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    with heart ; and we mutually said , < I have never revealed myself to any as to you . ' f f We had both suffered very much from the imperfect sympathies of all around us . How delicious , therefore , was it to meet with a kindred

    spirit before whom we coald pour ourselves freely when our beings overflowed with emotion . Now did we embody in words all our most delicate sensations—feelings which we thought would have been for ever unexpressed , now found their way into language . All our hopes , our fears , our desires , qur joys , and our sorrows were revealed to the other , and what delight in the revealing .

    " We were by nature similar . In Mary Penruddock I beheld a feminine incarnation of myself . Do not mistake me , Gerard ; she was as far above me in the scale of morality as the sun is above the moon , and yet elementally we were alike . The fruits were different , but the trees were the same . She had grown in a different soil—she had been

    nurtured by other hands—she had been watched more carefully and tended more assiduously ; she had not been exposed to the winds of circumstance and the blights of temptation as I had—she was pure and I was corrupt—she like a river at its source unsullied and untainted , I like the same river when it has passed through many cities and collected impurity from them all . "

    This fine description of a perfect communion of thought and feeling is followed by a tragical history . The circumstances imagined are indeed most powerful , and the idea of them fearfully original ; but even under the dreadful trial supposed , yve can never believe that so entire a passion could utterly fail , after

    one year of union . A conflict between the instinct of the mother , and the love of the wife , is brought into intense action , and the former prevails . We continue the narrative in the words pf Anstruther , as he g ives it to Gerard . He has been describing his feelings of delight at the prospect of becoming a father—feelings which he likens to idolatry , and he thus

    continues : •—" The hour arrived , a man-child was born—I w ^ s a father ; but the curse was upon us , and , Gerard , we suffered for our idolatry . " t * The mother died ?" ff Oh I no , Gerard , not that ; the mother lived , but the child was a

    monster . " A poor deformed , miserable object . They tried that I should > not Sq 0 ii ^ -they tried to conceal its infirmities with the clothes—but I took tfye bate into my hands and J felt that it was a shapejess mass . My heart died within me , as though it had been crushed . I could not speak to the mother of the child .

    r" Gejrard , now begin my confessions . Hitherto you have seen me a * a man ; I shall presently stand before you as a monster , more niopr 8 trou * than my poor tittle babe ; I seek to extenuate nothihg ; I wad a brute , for I hated my child from the hour of its birth ; I hated it ~ t

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    Dweton ; or * the Mim of many Impulses . 296

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 1, 1837, page 295, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1831/page/40/