deplore with so
much bitterness? Your own misfortunes, or those of Virginia? Your own
misfortunes are indeed severe. You have lost the most amiable of women: she
who sacrificed her own interests to yours, who preferred you to all that
fortune could bestow, and considered you as the only recompense worthy of
her virtues. But might not this very object, from whom you expected the
purest happiness, have proved to you a source of the most cruel distress?
She had returned poor, disinherited; and all you could henceforth have
partaken with her was your labours: while rendered more delicate by her
education, and more courageous by her misfortunes, you would have beheld
her every day sinking beneath her efforts to share and soften your
fatigues. Had she brought you children, this would only have served to
increase her inquietudes and your own, from the difficulty of sustaining
your aged parents and your infant family. You will tell me, there would
have been reserved to you a happiness independent of fortune, that of
protecting a beloved object, which attaches itself to us in proportion to
its helplessness; that your pains and sufferings would have served to
endear you to each other, and that your passion would have gathered
strength from your mutual misfortunes. Undoubtedly virtuous love can shed a
charm over pleasures which are thus mingled with bitterness. But Virginia
is no more; yet those persons still live, whom, next to yourself, she held
most dear; her mother, and your own, whom your inconsolable affliction is
bending with sorrow to the grave. Place your happiness, as she did hers, in
affording them succour. And why deplore the fate of Virginia? Virginia
still exists. There is he assured, a region in which virtue receives its
reward. Virginia now is happy. Ah! if, from the abode of angels, she could
tell you, as she did when she bid you farewell. 'O, Paul! life is but a
trial. I was faithful to the laws of nature, love, and virtue. Heaven found
I had fulfilled my duties, and has snatched me for ever from all the
miseries I might have endured myself, and all I might have felt for the
miseries of others. I am placed above the reach of all human evils, and you
pity me! I am become pure and unchangeable as a particle of light, and you
would recall me to the darkness of human life! O, Paul! O, my beloved
friend! recollect those days of happiness, when in the morning we felt the
delightful sensations excited by the unfolding bea