a
fond heart, watching over a friend thus estranged, absent, though
present--over a poor wretch lost to reason and the social joys of
existence; and losing all consciousness of misery in its excess. What a
task, to watch the light of reason quivering in the eye, or with
agonizing expectation to catch the beam of recollection; tantalized by
hope, only to feel despair more keenly, at finding a much loved face or
voice, suddenly remembered, or pathetically implored, only to be
immediately forgotten, or viewed with indifference or abhorrence!

The heart-rending sigh of melancholy sunk into her soul; and when she
retired to rest, the petrified figures she had encountered, the only
human forms she was doomed to observe, haunting her dreams with tales of
mysterious wrongs, made her wish to sleep to dream no more.

Day after day rolled away, and tedious as the present moment appeared,
they passed in such an unvaried tenor, Maria was surprised to find that
she had already been six weeks buried alive, and yet had such faint hopes
of effecting her enlargement. She was, earnestly as she had sought for
employment, now angry with herself for having been amused by writing her
narrative; and grieved to think that she had for an instant thought of
any thing, but contriving to escape.

Jemima had evidently pleasure in her society: still, though she often
left her with a glow of kindness, she returned with the same chilling
air; and, when her heart appeared for a moment to open, some suggestion
of reason forcibly closed it, before she could give utterance to the
confidence Maria's conversation inspired.

Discouraged by these changes, Maria relapsed into despondency, when she
was cheered by the alacrity with which Jemima brought her a fresh parcel
of books; assuring her, that she had taken some pains to obtain them from
one of the keepers, who attended a gentleman confined in the opposite
corner of the gallery.

Maria took up the books with emotion. "They come," said she, "perhaps,
from a wretch condemned, like me, to reason on the nature of madness, by
having wrecked minds continually under his eye; and almost to wish
himself--as I do--mad, to escape from the contemplation of it." Her heart
throbbed with sympathetic alarm; and she turned over the leaves with awe,
as if they had become sacred from passing through the hands of an
unfortunate being, oppressed by a similar fate.

Dryden's Fables, Milton's Paradise Lost, with several mod