'Had I, you tell me, "worshipped at the altar of reason, but half as assiduously as I have sacrificed at the shrine of illusion, my happiness might have been enviable." But do you not perceive, that my reason was the auxiliary of my passion, or rather my passion the generative principle of my reason? Had not these contradictions, these oppositions, roused the energy of my mind, I might have domesticated, tamely, in the lap of indolence and apathy. 'I do ask myself, every day--"Why should I be miserable?"--and I answer, "Because the strong, predominant, sentiment of my soul, close twisted with all its cherished associations, has been rudely torn away, and the blood flows from the lacerated wound. You would be ashamed of placing disappointed love in your enumeration of evils! Gray was not ashamed of this-- 'And pining love shall waste their youth, And jealousy, with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart!' * * * * * 'These shall the stings of falsehood try, And hard unkindness' alter'd eye, That mocks the tear it forc'd to flow.'" 'Is it possible that you can be insensible of all the mighty mischiefs which have been caused by this passion--of the great events and changes of society, to which it has operated as a powerful, though secret, spring? That Jupiter shrouded his glories beneath a mortal form; that he descended yet lower, and crawled as a reptile--that Hercules took the distaff, and Sampson was shorn of his strength, are in their spirit, no fables. Yet, these were the legends of ages less degenerate than this, and states of society less corrupt. Ask your own heart--whether some of its most exquisite sensations have not arisen from sources, which, to nine-tenths of the world, would be equally inconceivable: Mine, I believe, is a _solitary madness in the eighteenth century: it is not on the altars of love, but of gold, that men, now, come to pay their offerings_.