rrid noises around her, which
previously had continually employed her feverish fancy. Thinking it
selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches,
who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her
imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes
of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this
gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human
corruption. Often at midnight was she waked by the dismal shrieks of
demoniac rage, or of excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of
indescribable anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused
phantoms of horror in her mind, far more terrific than all that dreaming
superstition ever drew. Besides, there was frequently something so
inconceivably picturesque in the varying gestures of unrestrained
passion, so irresistibly comic in their sallies, or so heart-piercingly
pathetic in the little airs they would sing, frequently bursting out
after an awful silence, as to fascinate the attention, and amuse the
fancy, while torturing the soul. It was the uproar of the passions which
she was compelled to observe; and to mark the lucid beam of reason,
like a light trembling in a socket, or like the flash which divides the
threatening clouds of angry heaven only to display the horrors which
darkness shrouded.

Jemima would labour to beguile the tedious evenings, by describing the
persons and manners of the unfortunate beings, whose figures or voices
awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria's bosom; and the stories she told
were the more interesting, for perpetually leaving room to conjecture
something extraordinary. Still Maria, accustomed to generalize her
observations, was led to conclude from all she heard, that it was a
vulgar error to suppose that people of abilities were the most apt to
lose the command of reason. On the contrary, from most of the instances
she could investigate, she thought it resulted, that the passions only
appeared strong and disproportioned, because the judgment was weak and
unexercised; and that they gained strength by the decay of reason, as
the shadows lengthen during the sun's decline.

Maria impatiently wished to see her fellow-sufferer; but Darnford was
still more earnest to obtain an interview. Accustomed to submit to every
impulse of passion, and never taught, like women, to restrain the most
natural, and acquire, instead of the bewitching fra