this net of fiery anguish and all my struggles to release myself:  indeed if your soul were less pure and bright I would not attempt to exculpate myself to you; I should fear that if I led you to regard me with less abhorrence you might hate vice less:  but in addressing you I feel as if I appealed to an angelic judge.  I cannot depart without your forgiveness and I must endeavour to gain it, or I must despair.[35] I conjure you therefore to listen to my words, and if with the good guilt may be in any degree extenuated by sharp agony, and remorse that rends the brain as madness perhaps you may think, though I dare not, that I have some claim to your compassion.

“I entreat you to call to your remembrance our first happy life on the shores of Loch Lomond.  I had arrived from a weary wandering of sixteen years, during which, although I had gone through many dangers and misfortunes, my affections had been an entire blank.  If I grieved it was for your mother, if I loved it was your image; these sole emotions filled my heart in quietness.  The human creatures around me excited in me no sympathy and I thought that the mighty change that the death of your mother had wrought within me had rendered me callous to any future impression.  I saw the lovely and I did not love, I imagined therefore that all warmth was extinguished in my heart except that which led me ever to dwell on your then infantine image.

“It is a strange link in my fate that without having seen you I should passionately love you.  During my wanderings I never slept without first calling down gentle dreams on your head.  If I saw a lovely woman, I thought, does my Mathilda resemble her?  All delightful things, sublime scenery, soft breezes, exquisite music seemed to me associated with you and only through you to be pleasant to me.  At length I saw you.  You appeared as the deity of a lovely region, the ministering Angel of a Paradise to which of all human kind you admitted only me.  I dared hardly consider you as my daughter; your beauty, artlessness and untaught wisdom seemed to belong to a higher order of beings; your voice breathed forth only words of love:  if there was aught of earthly in you it was only what you derived from the beauty of the world; you seemed to have gained a grace from the mountain breezes—­the waterfalls and the lake; and this was all of earthly except your affections that you had; there was no dross, no bad feeling in the composition.  You yet even have not seen enough[36] of the world to know the stupendous difference that exists between the women we meet in dayly life and a nymph of the woods such as you were, in whose eyes alone mankind may study for centuries & grow wiser & purer.  Those divine lights which shone on me as did those of Beatrice upon Dante, and well might I say with him yet with what different feelings

    E quasi mi perdei gli occhi chini.

Can you wonder, Mathilda, that I dwelt on your looks, your words, your motions, & drank in unmixed delight?