long chain which was coiled around my heart. It were a tedious and
bitter history, even were it permitted, to tell you of all the sins and
misfortunes to which in afterlife that passion was connected. I will
only speak of the more hidden but general effect it had upon my mind;
though, indeed, naturally inclined to a morbid and melancholy philosophy,
it is more than probable, but for that occurrence, that it would never
have found matter for excitement. Thrown early among mankind, I should
early have imbibed their feelings, and grown like them by the influence
of custom. I should not have carried within the one unceasing
remembrance, which was to teach me, like Faustus, to find nothing in
knowledge but its inutility, or in hope but its deceit; and to bear like
him, through the blessings of youth and the allurements of pleasure, the
curse and the presence of a fiend.



FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

It was after the first violent grief produced by that train of
circumstances to which I must necessarily so darkly allude, that I began
to apply with earnestness to books. Night and day I devoted myself
unceasingly to study, and from this fit I was only recovered by the long
and dangerous illness it produced. Alas! there is no fool like him who
wishes for knowledge! It is only through woe that we are taught to
reflect, and we gather the honey of worldly wisdom, not from flowers, but
thorns.

"Une grande passion malheureuse est un grand moyen de sagesse." From the
moment in which the buoyancy of my spirit was first broken by real
anguish, the losses of the heart were repaired by the experience of the