YOU must expect nothing like wit or humour, or even common sense, from me; wit and humour are flown with you, and your return only can restore them. I am sometimes willing to persuade myself that this is the case—I think I hear the well known voice, I look around me with the ecstasy of Orpheus, but that look breaks the charm, I find myself alone, and my Eurydice vanished to the shades.
I HOPE you will not permit yourself to grow envious of the beauties of Rhodeisland. Of the force of their charms I am experimentally acquainted. Wherever fortune has thrown me, it has been my happiness to imagine myself in love with some divine creature or other; and after all it is but truth to declare that the passion was seated more in fancy than the heart; and it is justice to acknowledge to you that I am now more provident of my passion, and never suffer the excursion of fancy, except when I am so liberal as to admit the united beauty of the Rhodeisland ladies in competition with yours.
WHERE there are handsome women there will necessarily be fine gentlemen, and should they be smitten with your external graces, I cannot but lament their deplorable situation, when they discover how egregiously they have been cheated. What must be his disappointment, who thought himself fascinated by beauty, when he finds he has unknowingly been charmed by reason and virtue!
BUT this you will say contains a sentiment of jealously, and is but a transcript of my apprehensions and gloomy anxieties: When will your preference, like the return of the sun in the spring, which dispels glooms, and reanimates the face of nature, quiet these apprehensions? If it be not in a short time, I shall proceed on a journey to find you out; until then I commit you to the care of your guardian angel.
LETTER XX.
Harrington to Harriot.
Boston.
LAST night I went on a visit to your house: It was an adventure that would have done honour to the Knight of La Mancha. The moon ascended a clear, serene sky, the air was still, the bells sounded the solemn hour of midnight—I sighed—and the reason of it I need not tell you. This was, indeed, a pilgrimage; and no Musselman ever travelled barefooted to Mecca with more sincere devotion.
YOUR absence would cause an insufferable ennui in your friends, were it not for the art we have in making it turn to our amusement. Instead of wishing you were of our party, you are the goddess in whose honour we performed innumerable Heathenish rites. Libations of wine are poured out, but not a guest presumes to taste it, until they implore the name of Harriot; we hail the new divinity in songs, and strew around the flowers of poetry. You need not, however, take to yourself any extraordinary addition of vanity on the occasion as your absence will not cause any repining:
“Harriot our goddess and our grief no more.”