THE LADY AUGUSTA VERNON TO

LADY DELAWARD.

ERE I seek my pillow, dearest Mary, I must open my oppressed heart to you. Ah! why had I not courage to do so, before it was too late? But, I am a very child; and, alas! with more of the wilfulness of childhood than generally falls to the lot of even the weakest of my sex. To-morrow, Mary, I bestow my hand on one, whom, every moment proves to me, I do not, cannot love.

I made this discovery even in the hour that my entreaties won the reluctant consent of my dear and too indulgent father, and mother; but false pride, and the shame of being considered childish, and vacillating, have induced me to conceal the real state of my feelings from them. Often, while at Dela

ward Park, have I been tempted to make to you this unhappy avowal. Why, why did I not? for then, all would have been well. It was not, my dear friend, until, beneath your roof, I was a witness to the happiness to be derived from a marriage of affection, that my eyes were quite opened to the loveless, cheerless destiny I had, by my own folly, prepared for myself. But, even then, I struggled against the conviction. I tried to think, that when I saw Lord Annandale again, my reluctance might decrease; but the result has been otherwise far, far otherwise; and I am the victim of my own wilfulness!

Why do I tell you all this now; when, before the avowal reaches you, my fate will be irrevocably sealed? Alas! I divulge it to you, because my very soul is steeped in sadness; and I have no one here, to whom it can be revealed, that would pity me, except those from

whose affectionate hearts I would conceal it for ever. To leave the home of my infancy, even with one beloved, would always have been attended with pain; but to leave it with one for whom I entertain only indifference, is dreadful. A fearful presentiment of evil oppresses me. I feel as if I were about to abandon this place for ever; and now, for the first time, I am penetrated with a sense of all the tender, the too indulgent, affection my dear father and mother, and all the gratitude it has excited in my breast.

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During the last few days, I have often thought, that to dwell here, as I have hitherto dwelt, surrounded by loving faces and affectionate protectors, would be happiness enough. Why did I ever wish for any other? How empty, how puerile, appear now the brilliant dreams in which my prurient fancy has indulged, of the gaieties, the splendours, of a

fashionable life in London! when I should shine, for my brief minute, among the evanescent meteors of the season, that flash and disappear. I turn from these my frivolous anticipations, at this moment, with feelings such as I might experience on the bed of death; and wonder, and grieve, that they could ever have dazzled me. He, who appeared as the necromancer who was to conduct me through the magnificent scenes he so glowingly described. now looks like the baffled mountebank that manœuvres his puppets before children, who, having examined their mechanism, and detected the springs that move them, despise alike the exhibition and the exhibitor. Had I never witnessed the happiness—the rational and soul-satisfying happiness-which you enjoy, I might never have felt the reluctance I now experience to enter a career of dissipaG 2

tion, piloted by one who seems to think pleasure the end and aim of life.

I am sensible that I stand perilously in need of a high-minded and discerning monitor, to guide me through the mazes which I must enter; one who could not only give me a clue to the labyrinth, but still linger by my side, to support and cheer me. I require some fond heart in which I can confide some firm mind, on which I can depend; and now, with a fearful consciousness of the almost vital necessity of these safeguards, I have forged fetters that bind me to one nearly as blind as blind than myself: for, my inexperience awakens a salutary alarm, while he is steeled and dulled, by custom, to the dangers I can discern, but know not how to escape. I feel as if, in having precluded myself from ever forming a marriage of affection, I had closed

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