I endeavoured to read.  I visited the libraries of Rome.  I selected a volume, and, choosing some sequestered, shady nook, on the banks of the Tiber, or opposite the fair temple in the Borghese Gardens, or under the old pyramid of Cestius, I endeavoured to conceal me from myself, and immerse myself in the subject traced on the pages before me.  As if in the same soil you plant nightshade and a myrtle tree, they will each appropriate the mould, moisture, and air administered, for the fostering their several properties—­so did my grief find sustenance, and power of existence, and growth, in what else had been divine manna, to feed radiant meditation.  Ah! while I streak this paper with the tale of what my so named occupations were—­while I shape the skeleton of my days—­my hand trembles—­my heart pants, and my brain refuses to lend expression, or phrase, or idea, by which to image forth the veil of unutterable woe that clothed these bare realities.  O, worn and beating heart, may I dissect thy fibres, and tell how in each unmitigable misery, sadness dire, repinings, and despair, existed?  May I record my many ravings—­the wild curses I hurled at torturing nature—­and how I have passed days shut out from light and food—­from all except the burning hell alive in my own bosom?

I was presented, meantime, with one other occupation, the one best fitted to discipline my melancholy thoughts, which strayed backwards, over many a ruin, and through many a flowery glade, even to the mountain recess, from which in early youth I had first emerged.

During one of my rambles through the habitations of Rome, I found writing materials on a table in an author’s study.  Parts of a manuscript lay scattered about.  It contained a learned disquisition on the Italian language; one page an unfinished dedication to posterity, for whose profit the writer had sifted and selected the niceties of this harmonious language —­to whose everlasting benefit he bequeathed his labours.

I also will write a book, I cried—­for whom to read?—­to whom dedicated?  And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, dedication to the illustrious dead.  Shadows, arise, and read your fall!  Behold the history of the last man.

Yet, will not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike, had departed from their home to an unknown country?

I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this “world’s sole monument,” a record of these things.  I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man.  At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion; but I lingered fondly on my early years, and recorded with sacred zeal the virtues of my companions.  They have been with me during the fulfilment of my task.  I have brought it to an end—­I lift my eyes from my paper—­again they are lost to me.  Again I feel that I am alone.