to be laid--
To bless and to be blessed--to be heart-bare
To one who found his bettered likeness there--
To think for ever with him, like a bride--
To haunt his eye, like taste personified--
To double his delight, to share his sorrow,
And like a morning beam, wake to him every morrow?

I saw her pale, cold form glide silent by me, dead to shame as to pity.
Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to my bosom; this
lifeless image, which was all that was left of my love, was the only
thing to which my sad heart clung. Were she dead, should I not wish to
gaze once more upon her pallid features? She is dead to me; but what
she once was to me, can never die! The agony, the conflict of hope and
fear, of adoration and jealousy is over; or it would, ere long, have
ended with my life. I am no more lifted now to Heaven, and then plunged
in the abyss; but I seem to have been thrown from the top of a
precipice, and to lie groveling, stunned, and stupefied. I am
melancholy, lonesome, and weaker than a child. The worst is, I have no
prospect of any alteration for the better: she has cut off all
possibility of a reconcilement at any future period. Were she even to
return to her former pretended fondness and endearments, I could have no
pleasure, no confidence in them. I can scarce make out the
contradiction to myself. I strive to think she always was what I now
know she is; but I have great difficulty in it, and can hardly believe
but she still IS what she so long SEEMED. Poor thing! I am afraid
she is little better off herself; nor do I see what is to become of her,
unless she throws off the mask at once, and RUNS A-MUCK at infamy.
She is exposed and laid bare to all those whose opinion she set a value
upon. Yet she held her head very high, and must feel (if she feels any
thing) proportionably mortified.--A more complete experiment on
character was never made. If I had not met her lover immediately after
I parted with her, it would have been nothing. I might have supposed
she had changed her mind in my absence, and had given him the preference
as soon as she felt it, and even shewn her delicacy in declining any
farther intimacy with me. But it comes out that she had gone on in the
most forward and familiar way with both at once--(she could not change
her mind in passing from one room to another)--told both the same
barefaced and unblushing falsehoods, like the commonest creature;
received presen