When I left Dr. -----'s, I was sent to a private tutor in D-----e. Here
I continued for about two years. It was during that time that--but what
then befell me is for no living ear! The characters of that history are
engraven on my heart in letters of fire; but it is a language that none
but myself have the authority to read. It is enough for the purpose of
my confessions that the events of that period were connected with the
first awakening of the most powerful of human passions, and that,
whatever their commencement, their end was despair! and she--the object
of that love--the only being in the world who ever possessed the secret
and the spell of my nature--her life was the bitterness and the fever of
a troubled heart,--her rest is the grave
Non la conobbe il mondo mentre l'ebbe
Con ibill'io, ch'a pianger qui rimasi.
That attachment was not so much a single event, as the first link in a
long chain which was coiled around my heart. It were a tedious and
bitter history, even were it permitted, to tell you of all the sins and
misfortunes to which in afterlife that passion was connected. I will
only speak of the more hidden but general effect it had upon my mind;
though, indeed, naturally inclined to a morbid and melancholy philosophy,
it is more than probable, but for that occurrence, that it would never
have found matter for excitement. Thrown early among mankind, I should
early have imbibed their feelings, and grown like them by the influence
of custom. I should not have carried within the one unceasing
remembrance, which was to teach me, like Faustus, to find nothing in
knowledge but its inutility, or in hope but its deceit; and to bear like
him, through the blessings of youth and the allurements of pleasure, the
curse and the presence of a fiend.