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  For thee all thoughts of pleasure I forego,
  For thee my tears shall never cease to flow: 
  For thee at once I from the world retire,
  To feed in silent shades a hopeless fire. 
  My bosom all thy image shall retain;
  The full impression there shall still remain. 
  As thou hast taught my constant heart to prove;
  The noblest height and elegance of love;
  That sacred passion I to thee confine;
  My spotless faith shall be for ever thine.

After Mr. Rowe’s decease, and as soon as her affairs would permit, our authoress indulged her inconquerable inclination to solitude, by retiring to Froome in Somersetshire, in the neighbourhood of which place the greatest part of her estate lay.  When she forsook the town, she determined to return no more but to spend the remainder of her life in absolute retirement; yet upon some few occasions she thought it her duty to violate this resolution.  In compliance with the importunate request of the honourable Mrs. Thynne, she passed some months with her at London, after the death of her daughter the lady Brooke, and upon the decease of Mrs. Thynne herself, she could not dispute the commands of the countess of Hertford, who earnestly desired her company, to soften the severe affliction of the loss of so excellent a mother, and once or twice more, the power which this lady had over Mrs. Rowe, drew her, with an obliging kind of violence, to spend a few months with her in the country.  Yet, even on these occasions she never quitted her retreat without sincere regret, and always returned to it, as soon as she could with decency disengage herself from the importunity of her noble friends.  It was in this recess that she composed the most celebrated of her works, in twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living; the design of which is to impress the notion of the soul’s immortality, without which all virtue and religion, with their temporal and eternal good conferences must fall to the ground.

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Some who pretend to have no scruples about the being of a God, have yet doubts about their own eternal existence, though many authors have established it, both by christian and moral proofs, beyond reasonable contradiction.  But since no means should be left untried, in a point of such awful importance, a virtuous endeavour to make the mind familiar with the thoughts of immortality, and contract as it were unawares, an habitual persuasion of it, by writings built on that foundation, and addressed to the affections, and imagination, cannot be thought improper, either as a doctrine or amusement:  Amusement, for which the world makes so large a demand, and which generally speaking is nothing but an art of forgetting that immortality, the form, belief, and advantageous contemplation, of which this higher amusement would recommend.