sight if thou
wouldest not behold my death!

Thou are gone! murmuring and reluctant! And now my repose is coming--my
work is done!

Chapter XXVII

[Written three years after the foregoing, and dated at Montpellier.]

I imagined that I had forever laid aside the pen; and that I should
take up my abode in this part of the world, was of all events the least
probable. My destiny I believed to be accomplished, and I looked forward
to a speedy termination of my life with the fullest confidence.

Surely I had reason to be weary of existence, to be impatient of every
tie which held me from the grave. I experienced this impatience in its
fullest extent. I was not only enamoured of death, but conceived, from
the condition of my frame, that to shun it was impossible, even though
I had ardently desired it; yet here am I, a thousand leagues from my
native soil, in full possession of life and of health, and not destitute
of happiness.

Such is man. Time will obliterate the deepest impressions. Grief the
most vehement and hopeless, will gradually decay and wear itself out.
Arguments may be employed in vain: every moral prescription may be
ineffectually tried: remonstrances, however cogent or pathetic, shall
have no power over the attention, or shall be repelled with disdain;
yet, as day follows day, the turbulence of our emotions shall subside,
and our fluctuations be finally succeeded by a calm.

Perhaps, however, the conquest of despair was chiefly owing to an
accident which rendered my continuance in my own house impossible. At
the conclusion of my long, and, as I then supposed, my last letter to
you, I mentioned my resolution to wait for death in the very spot which
had been the principal scene of my misfortunes. From this resolution my
friends exerted themselves with the utmost zeal and perseverance to make
me depart. They justly imagined that to be thus surrounded by memorials
of the fate of my family, would tend to foster my disease. A swift
succession of new objects, and the exclusion of every thing calculated
to remind me of my loss, was the only method of cure.

I refused to listen to their exhortations. Great as my calamity was, to
be torn from this asylum was regarded by me as an aggravation of it. By
a perverse constitution of mind, he was considered as my greatest enemy
who sought to withdraw me from a scene which supplied eternal food to my
melancholy, and kept my despair from languishing.

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