 a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour
for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I
sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects
of what I was now doing. Three years before I was engaged in the same manner,
and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and
filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another
being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand
times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and
wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in
deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a
thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before
her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived
loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it
when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with
disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be
again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of
his own species.
    Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world,
yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted
would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who
might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and
full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I
had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats: but now, for
the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think
that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not
hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the
whole human race.
    I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by
the light of the moon, the dæmon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his
lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to
me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid
himself in caves, or
