rain that fell about my heart has acted like the waters
of the cavern of Antiparos[43] and has changed it to stone. I do not
weep or sigh; but I must reason with myself, and force myself to feel
sorrow and despair. This is not resignation that I feel, for I am dead
to all regret.

I communed in this manner with myself, but I was silent to all around
me. I hardly replied to the slightest question, and was uneasy when I
saw a human creature near me. I was surrounded by my female relations,
but they were all of them nearly strangers to me: I did not listen to
their consolations; and so little did they work their designed effect
that they seemed to me to be spoken in an unknown tongue. I found if
sorrow was dead within me, so was love and desire of sympathy. Yet
sorrow only slept to revive more fierce, but love never woke
again--its ghost, ever hovering over my father's grave, alone
survived--since his death all the world was to me a blank except where
woe had stampt its burning words telling me to smile no more--the
living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by
what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.

My convalescence rapidly advanced, yet this was the thought that
haunted me, and I was for ever forming plans how I might hereafter
contrive to escape the tortures that were prepared for me when I
should mix in society, and to find that solitude which alone could
suit one whom an untold grief seperated from her fellow creatures.
Who can be more solitary even in a crowd than one whose history and
the never ending feelings and remembrances arising from it is [_sic_]
known to no living soul. There was too deep a horror in my tale for
confidence; I was on earth the sole depository of my own secret. I
might tell it to the winds and to the desart heaths but I must never
among my fellow creatures, either by word or look give allowance to
the smallest conjecture of the dread reality: I must shrink before the
eye of man lest he should read my father's guilt in my glazed eyes: I
must be silent lest my faltering voice should betray unimagined
horrors. Over the deep grave of my secret I must heap an impenetrable
heap of false smiles and words: cunning frauds, treacherous laughter
and a mixture of all light deceits would form a mist to blind others
and be as the poisonous simoon to me.[44] I, the offspring of love,
the child of the woods, the nursling of Nature's bright self was to
subm