I will not dwell on the last changes that I feel in the final decay of nature.  It is rapid but without pain:  I feel a strange pleasure in it.  For long years these are the first days of peace that have visited me.  I no longer exhaust my miserable heart by bitter tears and frantic complaints; I no longer the [sic] reproach the sun, the earth, the air, for pain and wretchedness.  I wait in quiet expectation for the closing hours of a life which has been to me most sweet & bitter.  I do not die not having enjoyed life; for sixteen years I was happy:  during the first months of my father’s return I had enjoyed ages of pleasure:  now indeed I am grown old in grief; my steps are feeble like those of age; I have become peevish and unfit for life; so having passed little more than twenty years upon the earth I am more fit for my narrow grave than many are when they reach the natural term of their lives.

Again and again I have passed over in my remembrance the different scenes of my short life:  if the world is a stage and I merely an actor on it my part has been strange, and, alas! tragical.  Almost from infancy I was deprived of all the testimonies of affection which children generally receive; I was thrown entirely upon my own resources, and I enjoyed what I may almost call unnatural pleasures, for they were dreams and not realities.  The earth was to me a magic lantern and I [a] gazer, and a listener but no actor; but then came the transporting and soul-reviving era of my existence:  my father returned and I could pour my warm affections on a human heart; there was a new sun and a new earth created to me; the waters of existence sparkled:  joy! joy! but, alas! what grief!  My bliss was more rapid than the progress of a sunbeam on a mountain, which discloses its glades & woods, and then leaves it dark & blank; to my happiness followed madness and agony, closed by despair.

This was the drama of my life which I have now depicted upon paper.  During three months I have been employed in this task.  The memory of sorrow has brought tears; the memory of happiness a warm glow the lively shadow of that joy.  Now my tears are dried; the glow has faded from my cheeks, and with a few words of farewell to you, Woodville, I close my work:  the last that I shall perform.

Farewell, my only living friend; you are the sole tie that binds me to existence, and now I break it[.] It gives me no pain to leave you; nor can our seperation give you much.  You never regarded me as one of this world, but rather as a being, who for some penance was sent from the Kingdom of Shadows; and she passed a few days weeping on the earth and longing to return to her native soil.  You will weep but they will be tears of gentleness.  I would, if I thought that it would lessen your regret, tell you to smile and congratulate me on my departure from the misery you beheld me endure.  I would say; Woodville, rejoice with your friend, I triumph now and am most happy.  But I check these expressions; these may not be the consolations of the living; they weep for their own misery, and not for that of the being they have lost.  No; shed a few natural tears due to my memory:  and if you ever visit my grave, pluck from thence a flower, and lay it to your heart; for your heart is the only tomb in which my memory will be enterred.