ad energy--health--nerve--resolution; but all are
gone: yes, yes, I have yielded--I do yield daily to what is at once my
tormentor and my temporary refuge from intolerable misery. You remember
the sad hour you first knew your husband was a drunkard. Your look on
that morning of misery--shall I ever forget it? Yet, blind and confiding
as you were, how soon did your ill-judged confidence in me return! Vain
hopes! I was even then past recovery--even then sealed over to blackness
of darkness forever.

"Alas! my wife, my peerless wife, why am I your husband? why the father
of such children as you have given me? Is there nothing in your
unequalled loveliness--nothing in the innocence of our helpless babes,
that is powerful enough to recall me? No, there is not.

"Augusta, you know not the dreadful gnawing, the intolerable agony of
this master passion. I walk the floor--I think of my own dear home, my
high hopes, my proud expectations, my children, my wife, my own immortal
soul. I feel that I am sacrificing all--feel it till I am withered with
agony; but the hour comes--the burning hour, and _all is in vain_. I
shall return to you no more, Augusta. All the little wreck I have saved
I send: you have friends, relatives--above all, you have an energy of
mind, a capacity of resolute action, beyond that of ordinary women, and
you shall never be bound--the living to the dead. True, you will suffer,
thus to burst the bonds that unite us; but be resolute, for you will
suffer more to watch from day to day the slow workings of death and ruin
in your husband. Would you stay with me, to see every vestige of what
you once loved passing away--to endure the caprice, the moroseness, the
delirious anger of one no longer master of himself? Would you make your
children victims and fellow-sufferers with you? No! dark and dreadful is
my path! I will walk it alone: no one shall go with me.

"In some peaceful retirement you may concentrate your strong feelings
upon your children, and bring them up to fill a place in your heart
which a worthless husband has abandoned. If I leave you now, you will
remember me as I have been--you will love me and weep for me when dead;
but if you stay with me, your love will be worn out; I shall become the
object of disgust and loathing. Therefore farewell, my wife--my first,
best love, farewell! with you I part with hope,--

'And with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost: