LETTER XIX.
HARRINGTON to HARRIOT.
If a wish, arising from the most
tender affection, could transport me to the
object of my love, I persude myself that
you would not be troubled with reading this
letter.
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 ecstacy 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. Whereever 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 dis-appointment,
who thought himself fascinated
by beauty, when he finds he has un-knowingly
been charmed by reason and
virtue!
BUT this you will say contains a sentiment
of jealousy, and is but a transcript of my ap-prehensions
and gloomy anxieties: When
will your presence like the return of the fun
in the spring, which dispels glooms, and re-animates
the face of nature, quiet these ap-prehensions.
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.
