ith thy blue cone rising out of summer seas; for thou art the beacon of
my banished thoughts, and dost point my way to her, who is my heart's
true home. The air is too thin for me, that has not the breath of Love
in it; that is not embalmed by her sighs!

A THOUGHT

I am not mad, but my heart is so; and raves within me, fierce and
untameable, like a panther in its den, and tries to get loose to its
lost mate, and fawn on her hand, and bend lowly at her feet.

ANOTHER

Oh! thou dumb heart, lonely, sad, shut up in the prison-house of this
rude form, that hast never found a fellow but for an instant, and in
very mockery of thy misery, speak, find bleeding words to express thy
thoughts, break thy dungeon-gloom, or die pronouncing thy Infelice's
name!

ANOTHER

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate;
but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces,
silent and in tears.

LETTER IX

My dear P----, You have been very kind to me in this business; but I
fear even your indulgence for my infirmities is beginning to fail. To
what a state am I reduced, and for what? For fancying a little artful
vixen to be an angel and a saint, because she affected to look like one,
to hide her rank thoughts and deadly purposes. Has she not murdered me
under the mask of the tenderest friendship? And why? Because I have
loved her with unutterable love, and sought to make her my wife. You
say it is my own "outrageous conduct" that has estranged her: nay, I
have been TOO GENTLE with her. I ask you first in candour whether the
ambiguity of her behaviour with respect to me, sitting and fondling a
man (circumstanced as I was) sometimes for half a day together, and then
declaring she had no love for him beyond common regard, and professing
never to marry, was not enough to excite my suspicions, which the
different exposures from the conversations below-stairs were not
calculated to allay? I ask you what you yourself would have felt or
done, if loving her as I did, you had heard what I did, time after time?
Did not her mother own to one of the grossest charges (which I shall
not repeat)--and is such indelicacy to be reconciled with her pretended
character (that character with which I fell in love, and to which I
MADE LOVE) without supposing her to be the greatest hypocrite in the
world? My unpardonable offence has been that I took her at her word,
and w