unsupported by you; and therefore it depends on you alone that I may be such as you desire. Oh! that you had not so powerful an influence over all my soul! It is your fears, surely, that make you thus deaf to my entreaties, and negligent of my desires: but what is there for you to fear? When we lived happily together you might have doubted whether it was pleasure or affection that united me to you; but the place from which I now indite my lamentations must have removed that idea, if it ever could find a place in your mind. Even within these gloomy walls, my heart springs toward you with more affection than it felt, if possible, in the gay and glittering world. Had pleasure been my guide, the world would have been the theatre of my joys. Two and twenty years only of my life had worn away, when the lover on whom my soul doated was cruelly torn from my arms; and at that age female charms are not generally despised; but, instead of seeking to indulge the pleasures of youth, your Eloisa, when deprived of thee, renounced the world, suppressed the emotions of sense, at a time when the pulses beat with the warmest ardor, and buried herself within the cold and cheerless region of the cloister. To you she consecrated the flower of her charms; to you she now devotes the poor remains of faded beauty; and dedicates to heaven and to you, her tedious days and widowed nights in solitude and sorrow.” The passion, alas! which Eloisa thus fondly nourished in her bosom, like an adder, to goad and sting her peace of mind, was very little of a spiritual nature; and the walls of Paraclete only re-echoed more fervent sighs than she had before breathed, and witnessed a more abundant flow of tears than she had shed in the cells of Argenteuil, over the memory of departed joys with her beloved Abelard. Her letters, indeed, show with what toilsome but ineffectual anxiety she endeavored to chasten her mind, and support her fainting virtue, as well by her own reasoning and reflection, as by his counsels and exhortations; but the passion had tenaciously rooted itself at the very bottom of her heart; and it was not until the close of life that she was able to repress the transports of her imagination, and subdue the wild sallies of her fond and fertile fancy. Personally separated from each other, she indulged a notion that her love could not be otherwise than pure and spiritual; but there are many parts of letters which show how much she was deceived by this idea; for in all the fancied chastity of their tender and too ardent loves, “Back thro’ the pleasing maze of sense she ran, And felt within the slave of love and man.”