ent to a private tutor in D-----e. Here
I continued for about two years. It was during that time that--but what
then befell me is for no living ear! The characters of that history are
engraven on my heart in letters of fire; but it is a language that none
but myself have the authority to read. It is enough for the purpose of
my confessions that the events of that period were connected with
the first awakening of the most powerful of human passions, and that,
whatever their commencement, their end was despair! and she--the object
of that love--the only being in the world who ever possessed the secret
and the spell of my nature--her life was the bitterness and the fever of
a troubled heart,--her rest is the grave--

Non la conobbe il mondo mentre l'ebbe
Con ibill'io, ch'a pianger qui rimasi.

That attachment was not so much a single event, as the first link in
a long chain which was coiled around my heart. It were a tedious and
bitter history, even were it permitted, to tell you of all the sins and
misfortunes to which in afterlife that passion was connected. I will
only speak of the more hidden but general effect it had upon my
mind; though, indeed, naturally inclined to a morbid and melancholy
philosophy, it is more than probable, but for that occurrence, that
it would never have found matter for excitement. Thrown early among
mankind, I should early have imbibed their feelings, and grown like them
by the influence of custom. I should not have carried within the one
unceasing remembrance, which was to teach me, like Faustus, to find
nothing in knowledge but its inutility, or in hope but its deceit; and
to bear like him, through the blessings of youth and the allurements of
pleasure, the curse and the presence of a fiend.

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

It was after the first violent grief produced by that train of
circumstances to which I must necessarily so darkly allude, that I
began to apply with earnestness to books. Night and day I devoted myself
unceasingly to study, and from this fit I was only recovered by the long
and dangerous illness it produced. Alas! there is no fool like him
who wishes for knowledge! It is only through woe that we are taught to
reflect, and we gather the honey of worldly wisdom, not from flowers,
but thorns.

"Une grande passion malheureuse est un grand moyen de sagesse." From
the moment in which the buoyancy of my spirit was first broken by real
anguish, the losses