tle boy, whose face I see struck blank at the
news, looking through the world for pity and meeting with contempt
instead, I should soon, I fear, settle the question by my death. That
recollection is the only thought that brings my wandering reason to an
anchor; that stirs the smallest interest in me; or gives me fortitude to
bear up against what I am doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Otherwise,
I am dead to every thing but the sense of what I have lost. She was my
life--it is gone from me, and I am grown spectral! If I find myself in
a place I am acquainted with, it reminds me of her, of the way in which
I thought of her,

--"and carved on every tree The soft, the fair, the inexpressive she!"

If it is a place that is new to me, it is desolate, barren of all
interest; for nothing touches me but what has a reference to her. If
the clock strikes, the sound jars me; a million of hours will not bring
back peace to my breast. The light startles me; the darkness terrifies
me. I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. She has
deceived me, and the earth fails from under my feet; no object in nature
is substantial, real, but false and hollow, like her faith on which I
built my trust. She came (I knew not how) and sat by my side and was
folded in my arms, a vision of love and joy, as if she had dropped from
the Heavens to bless me by some especial dispensation of a favouring
Providence, and make me amends for all; and now without any fault of
mine but too much fondness, she has vanished from me, and I am left to
perish. My heart is torn out of me, with every feeling for which I
wished to live. The whole is like a dream, an effect of enchantment; it
torments me, and it drives me mad. I lie down with it; I rise up with
it; and see no chance of repose. I grasp at a shadow, I try to undo the
past, and weep with rage and pity over my own weakness and misery. I
spared her again and again (fool that I was) thinking what she allowed
from me was love, friendship, sweetness, not wantonness. How could I
doubt it, looking in her face, and hearing her words, like sighs
breathed from the gentlest of all bosoms? I had hopes, I had prospects
to come, the flattery of something like fame, a pleasure in writing,
health even would have come back with her smile--she has blighted all,
turned all to poison and childish tears. Yet the barbed arrow is in my
heart--I can neither endure it, nor draw it out; for with it flows