[661] In allusion to this sacrifice of herself at his will she says in her first letter: "You are of all mankind most abundantly indebted to me; and particularly for that proof of absolute submission to your commands in thus destroying myself at your injunction."—Wakefield.
[662] Heloisa to Abelard: "Death only can make me leave the place where you have fixed me, and then too my ashes shall rest there, and wait for yours."
[663] Abelard to Heloisa: "I hope you will be contented when you have finished this mortal life to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing."
[664] Heloisa to Abelard: "Among those who are wedded to God I serve a man. What a prodigy am I! Enlighten me, O Lord! Does thy grace or my despair draw these words from me?"
[665] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am sensible I am in the temple of chastity only with the ashes of that fire which has consumed us."
[666] This couplet, and its wretched rhymes, seem derived from an elegy of Walsh in Dryden's Miscellanies:
I know I ought to hate you for the fault;
But oh! I cannot do the thing I ought.—Wakefield.
[667] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am here a sinner, but one, who far from weeping for her sins, weeps only for her lover; far from abhorring her crimes endeavours only to add to them, and then who pleases herself continually with the remembrance of past actions when it is impossible to renew them." And again: "I, who have experienced so many pleasures in loving you feel, in spite of myself, that I cannot repent of them, nor forbear enjoying them over again as much as is possible by recollecting them in my memory." Abelard, in the translation of the letters, expresses the same sentiment: "Love still preserves its dominion in my fancy, and entertains itself with past pleasures."
[668] Abelard to Heloisa: "To forget in the case of love is the most necessary penitence, and the most difficult."
[669] Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia: