Death, or
any of the thousand ills that fortune stores for them she hates, could
not come in a more welcome hour.--Oh Imogen, lovely, adorable Imogen,
how vain has been my authority, how vain the space of my command! Let
then my palaces tumble into ruin--Let that wand which once I boasted,
shivered in a thousand fragments, be cast to all the winds of heaven! I
will glory in desolation and forlornness. I will wrap myself in my
poverty. I will retire to some horrid cave in the midst of the untamed
desart, and shagged with horrid shades, that outgloom the blackness of
the infernal regions. There I will ruminate upon my past felicity. There
I will tell over enjoyments never to return. I will make myself a little
universe, and a new and unheard of satisfaction in the darkness of my
reflections, and the depth of my despair.
"And yet surely, surely the Gods have treated me severely, and measured
out to me a hard and merciless fate. What are all the felicities I talk
of, and have prized so much? Oh, they were seasoned, each of them, with
a bitter infusion! Little, little indeed have I tasted of a pure and
unmixed happiness. In my choicest delights, I have felt a vacancy. They
have become irksome and tedious. I have fled from myself; I have fled
from the magnificence of my retinue, to find variety.
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