This meeting was, in the highest degree, propitious. It not only assured
me of his existence, but proved that his miseries were capable of being
suspended. His slumber enabled me to pause, to ruminate on the manner by
which his understanding might be most successfully addressed; to collect
and arrange the topics fitted to rectify his gloomy and disastrous
perceptions.

Thou knowest that I am qualified for such tasks neither by my education
nor my genius. The headlong and ferocious energies of this man could not
be repelled or diverted into better paths by efforts so undisciplined as
mine. A despair so stormy and impetuous would drown my feeble accents.
How should I attempt to reason with him? How should I outroot
prepossessions so inveterate,--the fruits of his earliest education,
fostered and matured by the observation and experience of his whole
life? How should I convince him that, since the death of Wiatte was not
intended, the deed was without crime? that, if it had been deliberately
concerted, it was still a virtue, since his own life could by no other
means be preserved? that when he pointed a dagger at the bosom of his
mistress he was actuated, not by avarice, or ambition, or revenge, or
malice? He desired to confer on her the highest and the only benefit of
which he believed her capable. He sought to rescue her from tormenting
regrets and lingering agonies.

These positions were sufficiently just to my own view, but I was not
called upon to reduce them to practice. I had not to struggle with the
consciousness of having been rescued, by some miraculous contingency,
from imbruing my hands in the blood of her whom I adored; of having
drawn upon myself suspicions of ingratitude and murder too deep to be
ever effaced; of having bereft myself of love, and honour, and friends,