 not how torn affections & misery incalculable misery—withers up the soul. How petty do the actions of our earthly life appear when the whole universe is opened to our gaze—yet there our passions are deep & irrisisbable [sic] and as we are floating hopless yet clinging to hope down the impetuous stream can we perceive the beauty of its banks which alas my soul was too turbid to reflect—If knowledge is the end of our being why are passions & feelings implanted in us that hurries [sic] us from wisdom to selfconcentrated misery & narrow selfish feeling? Is it as a trial? On earth I thought that I had well fulfilled my trial & my last moments became peaceful with the reflection that I deserved no blame—but you take from me that feeling—My passions were there my all to me and the hopeless misery that possessed me shut all love & all images of beauty from my soul—Nature was to me as the blackest night & if rays of loveliness ever strayed into my darkness it was only to draw bitter tears of hopeless anguish from my eyes—Oh on earth what consolation is there to misery?

Your heart I fear, replied Diotima, was broken by your sufferings—but if you had struggled—if when you found all hope of earthly happiness wither within you while desire of it scorched your soul—if you had near you a friend to have raised you to the contemplation of beauty & the search of knowledge you would have found perhaps not new hopes spring within you but a new life distinct from that of passion by which you had before existed[99]—relate to me what this misery was that thus engroses you—tell me what were the vicissitudes of feeling that you endured on earth—after death our actions & worldly interest fade as nothing before us but the traces of our feelings exist & the memories of those are what furnish us here with eternal subject of meditation.

A blush spread over the cheek of the lovely girl—Alas, replied she what a tale must I relate what dark & phre[n]zied passions must I unfold—When you Diotima lived on earth your soul seemed to mingle in love only with its own essence & to be unknowing of the various tortures which that heart endures who if it has not sympathized with has been witness of the dreadful struggles of a soul enchained by dark deep passions which were its hell & yet from which it could not escape—Are there in the peaceful language used by the inhabitants of these regions—words burning enough to paint the tortures of the human heart—Can you understand them? or can you in any way sympathize with them—alas though dead I do and my tears flow as when I lived when my memory recalls the dreadful images of the past—

—As the lovely girl spoke my own eyes filled with bitter drops—the spirit of Fantasia seemed
