ction with Imlay, which lasted for about
two years, are the letters which she wrote to him while he was away from
her, his absences being frequent and long. Fortunately, these letters
have been preserved. They were published by Godwin almost immediately
after her death, and were republished in 1879 by C. Kegan Paul. "They
are," says Godwin, "the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart
penetrated with the passion it essays to describe." She was thirty-five
when she met Imlay. Her passion for him was strong with the strength of
full womanhood, nor had it been weakened by the flirtations in which so
many women fritter away whatever deep feeling they may have originally
possessed. She was no coquette, as she told him many times. She could not
have concealed her love in order to play upon that of the man to whom she
gave it. What she felt for him she showed him with no reservation or
affectation of feminine delicacy. She despised such false sentiments. The
consequence is, that her letters contain the unreserved expression of her
feelings. Those written before she had cause to doubt her lover are full
of wifely devotion and tenderness; those written from the time she was
forced to question his sincerity, through the gradual realization of his
faithlessness, until the bitter end, are the most pathetic and
heart-rending that have ever been given to the world. They are the cry of
a human soul in its death-agony, and are the more tragic because they
belong to real life and not to fiction. The sorrows of the Heros,
Guineveres, and Francescas of romance are not greater than hers were.
Their grief was separation from lovers who still loved them. Hers was the
loss of the love of a man for whom her passion had not ceased, and the
admission of the unworthiness of him whom she had chosen as worthy above
all others. Who will deny that her fate was the more cruel?

She in her letters tells her story better than any one else could do it
for her. Therefore, as far as it is possible, it will be repeated here in
her own words.

Imlay's love was to Mary what the kiss of the Prince was to the Sleeping
Beauty in the fairy tale. It awakened her heart to happiness, leading her
into that new world which is the old. Hitherto the love which had been
her portion was that which she had sought

"... in the pity of other's woe,
In the gentle relief of another's care."

And yet she had always believed that the pure passion which a man g