y female bent hers to the ground & after a deep
sigh was the first to break the silence--

Oh divinest prophetess, said she--how new & to me how strange are your
lessons--If such be the end of our being how wayward a course did I
pursue on earth--Diotima you know not how torn affections & misery
incalculable misery--withers up the soul. How petty do the actions of
our earthly life appear when the whole universe is opened to our
gaze--yet there our passions are deep & irrisisbable [_sic_] and as we
are floating hopless yet clinging to hope down the impetuous stream
can we perceive the beauty of its banks which alas my soul was too
turbid to reflect--If knowledge is the end of our being why are
passions & feelings implanted in us that hurries [_sic_] us from
wisdom to selfconcentrated misery & narrow selfish feeling? Is it as a
trial? On earth I thought that I had well fulfilled my trial & my last
moments became peaceful with the reflection that I deserved no
blame--but you take from me that feeling--My passions were there my
all to me and the hopeless misery that possessed me shut all love &
all images of beauty from my soul--Nature was to me as the blackest
night & if rays of loveliness ever strayed into my darkness it was
only to draw bitter tears of hopeless anguish from my eyes--Oh on
earth what consolation is there to misery?

Your heart I fear, replied Diotima, was broken by your sufferings--but
if you had struggled--if when you found all hope of earthly happiness
wither within you while desire of it scorched your soul--if you had
near you a friend to have raised you to the contemplation of beauty &
the search of knowledge you would have found perhaps not new hopes
spring within you but a new life distinct from that of passion by
which you had before existed[99]--relate to me what this misery was
that thus engroses you--tell me what were the vicissitudes of feeling
that you endured on earth--after death our actions & worldly interest
fade as nothing before us but the traces of our feelings exist & the
memories of those are what furnish us here with eternal subject of
meditation.

A blush spread over the cheek of the lovely girl--Alas, replied she
what a tale must I relate what dark & phre[n]zied passions must I
unfold--When you Diotima lived on earth your soul seemed to mingle in
love only with its own essence & to be unknowing of the various
tortures which that heart endures who if it has not sympathized with