letter of the series. Its date is uncertain; but may,
as already intimated, be towards July 10, 1820. It follows next after
our No. 2.)

"My dearest Girl,--I wish you could invent some means to make me
at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more
concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my
mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I
cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute's content
until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I
will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can
have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like
mine go through.

"What island do your friends propose retiring to? I should be
happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object
to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have
nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came
to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than
pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of
any of those who used to meet at Elm Cottage[8] and Wentworth
Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I
cannot live with you, I will live alone.

"I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated
from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you: I cannot bear
flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. I am not so
unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday. To be
happy with you seems such an impossibility: it requires a luckier
star than mine--it will never be.

"I enclose a passage from one of your letters which I want you to
alter a little: I want (if you will have it so) the matter
expressed less coldly to me.

"If my health would bear it, I could write a poem which I have in
my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a
situation as mine. I would show some one in love, as I am, with a
person living in such liberty as you do.[9] Shakespeare always
sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet's heart was
full of such misery as mine is, when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a
nunnery, go, go!' Indeed, I should like to give up the matter at
once--I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world you
are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but
thorns for the future: wherever I may be