 to them but with caution and reserve. She began to
remit her curiosity, having no great care to collect notions which she had no
convenience of uttering. Rasselas endeavoured first to comfort and afterwards to
divert her; he hired musicians, to whom she seemed to listen, but did not hear
them, and procured masters to instruct her in various arts, whose lectures, when
they visited her again, were again to be repeated. She had lost her taste of
pleasure and her ambition of excellence. And her mind, though forced into short
excursions, always recurred to the image of her friend.
    Imlac was every morning earnestly enjoined to renew his inquiries, and was
asked every night whether he had yet heard of Pekuah, till not being able to
return the princess the answer that she desired, he was less and less willing to
come into her presence. She observed his backwardness, and commanded him to
attend her. »You are not, said she, to confound impatience with resentment, or
to suppose that I charge you with negligence, because I repine at your
unsuccessfulness. I do not much wonder at your absence; I know that the unhappy
are never pleasing, and that all naturally avoid the contagion of misery. To
hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy; for who would
cloud by adventitious grief the short gleams of gaiety which life allows us? or
who, that is struggling under his own evils, will add to them the miseries of
another?
    The time is at hand, when none shall be disturbed any longer by the sighs of
Nekayah: my search after happiness is now at an end. I am resolved to retire
from the world with all its flatteries and deceits, and will hide myself in
solitude, without any other care than to compose my thoughts, and regulate my
hours by a constant succession of innocent occupations, till, with a mind
purified from all earthly desires, I shall enter into that state, to which all
are hastening, and in which I hope again to enjoy the friendship of Pekuah.«
    »Do not entangle your mind, said Imlac, by irrevocable determinations, nor
increase the burthen of life by a voluntary accumulation of misery: the
weariness of retirement will continue or increase when the loss of Pekuah is
forgotten. That you have been deprived of one pleasure is no very good reason
for rejection of the rest.«
    »Since Pekuah was taken from me, said the princess, I have no pleasure to
reject or to retain. She that has no one to love or trust has little to hope.
She wants the radical
