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_!