“I think you have the courage to excuse the plainness with which I am going to speak. The game for which we play, the stake that may eventually be lost is my happiness and perhaps your own.
“You have it in your power to give me new life, a new interest in existence, to raise me from the grave in which my heart lies buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the most known men of the age, of one whose principles, whose temper, whose thoughts, you have been long acquainted with, and will, I believe, confess their universal constancy. This connection, I should think, would restore you to self-respect, would give security to your future peace, and insure for you no mean degree of respectability. What you propose to choose in opposition to this I hardly know how to describe to you. You have said you cannot live without a passion; yet you prefer a mere abstraction, the unknown ticket you may draw in the lottery of men, to the attachment of a man of some virtues, a man whom you once, whom you long believed you loved. Your temper is so gentle and yielding, in those moments in which your heart is moved, that you indeed want a protector and an amulet I cannot bear to think of what, but for the sake of warning you, I would not suffer to remain a moment in my thoughts, the new difficulties, embarrassments, and repentance in which this amiable softness of your character will, too probably, involve you. I offer you a harbour, once your favourite thought; you prefer to launch away into the tempestuous treacherous ocean. I should not forgive myself in case of any new misfortune to you, if I had not ventured to say thus much.
“How singularly perverse and painful is my fate. When
all obstacles interposed between us, when I had a wife, when you had a husband,
you said you loved me, for years loved me! Could you
| 336 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
