I can fancy that for such a
man, emotional, and with a need, now and again, to exercise
parsimony in emotions not strictly needful, something a
little mechanical, something hard and fast and clearly
understood, would enter into his ideal of a home. There were
storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at
the fireside even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So,
from a wife, of all women, he would not ask much. One letter
to her which has come down to us is, I had almost said,
conspicuous for coldness. (3) He calls her, as he called
other female correspondents, "dearly beloved sister;" the
epistle is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not
upon her own case, but upon that of her mother. However, we
know what Heine wrote in his wife's album; and there is,
after all, one passage that may be held to intimate some
tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly
opposite construction. "I think," he says, "I THINK this be
the first letter I ever wrote to you." This, if we are to
take it literally, may pair off with the "two OR THREE
children" whom Montaigne mentions having lost at nurse; the
one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in a parent.
Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his
troubled wooing than might have been expected. The whole
Bowes family, angry enough already at the influence he had
obtained over the mother, set their faces obdurately against
the match.
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