CAROLINE ASHBURN
LETTER VIII
FROM CLEMENT MONTGOMERY
TO
ARTHUR MURDEN
Infidel as thou art toward beauty, and indolent as thou art in friendship, whence dost thou still derive the power to attract the homage of beauty, and the zeal of friendship.
That Janetta, the Empress of all hearts, but callous thine, possessed sensibility, susceptibility, or even animation, thou, infidel Arthur, didst deny. Yet Janetta can sometimes torture her admiring Clement by the repetition of thy praises.
Four letters of mine, long letters, letters to which I yielded hours that might have been rapturous in enjoyments, those letters lie, the last as the first, unanswered, unheeded in thy possession.
I devoutly thank the star that shed its influence over the hour of my birth, that it gave me a temperament opposite to thine, Arthur: for, have I not seen thee more than insensible, even averse to the offered favours of the fair? Have I not seen thee yawn with listlessness at an assembly, where rank and splendor, the delights of harmony, and the fascinations of beauty, filled my every sense with exstacy? Give me the sphere of fashion, and its delights! Fix me in the regions of ever varying novelty!
Mine is life. I sail on an ocean of pleasure. Where are its rocks, its sands, its secret whirlpools, or its daring tempests? Fables all! Fables invented by the envious impotence of snarling Cynics, to crush the aspiring fancy of glowing youth! Thy apathy, Murden, I detest. Nay, I pity thee. And I swear by that pity, I would sacrifice some portion of my pleasures, to awaken thee to the knowledge of one hour's rapture.
Soul-less Arthur, how couldst thou slight the accomplished L——? How could thou acknowledge that she was beautiful, yet tell me of her defects?—Defects! Good heaven! Defects, in a beautiful, kind, and yielding woman!—Arthur, Arthur, in compassion to thy passing youth, thy graceful figure, and all those manly charms with which thou art formed to captivate, forget thy wild chimeras, thy absurd dreams of romantic useless perfections; and make it thy future creed, that in woman there can be no crime but ugliness, no weakness nor defect but cruelty.