Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Thomas Charles Morgan to Sydney Owen, 28 December 1811
Saturday, 4 o’clock,
p.m.,
December 28, 1811.
A thousand thousand blessings upon my soul’s best
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| 522 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. | |
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hope for her dear letters. Oh! how welcome was the
stranger joy to my heart, yet it was a stranger, and its first approach, almost
pain. I grew sick as I read, and trembled violently—tears flowed,
welcome, heavenly drops; dear as the first showers in April, when the cold east
wind has long parched the fields. My beloved Glorvina, you will come, then! you will be here at Christmas? and no longer leave me to
pine at your absence, and doubt your love. Yet tell me so again; tell me your
arrangements; as yet I dare not trust myself with this promise of better days.
I have had a long and dreary dream, and fear has not yet quitted me. How weak,
how inadequate are words to express all that I would say to you on this event!
the ideas crowd upon my mind, and in vain seek for utterance. I would tell you
of my love, my devotion, my gratitude. I would do homage to your virtues, to your tenderness, your
affection, by heaven more welcome to me than
fortune’s proudest gifts, her foremost places; but it must not be. Your
imagination must befriend me; think me at your feet, my long frozen bozom
thawed and melting into all that is tender, all that is affectionate. What an
age of misery I have suffered!—the pain, the grief of heart to think
hardly of you! Yet so it has been; you have suffered in my estimation more than
I dare tell; and though I feel now that I wronged you, yet was I not
unjust; but thank God, thank God, all is again peace, and I have nothing
to regret, but the lingering flight of slow-winged time. My sweet love, why do
you not take care of your health? Why do you suffer that odious cough to
remain? be more thoughtful of your-![]()
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self, for my sake; how
much too happy should I be was it possible to bear your sorrows and your
sickness for you—what a proud satisfaction in the endurance! The bell has
just rung, and I must bid you a hasty farewell. Give my love to Livy, and tell her, if I can manage a billet doux for her to-morrow I will write.
Lady Olivia Clarke [née Owenson] (1785 c.-1845)
The younger sister of Lady Morgan who married Dublin physician Sir Arthur Clarke
(1778-1857) in 1808. She wrote songs and a play, and published in the
Metropolitan Magazine and
Athenaeum.
Sir Thomas Charles Morgan (1780-1843)
English physician and philosophical essayist who married the novelist Sydney Owenson in
1812; he was the author of
Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals
(1822). He corresponded with Cyrus Redding.
