My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt XXVI
William Hazlitt to Peter George Patmore, [9 June 1822]
“Your letter raised me a moment from the depths of
despair; but, not hearing from you yesterday or to-day (as I hoped), I am gone
back again. You say I want to get rid of her. I hope you are more right in your
conjectures about her than in this about me. Oh, no! believe it, I love her as
I do my own soul: my heart is wedded to her, be she what she may; and I would
not hesitate a moment between her and an angel from heaven. I ![]()
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grant all you say about my self-tormenting madness; but
has it been without cause? Has she not refused me again and again with scorn
and abhorrence? * * * ‘She can make no
more confidences!’ These words ring for ever in my ears, and will
be my death-watch. My poor fond heart, that brooded over her, and the remains
of her affections, as my only hope of comfort upon earth, cannot brook or
survive this vulgar degradation. Who is there so low as I? Who is there
besides, after the homage I have paid her, and the caresses she has lavished on
me, so vile, so filthy, so abhorrent to love, to whom such an indignity could
have happened? When I think of this (and I think of it for ever, except when I
read your letters), the air I breathe stifles me. I am pent up in burning
impotent desires, which can find no vent or object. I am hated, repulsed,
bemocked, by all I love. I cannot stay in any place, and find no rest or
interruption from the thought of her contempt, and her ingratitude. I can do
nothing. What is the use of all I have done? Is it not that my thinking beyond
my ![]()
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strength, my feeling more than I ought about so many
things, has withered me up, and made me a thing for love to shrink from and
wonder at? Who could ever feel that peace from the touch of her hand that I
have done; and is it not torn for ever from me? My state is, that I feel I
shall never lie down again at night, nor rise up of a morning in peace, nor
ever behold my little boy’s face with pleasure while I live, unless I am
restored to her favour. Instead of that delicious feeling I had when she was
heavenly kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its own tenderness and
her sweetness, I am now enclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble,
like my thoughts; nature is dead without me, as hope is within me; no object
can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, or the prospect of it in time to
come. I wander, or rather crawl, by the seaside; and the eternal ocean, and
lasting despair, and her face, are before me. Hated, mocked by her on whom my
heart by its last fibre hung. I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet
companion, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart ![]()
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in her—cold, insensible, or struggling from me; and the worm gnaws me, and the
sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have
lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety; and my tea, which used to
refresh me when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh! cold, solitary, sepulchral
breakfasts, compared to those which I made when she was standing by my side; my
Eve, my guardian angel, my wife, my sister, my sweet friend, my all. *
* * Ah! what I suffer now, shows only what I have felt
before.
“But you say, ‘The girl is a good girl, if
there is goodness in human nature.’ I thank you for those words,
and I will fall down and worship you, if you can prove them true; and I would
not do much less to him that proves her a demon.
“Do let me know if anything has passed; suspense is my
greatest torment. I am going to Renton Inn, to see if I can work a
little.”
