her father had early given to her mind a severe
cast of thought, and substituted the inflexibility of resistance for the
confidence of affection. The cheerfulness of her entrance upon
womanhood, had been darkened, by an attendance upon the death-bed of her
mother, and the still more afflicting calamity of her eldest sister. Her
exertions to create a joint independence for her sisters and herself,
had been attended, neither with the success, nor the pleasure, she had
hoped from them. Her first youthful passion, her friendship for Fanny,
had encountered many disappointments, and, in fine, a melancholy and
premature catastrophe. Soon after these accumulated mortifications, she
was engaged in a contest with a near relation, whom she regarded as
unprincipled, respecting the wreck of her father's fortune. In this
affair she suffered the double pain, which arises from moral
indignation, and disappointed benevolence. Her exertions to assist
almost every member of her family, were great and unremitted. Finally,
when she indulged a romantic affection for Mr. Fuseli, and fondly
imagined that she should find in it the solace of her cares, she
perceived too late, that, by continually impressing on her mind
fruitless images of unreserved affection and domestic felicity, it only
served to give new pungency to the sensibility that was destroying her.

Some persons may be inclined to observe, that the evils here enumerated,
are not among the heaviest in the catalogue of human calamities. But
evils take their rank, more from the temper of the mind that suffers
them, than from their abstract nature. Upon a man of a hard and
insensible disposition, the shafts of misfortune often fall pointless
and impotent. There are persons, by no means hard and insensible, who,
from an elastic and sanguine turn of mind, are continually prompted to
look on the fair side of things, and, having suffered one fall,
immediately rise again, to pursue their course, with the same eagerness,
the same hope, and the same gaiety, as before. On the other hand, we not
unfrequently meet with persons, endowed with the most exquisite and
delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to
encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is
transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable. This character is
finely pourtrayed by the author of the Sorrows of Werter. Mary was in
this respect a female Werter.

She brought then, in the pre