You, Montgomery, perhaps happily for yourself, have been a stranger to this species of refinement. You could have loved any where; and the utmost stretch of your powers of imagination, will not produce even a faint picture of that life of never-fading bliss I expected to enjoy, when I should have found my ideal fair one, for whose tenderness I preserved my heart a sanctuary, sacred, and inviolate. What, then, had been my faith, if, when the prototype of the ideal form did burst upon me in existence, I had been the chosen above all mankind of a heart corresponding in all things with my own. Sir Thomas commanded me home. You I left without pain. To him I returned without pleasure.--Yes: I returned home--and soon--it was men, Clement--ay then it was-- You say I advised you to forget her in other arms. Montgomery, why did I advise?--And wherein was I competent to judge?--Had you not already prepared other arms to open for your reception? How could I divine that she whom you loved was not of the race of those beings to whom you were constantly lending the epithets of charming, lovely, exquisite angelic? Nought beyond a glance of transient admiration, or a temporary delirium of the senses, could they excite in me. I sighed to find something worthy of remembrance. You sighed to forget the worth, the inestimable worth you had known! Wearied with the importunity of--'would to God I could forget her!'--Forget her in other arms, I said.--Most readily did you yield to the advice; for which, as you have justly said in one of your letters, you deserved--'tis your own words, Clement--you deserved damnation. And what art thou doing now?--Now, even that she has sacrificed herself to save thee from despair?--That she has--Let thy heart tell thee her deserts--let it remind thee, that she is sorrowing for thy safety--preparing in mind and affection against thy return ages of joy, of felicity, such as never--merciful heaven!--And thou art--seeking reconciliation with Janetta Laundy. Rememberest thou, Montgomery, the terrific and awful minutes we past on Vesuvius! Was not that a scene which, while it gratified curiosity and exhausted wonder, made nature shrink with repugnance from the situation?--Yet, in all the horrors of a night worse than that hour, lighted only by the flame of destruction, with showers of thundering dangers obstructing my footsteps, yet, had I been _thee_ Clement! would I have climbed that summit--aye and precipitated myself into the gulph of ruin, rather than forever blacken the fair sheet of love, by sinking to the embraces of a prostitute! Oh 'tis a stain indelible! Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous sea incarnadine, Making the green, one red.