 closed? In her fourteenth year, in the spring of life, your Emma and mine, lovely and fragile blossom, was blighted by a killing frost—After a few days illness, she drooped, faded, languished, and died!

It was now that I felt—'That no agonies were like the agonies of a mother.' My broken spirits, from these repeated sorrows, sunk into habitual, hopeless, dejection. Prospects, that I had meditated with ineffable delight, were for ever veiled in darkness. Every earthly tie was broken, except that which bound you to my desolated heart with a still stronger cord of affection. You wept, in my arms, the loss of her whom you, yet, fondly believed your sister.—I cherished the illusion lest, by dissolving it, I should weaken your confidence in my maternal love, weaken that tenderness which was now my only consolation.

TO AUGUSTUS HARLEY.

My Augustus, my more than son, around whom my spirit, longing for dissolution, still continues to flutter! I have unfolded the errors of my past life—I have traced them to their source—I have laid bare my mind before you, that the experiments which have been made upon it may be beneficial to yours! It has been a painful, and a humiliating recital—the retrospection has been marked with anguish. As the enthusiasm—as the passions of my youth—have passed in review before me, long forgotten emotions have been revived in my lacerated heart—it has been again torn with the pangs of contemned love—the disappointment of rational plans of usefulness—the dissolution of the darling hopes of maternal pride and fondness. The frost of a premature age sheds its snows upon my temples, the ravages of a sickly mind shake my tottering frame. The morning dawns, the evening closes upon me, the seasons revolve, without hope; the sun shines, the spring returns, but, to me, it is mockery.

And is this all of human life—this, that passes like a tale that is told? Alas! it is a tragical tale! Friendship was the star, whose cheering influence I courted to beam upon my benighted course. The social affections were necessary to my existence, but they have been only inlets to sorrow—yet, still, I bind them to my heart!

Hitherto there seems to have been something strangely wrong in the constitutions of society—a lurking poison that spreads its contagion far and wide—a canker at the root of private virtue and private happiness—a principle of deception, that sanctifies error—a Circean cup that lulls into a fatal intoxication. But men begin to think and reason; reformation dawns, though the advance is tardy. Moral martyrdom may possibly
