"All the currents of human affection--all that makes the past delightful, the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me. My heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. I was as a blighted tree, that perishes not at the root, but is withered in all its branches. Tears, I had none. One gracious drop, falling from my seared orbs, would have been the blessed channel of pent-up griefs that seemed to crush my almost frenzied brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose, in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was. Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived, except myself--the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's race--could find a grave! I, alone, looked upon the earth, and felt that it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON--the Giver of Life--the elixir of the Sibyl--but that would have been to subject myself to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the casting away of mine eternal soul! "Thus the stream of time rolled on, burying beneath its dark waves, our little span of present, in the huge ocean of a perpetual past, and devouring, as the food of both, our swift decaying future. But I floated on its surface, and beheld whole generations flourish and fade away, while age and silver hairs, growing infirmities, and the closing sigh that ends them all, mocked me with a horrible exemption. I remained, and might have remained, for ages yet to come, the fixed and unaltered image of what I was, when in Mauritania I encountered the potent Amaimon, the damned magician of the den, but for that--woman's faith, and man's fidelity--which have made me what I AM! "This _was_ my destiny. Now mark, how I became enthralled to it; and how it befell, that at last I shook it off, and found redemption.