experienced such severe unkindness, but to whom she ardently desired to
be reconciled. The moment of desperation I have mentioned, occurred in
the close of May, and, in about a week after, she set out upon this new
expedition.

The narrative of this voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of
travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other
instance, found its way from the press. The occasional harshness and
ruggedness of character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, here totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to
make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.
She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and
dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius
which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to
a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit
seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment.

Thus softened and improved, thus fraught with imagination and
sensibility, with all, and more than all, "that youthful poets fancy,
when they love," she returned to England, and, if he had so pleased, to
the arms of her former lover. Her return was hastened by the ambiguity,
to her apprehension, of Mr. Imlay's conduct. He had promised to meet her
upon her return from Norway, probably at Hamburgh; and they were then to
pass some time in Switzerland. The style however of his letters to her
during her tour, was not such as to inspire confidence; and she wrote to
him very urgently, to explain himself, relative to the footing upon
which they were hereafter to stand to each other. In his answer, which
reached her at Hamburgh, he treated her questions as "extraordinary and
unnecessary," and desired her to be at the pains to decide for herself.
Feeling herself unable to accept this as an explanation, she instantly