 should load my
memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of
enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward
form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of
unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now
crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no
malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the
frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature
whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the
beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes
a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates
in his desolation; I am alone.
    You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my
crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he
could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in
impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own
desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and
fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be
thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not
hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not
execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these
are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an
abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils
at the recollection of this injustice.
    But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the
helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his
throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my
creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among
men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he
lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal
that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I
think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for
the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that
