n guidance. She yielded herself up
to the uncontrolled rovings of a vagrant fancy. When a child she wrote
verses, which were shown in her presence to every guest. Their flattery
completed her intoxication. She afterward translated Italian sonnets and
composed elegies of which love was the only theme. These she was
encouraged by her mother to recite herself, in all companies, with a
pathos and sensibility which delighted her parents, but alarmed her more
prudent friends.

"She grew up with the confirmed opinion that the two great and sole
concerns of human life were love and poetry. She considered them as
inseparably connected, and she resolved in her own instance never to
violate so indispensable a union. The object of her affection was
unhappily chosen, and the effects of her attachment were such as might
have been expected from a connexion formed on so slight a foundation. In
the perfections with which she invested her lover, she gave the reins to
her imagination, when she thought she was only consulting her heart. She
picked out and put together the fine qualities of all the heroes of all
the poets she had ever read, and into this finished creature, her fancy
transformed her admirer.

"Love and poetry commonly influence the two sexes in a very
disproportionate degree. With men, each of them is only one passion
among many. Love has various and powerful competitors in hearts divided
between ambition, business, and pleasure. Poetry is only one amusement
in minds, distracted by a thousand tumultuous pursuits, whereas in girls
of ardent tempers, whose feelings are not curbed by restraint, and
regulated by religion, love is considered as the great business of their
earthly existence. It is cherished, not as 'the cordial drop,' but as
the whole contents of the cup; the remainder is considered only as froth
or dregs. The unhappy victim not only submits to the destructive
dominion of a despotic passion but glories in it. So at least did this
ill-starred girl.

"The sober duties of a family had early been transferred to her sisters,
as far beneath the attention of so fine a genius; while she abandoned
herself to studies which kept her imagination in a fever, and to a
passion which those studies continually fed and inflamed. Both together
completed her delirium. She was ardent, generous, and sincere; but
violent, imprudent, and vain to excess. She set the opinion of the world
at complete defiance, and was not only totally de