September 6.
I received just now your letter of the 20th. I had written you a letter
last night, into which imperceptibly slipt some of my bitterness of
soul. I will copy the part relative to business. I am not sufficiently
vain to imagine that I can, for more than a moment, cloud your enjoyment
of life—to prevent even that, you had better never hear from me—and
repose on the idea that I am happy.
Gracious God! It is impossible for me to stifle something like
resentment, when I receive fresh proofs of your indifference. What I
have suffered this last year, is not to be forgotten! I have not that
happy substitute for wisdom, insensibility—and the lively sympathies
which bind me to my fellow-creatures, are all of a painful kind.—They
are the agonies of a broken heart—pleasure and I have shaken hands.
I see here nothing but heaps of ruins, and only converse with people
immersed in trade and sensuality.
I am weary of travelling—yet seem to have no home—no resting place to
look to.—I am strangely cast off.—How often, passing through the rocks,
I have thought, “But for this child I would lay my head on one of them,
and never open my eyes again!” With a heart feelingly alive to all the
affections of my nature—I have never met with one, softer than the stone
that I would fain take for my last pillow. I once thought I had, but it
was all a delusion. I meet with families continually, who are bound
together by affection or principle—and, when I am conscious that I have
fulfilled the duties of my station, almost to a forgetfulness of myself,
I am ready to demand, in a murmuring tone, of Heaven, “Why am I thus
abandoned?”