[From This World to the Next by Henry Fielding]@TWC D-Link bookFrom This World to the Next CHAPTER XXI 4/6
I cursed myself, the king, and the whole world, which no longer seemed to have any delight for me.
I threw myself on the grave of my deceased love, and lay there without any kind of sustenance for two whole days. At last hunger, together with the persuasions of some people who took pity on me, prevailed with me to quit that situation, and refresh myself with food.
They then persuaded me to return to my post, and abandon a place where almost every object I saw recalled ideas to my mind which, as they said, I should endeavor with my utmost force to expel from it. This advice at length succeeded; the rather, as the father and mother of my beloved refused to see me, looking on me as the innocent but certain cause of the death of their only child. "The loss of one we tenderly love, as it is one of the most bitter and biting evils which attend human life, so it wants the lenitive which palliates and softens every other calamity; I mean that great reliever, hope.
No man can be so totally undone, but that he may still cherish expectation: but this deprives us of all such comfort, nor can anything but time alone lessen it.
This, however, in most minds, is sure to work a slow but effectual remedy; so did it in mine: for within a twelve-month I was entirely reconciled to my fortune, and soon after absolutely forgot the object of a passion from which I had promised myself such extreme happiness, and in the disappointment of which I had experienced such inconceivable misery. "At the expiration of the month I returned to my garrison at Exeter; where I was no sooner arrived than I was ordered to march into the north, to oppose a force there levied by the earls of Chester and Northumberland.
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