The narrative of this voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance, found its way from the press.  The occasional harshness and ruggedness of character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here totally disappear.  If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.  She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.  Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment.

Thus softened and improved, thus fraught with imagination and sensibility, with all, and more than all, “that youthful poets fancy, when they love,” she returned to England, and, if he had so pleased, to the arms of her former lover.  Her return was hastened by the ambiguity, to her apprehension, of Mr. Imlay’s conduct.  He had promised to meet her upon her return from Norway, probably at Hamburgh; and they were then to pass some time in Switzerland.  The style however of his letters to her during her tour, was not such as to inspire confidence; and she wrote to him very urgently, to explain himself, relative to the footing upon which they were hereafter to stand to each other.  In his answer, which reached her at Hamburgh, he treated her questions as “extraordinary and unnecessary,” and desired her to be at the pains to decide for herself.  Feeling herself unable to accept this as an explanation, she instantly determined to sail for London by the very first opportunity, that she might thus bring to a termination the suspence that preyed upon her soul.

It was not long after her arrival in London in the commencement of October, that she attained the certainty she sought.  Mr. Imlay procured her a lodging.  But the neglect she experienced from him after she entered it, flashed conviction upon her, in spite of his asseverations.  She made further enquiries, and at length was informed by a servant, of the real state of the case.  Under the immediate shock which the painful certainty gave her, her first impulse was to repair to him at the ready-furnished house he had provided for his new mistress.  What was the particular nature of their conference I am unable to relate.  It is sufficient to say that the wretchedness of the night which succeeded this fatal discovery, impressed her with the feeling, that she would sooner suffer a thousand deaths, than pass another of equal misery.