failed with thy songs to keep thy Heloïse on every tongue; the streets, the houses re-echoed me. How much fitter that you should now incite me to God than then to lust? Bethink thee what thou owest; heed what I ask; and a long letter I will conclude with a brief ending: farewell only one!"
Remarks upon this letter would seem to profane a shrine—had the man profaned that shrine? He had not always worshipped there. Heloïse knew this, for all her love. She said it too, writing in phraseology which had been brutalized through the denouncing spirit of Latin monasticism. How truly she puts the situation and how clearly she thinks withal, discerning as it were the beautiful and true in love and marriage. The whole letter is well arranged, and written in a style showing the writer's training in Latin mediaeval rhetoric. It was not the less deeply felt because composed with care and skill. Evidently the writer is of the Middle Ages; her occasional prolixity was not of her sex but of her time; and she quotes the ancients so naturally; what they say should be convincing. How the letter bares the motives of her own conduct: not for God's sake, or the kingdom of heaven's sake, but for Abaelard's sake she became a nun. She had no inclination thereto; her letters do not indicate that she ever became really and spontaneously devoted to her calling. Abaelard was her God, and as her God she held him to the end; though she applied herself to the consideration of religious topics, as we shall see. Moreover, her position as nun and abbess could not fail to force such topics on her consideration.
Is there another such love-letter, setting forth a situation so triple-barred and hopeless? And the love which fills the letter, which throbs and burns in it, which speaks and argues in it, how absolute is this love. It is love carried out to its full conclusions; it includes the whole woman and the whole of her life; whatever lies beyond its ken and care is scorned and rejected. This love is extreme in its humility, and yet realizes its own purity and worth; it is grieved at the thought of rousing a feeling baser than itself. Heloïse had been and still was Heloïse, devoted and self-sacrificing in her love. But the situation has become torture; her heart is filled with all manner of pain, old and new, till it is driven
