"But I disdained all these considerations--they occurred but faintly and ineffectually to my mind. Piety, conscience, and moral respect yielded before a feeling which decked its desires in the garb of necessity. Oh, how vain it is to analyze motive! Each man has the same motives; but it is the materials of each mind--the plastic or rocky nature, the mild or the burning temperament--that rejects the alien influence, or receives it into its own essence and causes the act. Such an impulse is as a summer healthy breeze just dimpling a still lake to one--while to another it is the whirlwind that rouses him to spread ruin around. "The Almighty who framed my miserable being made me a man of passion. They say that of such are formed the great and good. I know not that--I am neither; but I will not arraign the Creator. I will hope that in feeling my guilt--in acknowledging the superexcellence of virtue, I fulfil, in part, his design. After me, let no man doubt but that to do what is right is to ensure his own happiness; or that self-restraint, and submission to the voice of conscience implanted in our souls, impart more dignity of feeling, more true majesty of being, than a puerile assertion of will and a senseless disregard of immutable principles. "Is passion known in these days? Such as I felt, has any other experienced it? The expression has fled from our lips; but it is as deep-seated as ever in our hearts. Who, of created beings, has not loved? Who, of my sex, has not felt the struggle, and the yielding in the struggle, of the better to the worse parts of our nature? Who so dead to nature's influence as not, at least for some brief moments, to have felt that body and soul were a slight sacrifice to obtain possession of the affections of her he loved? Who, for some moments in his life, would not have seen his mistress dead at his feet rather than wedded to another? To feel this tyranny of passion is to be human; to conquer it is to be virtuous. He who conquers himself is, in my eyes, the only true hero. Alas, I am not such! I am among the vanquished, and view the wretch I am, and learn that there is nothing so contemptible, so pitiable, so eternally miserable, as he who is defeated in his conflict with passion. "That I am such, this very scene--this very occupation testifies. Once the slave of headlong impulse, I am now the victim of remorse. I am come to seek death, because I cannot retrieve the past; I long for the moment when the bullet shall pierce my flesh, and the pains of dissolution gather round me. Then I may hope to be, that for which I thirst, free! There is one who loves me. She is pure and kind as a guardian angel--she is as my own child--she implores me to live. With her my days might pass in a peace and innocence that saints might envy; but so heavy are the fetters of memory, so bitter the slavery of my soul, that even she cannot take away the sting from life.