ssed with
moisture; everything turns the soul to melancholy. Guess what my
feelings are when the most soothing and consolatory thought that
occurs is a temporary remission and oblivion in your affections.

"I had scarcely finished the above when I received your letter
accompanying T. W.'s, which was delayed by an accident till after
the regular arrival of the post. I am not sorry to have put down my
feelings as they were."

But even his tenderness is regulated by his philosophy. The lover becomes
the philosopher quite unconsciously:--

"One of the pleasures I promised myself in my excursion," he writes
in another letter, "was to increase my value in your estimation,
and I am not disappointed. What we possess without intermission, we
inevitably hold light; it is a refinement in voluptuousness to
submit to voluntary privations. Separation is the image of death,
but it is death stripped of all that is most tremendous, and his
dart purged of its deadly venom. I always thought Saint Paul's
rule, that we should die daily, an exquisite Epicurean maxim. The
practice of it would give to life a double relish."

Imlay, too, had found absence a stimulus to love, but there was this
difference in what at first appears to be a similarity of opinion between
himself and Godwin: while the former sought it that he might not tire of
Mary, the latter hoped it would keep her from growing tired of him.

Mary's letters to her husband are full of the tender love which no woman
knew how to express as well as she did. They are not as passionate and
burning as those to Imlay, but they are sincerely and lovingly
affectionate, and reveal an ever increasing devotion and a calmer
happiness than that she had derived from her first union. Godwin,
fortunately, was able to appreciate them:--

"You cannot imagine," he tells her on the 10th of June, "how happy
your letter made me. No creature expresses, because no creature
feels, the tender affections so perfectly as you do; and, after all
one's philosophy, it must be confessed that the knowledge that
there is some one that takes an interest in one's happiness,
something like that which each man feels in his own, is extremely
gratifying. We love, as it were, to multiply the consciousness of
our existence, even at the hazard of what Montague described so
pathetically one night up