s and requests for money.
Although not possessed of any secret really important affecting my
character, he knew well that he was possessed of one important to
my quiet; and he availed himself to the utmost of my strong and deep
aversion even to the most delicate recurrence to my love to Gertrude
and its unhallowed and disastrous termination. At length, however, he
wearied me. I found that he was sinking into the very dregs and refuse
of society, and I could not longer brook the idea of enduring his
familiarity and feeding his vices.

"I pass over any detail of my own feelings, as well as my outward and
worldly history. Over my mind a great change had passed: I was no longer
torn by violent and contending passions; upon the tumultuous sea a dead
and heavy torpor had fallen; the very winds, necessary for health, had
ceased:--I slept on the abyss without a surge."

"One violent and engrossing passion is among the worst of all
immoralities, for it leaves the mind too stagnant and exhausted for
those activities and energies which constitute our real duties. However,
now that the tyrant feeling of my mind was removed, I endeavoured
to shake off the apathy it had produced, and return to the various
occupations and businesses of life. Whatever could divert me from my own
dark memories, or give a momentary motion to the stagnation of my mind,
I grasped at with the fondness and eagerness of a child. Thus, you
found me surrounding myself with luxuries which palled upon my taste the
instant that their novelty had passed: now striving for the vanity of
literary fame; now, for the emptier baubles which riches could procure.
At one time I shrouded myself in my closet, and brooded over the dogmas
of the learned and the errors of the wise; at another, I plunged into
the more engrossing and active pursuits of the living crowd which rolled
around me,--and flattered my heart, that amid the applause of senators
and the whirlpool of affairs, I could lull to rest the voices of the
past and the spectre of the dead.

"Whether these hopes were effectual, and the struggle not in vain,
this haggard and wasting form, drooping day by day into the grave, can
declare; but I said I would not dwell long upon this part of my history,
nor is it necessary. Of one thing only, not connected with the main part
of my confessions, it is right, for the sake of one tender and guiltless
being, that I should speak.

"In the cold and friendless world with which