se all their actions, and call upon the
universe to judge them. An event of the most deplorable sort, has
awfully imposed silence upon the gabble of frivolity.

We renewed our acquaintance in January 1796, but with no particular
effect, except so far as sympathy in her anguish, added in my mind to
the respect I had always entertained for her talents. It was in the
close of that month that I read her Letters from Norway; and the
impression that book produced upon me has been already related.

It was on the fourteenth of April that I first saw her after her
excursion into Berkshire. On that day she called upon me in Somers Town,
she having, since her return, taken a lodging in Cumming-street,
Pentonville, at no great distance from the place of my habitation. From
that time our intimacy increased, by regular, but almost imperceptible
degrees.

The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I
have always regarded as the purest and most refined style of love. It
grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been
impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, and
who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established
custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so
severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to
have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey, in
the affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there
was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other.

In July 1796 I made an excursion into the county of Norfolk, which
occupied nearly the whole of that month. During this period Mary
removed, from Cumming-street, Pentonville, to Judd place West, which may
be considered as the extremity of Somers Town. In the former situation,
she had occupied a furnished lodging. She had meditated a tour to Italy
or Switzerland, and knew not how soon she should set out with that view.
Now however she felt herself reconciled to a longer abode in England,
probably without exactly knowing why this change had taken place in her
mind. She had a quantity of furniture locked up at a broker's ever since
her residence in Store-street, and she now found it adviseable to bring
it into use. This circumstance occasioned her present removal.

The temporary separation attendant on my little journey, had its effect
on the mind of both parties. It gave a space for the maturin