently a handwritten letter of some old friend in a trunk. Ah, is this not happiness?

Read what is here. How could reading a letter harm you?

There might even be something in it that pleases you.

My secrets are carried, by these letters, over land and sea:

even enemies read letters received from their enemies.

Letters of friendship, of love, of hate, of business, of state, have come into new value within the last twenty-five years. Reading them has come to be one of the most alluring pleasures of a large class of persons.

A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

A consolatory letter of yours to a friend happened some days since to fall into my hands. My knowledge of the character, and my love of the hand, soon gave me the curiosity to open it. In justification of the liberty I took, I flattered myself I might claim a sovereign privilege over every thing which came from you nor was I scrupulous to break thro' the rules of good breeding, when it was to hear news of Abelard. But how much did my curiosity cost me? what disturbance did it occasion? and how was I surprised to find the whole letter filled with a particular and melancholy account of our misfortunes? I met with my name a hundred times; I never saw it without fear: some heavy calamity always, followed it, I saw yours too, equally unhappy. These mournful but dear remembrances, puts my spirits into such a violent motion, that I thought it was too much to offer comfort to a friend for a few slight disgraces by such extraordinary means, as the representation of our sufferings and revolutions. What reflections did I not make, I began to consider the whole afresh, and perceived myself pressed with the same weight of grief as when we first began to be miserable. Tho' length of time ought to have closed up my wounds, yet the seeing them described by your hand was sufficient to make them all open and bleed afresh. Nothing can ever blot from my memory what you have suffered in defence of your writings.

No one writes each other letters anymore, but I think there's something so special about receiving a really heartfelt letter, still.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

I'm glad that the secret is submerged in my heart, that in me is the end of what is for you the beginning. And be glad that you have in me an abyss into which you can cast everything without fear - as if into a second self - because your spirit has long lain there at the very bottom. I keep your letters like a ribbon from a mistress. I have the ribbon; write to me, I'll caress you again in a week.