The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, consisting of Wieland;or, The transformation. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a sleep-walker. Jane Talbot. Ormond; or, The secret witness. Clara Howard; or, The enthusiasm of love. With a memoir of the author.

16

CLARA HOWARD; OR,

get where I am,-and restore myself to those rapturous
scenes and that blissful period which preceded my last
inauspicious meeting with Morton.
I write to you, and yet I have nothing to say that will
please you. My heart overflows with bitterness. I would
pour it out upon you; and yet my equity will only add new
keenness to my compunction, when I come to review what
I have written. I am disposed to complain. I want an
object to whom to impute my disasters, and to gratify
my malice by upbraiding. There is a kind of satisfaction in revenge that I want to taste. I want to shift
my anxieties from my own shoulders to those of another
who deserves the burden more than I.
Your decision has made me unhappy. I believe your
decision absurd, yet I know your motives are disinterested
and heroic. I know the misery which adherence to your
schemes costs you. It is only less than my own. Why
then should I aggravate that misery? It is the system of
nature that deserves my hatred and my curses,-that
system which makes our very virtues instrumental to our
misery.
But chiefly my own folly have I to deplore,-that folly
which made me intrust to you the story of Miss Wilmot
before the bonds had been formed which no after-repentance could break. I ought to have forgotten her existence.
I ought to have claimed your love and your hand. You
would have bestowed them upon me, and my happiness
would have been placed beyond the reach of caprice.
What has wrought this change in my thoughts? I set
out from Hatfield with a heart glowing with zeal for the
poor Mary. I burned with impatience to throw myself
at her feet and tender her my vows. This zeal, time has
extinguished. I call to mind the perfections of another.
I compare them with those of the fugitive. My soul
droops at the comparison, and my tongue would find it
impossible to utter the vows which my untoward fate
may exact from me.
Yet there is no alternative. I must finish the course
that I have begun; I must conjure up impetuosity and zeal
in this new cause. I must act and speak with the earnestness of sincerity and the pathos of hope; otherwise I shall