ith me again) I will repeat, I must ever repeat, that I am most
egregiously affected with the circumstances of the case: and, were this
paragon actually to quit the world, should never enjoy myself one hour
together, though I were to live to the age of Methusalem.

Indeed it is to this deep concern, that my levity is owing: for I
struggle and struggle, and try to buffet down my cruel reflections as
they rise; and when I cannot, I am forced, as I have often said, to try
to make myself laugh, that I may not cry; for one or other I must do: and
is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch, for a man to conquer
such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and, in the very
height of the storm, to be able to quaver out an horse-laugh?

Your Seneca's, your Epictetus's, and the rest of your stoical tribe, with
all their apathy nonsense, could not come up to this. They could forbear
wry faces: bodily pains they could well enough seem to support; and that
was all: but the pangs of their own smitten-down souls they could not
laugh over, though they could at the follies of others. They read grave
lectures; but they were grave. This high point of philosophy, to laugh
and be merry in the midst of the most soul-harrowing woes, when the
heart-strings are just bursting asunder, was reserved for thy Lovelace.

There is something owing to constitution, I own; and that this is the
laughing-time of my life. For what a woe must that be, which for an hour
together can mortify a man six or seven and twenty, in high blood and
spirits, of a naturally gay disposition, who can sing, dance, and
scribble, and take and give delight in them all?--But then my grief, as
my joy, is sharper-pointed than most other men's; and, like what Dolly
Welby once told me, describing the parturient throes, if there were not
lucid intervals, if they did not come and go, there would be no bearing
them.

***

After all, as I am so little distant from the dear creature, and as she
is so very ill, I think I cannot excuse myself from making her one visit.
Nevertheless, if I thought her so near--[what word shall I use, that my
soul is not shocked at!] and that she would be too much discomposed by a
visit, I would not think of it.--Yet how can I bear the recollection,
that, when she last went from me (her innocence so triumphant over my
premeditated guilt, as was enough to reconcile her to life, and to set
her above the sense of injuries so nobly sust