same hope, and the same gaiety, as before.  On the other hand, we not unfrequently meet with persons, endowed with the most exquisite and delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable.  This character is finely pourtrayed by the author of the Sorrows of Werter.  Mary was in this respect a female Werter.

She brought then, in the present instance, a wounded and sick heart, to take refuge in the bosom of a chosen friend.  Let it not however be imagined, that she brought a heart, querulous, and ruined in its taste for pleasure.  No; her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune.  Her sorrows, the depression of her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the simplicity and the vivacity of a youthful mind.  She was like a serpent upon a rock, that casts its slough, and appears again with the brilliancy, the sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age.  She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy.  Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness.  Her voice became chearful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it.

Mary now reposed herself upon a person, of whose honour and principles she had the most exalted idea.  She nourished an individual affection, which she saw no necessity of subjecting to restraint; and a heart like her’s was not formed to nourish affection by halves.  Her conception of Mr. Imlay’s “tenderness and worth, had twisted him closely round her heart;” and she “indulged the thought, that she had thrown out some tendrils, to cling to the elm by which she wished to be supported.”  This was “talking a new language to her;” but, “conscious that she was not a parasite-plant,” she was willing to encourage and foster the luxuriancies of affection.  Her confidence was entire; her love was unbounded.  Now, for the first time in her life she gave a loose to all the sensibilities of her nature.

Soon after the time I am now speaking of, her attachment to Mr. Imlay gained a new link, by finding reason to suppose herself with child.

Their establishment at Paris, was however broken up almost as soon as formed, by the circumstance of Mr. Imlay’s entering into business, urged, as he said, by the prospect of a family, and this being a favourable crisis in French affairs for commercial speculations.  The pursuits in which he was engaged, led him in the month of September to Havre de Grace, then called Havre Marat, probably to superintend the shipping of goods, in which he was jointly engaged with some other person or persons.  Mary remained in the capital.