How often have I taken up, and flung down, my pen! I hesitate in the
first period; I know not how, I know not where, to begin. And yet it
is to Eloisa I would write. To what a situation am I reduced? That
time is, alas! no more, when a thousand pleasing ideas crowded on my
mind, and flowed inexhaustibly from my pen. Those delightful moments
of mutual confidence, and sweet effusion of souls, are gone and fled.
We live no longer for each other. We are no more the same persons, and
I no longer know to whom I am writing. Will you deign to receive, to
read, my letters? Will you think them sufficiently cautious and
reserved? Shall I preserve the stile of our former intimacy? May I
venture to speak of a passion extinguished or despised? and am I not
to make as defiant approaches to Eloisa, as on the first day I
presumed to write? Good heavens! how different are the tedious hours
of my present wretchedness from those happy, those delightful days I
have passed! I but begin to exist, and am sunk into nothing. The hopes
of life that warmed my heart are fled, and the gloomy prospect of
death is all before me. Three revolving years have circumscribed the
happiness of my days. Would to God I had ended them, ere I had known
the misery of thus surviving myself! Oh that I had obeyed the
foreboding dictates of my heart, when once those rapid moments of
delight were passed, and life presented nothing to my view for which I
could wish to live! Better, doubtless, had it been that I had breathed
no longer, or that those three years of life and love I enjoyed could
be extracted from the number of my days. Happier is it never to taste
of felicity than to have it snatched from our enjoyment. Had I been
exempted from that fatal interval of happiness; had I escaped the
first enchanting look, that animated me to a new life, I might still
have preserved my reason, have still been fit to discharge the common
offices of life, and have displayed perhaps some virtues in the
duration of an insipid existence. One moment of delusion hath changed
the scene. I have ventured to contemplate with rapture an object I
should not have dared to look on. This presumption has produced its
necessary effect, and led me insensibly to ruin; I am become a
frantic, delirious wretch, a servile dispirited being, that drags
along his chain in ignominy and despair.