temper, that affection for extremes, has accompanied me through life.
Hence, not only all intermediums of emotion appear to me as tame, but
even the most overwrought excitation can bring neither novelty nor zest.
I have, as it were, feasted upon the passions; I have made that my daily
food, which, in its strength and excess, would have been poison to
others; I have rendered my mind unable to enjoy the ordinary aliments of
nature; and I have wasted, by a premature indulgence, my resources and my
powers, till I have left my heart, without a remedy or a hope, to
whatever disorders its own intemperance has engendered.



FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

When I left Dr. -----'s, I was sent to a private tutor in D-----e. Here
I continued for about two years. It was during that time that--but what
then befell me is for no living ear! The characters of that history are
engraven on my heart in letters of fire; but it is a language that none
but myself have the authority to read. It is enough for the purpose of
my confessions that the events of that period were connected with the
first awakening of the most powerful of human passions, and that,
whatever their commencement, their end was despair! and she--the object
of that love--the only being in the world who ever possessed the secret
and the spell of my nature--her life was the bitterness and the fever of
a troubled heart,--her rest is the grave

Non la conobbe il mondo mentre l'ebbe
Con ibill'io, ch'a pianger qui rimasi.

That attachment was not so much a single event, as the first link in a