Once more have I escaped—But, alas! I, my best self, have not
escaped!—Oh! your poor Clarissa Harlowe! you also will hate me, I
fear!——
Yet you won’t, when you know all!
But no more of my self! my lost self. You that can rise in a morning to
be blest, and to bless; and go to rest delighted with your own
reflections, and in your unbroken, unstarting slumbers, conversing with
saints and angels, the former only more pure than yourself, as they
have shaken off the incumbrance of body; you shall be my subject, as
you have long, long, been my only pleasure. And let me, at awful
distance, revere my beloved Anna Howe, and in her reflect upon what her
Clarissa Harlowe once was!
Forgive, O forgive my rambling. My peace is destroyed. My intellects
are touched. And what flighty nonsense must you read, if you now will
vouchsafe to correspond with me, as formerly!
O my best, my dearest, my only friend! what a tale have I to
unfold!—But still upon self, this vile, this hated self!—I will shake
it off, if possible; and why should I not, since I think, except one
wretch, I hate nothing so much? Self, then, be banished from self one
moment (for I doubt it will be for no longer) to inquire after a dearer
object, my beloved Anna Howe!—whose mind, all robed in spotless white,
charms and irradiates—But what would I say?——
And how, my dearest friend, after this rhapsody, which on re-perusal, I
would not let go, but to show you what a distracted mind dictates to my
trembling pen! How do you? You have been very ill, it seems. That you
are recovered, my dear, let me hear. That your mother is well, pray let
me hear, and hear quickly. This comfort surely is owing to me; for if
life is no worse than chequer-work, I must now have a little white to
come, having seen nothing but black, all unchequered dismal black, for
a great, great while.
And what is all this wild incoherence for? It is only to beg to know
how you have been, and how you do now, by a line directed for Mrs.
Rachel Clark, at Mr. Smith’s, a glove-shop, in King-street,
Covent-garden; which (although my abode is secret to every body else)
will reach the hands of—your unhappy—but that’s not enough——
Your miserable CLARISSA HARLOWE.