Death is the goal that I would attain, but, alas! I do not even see the end of the course.

Do you, my compassionate friend,[63] tell me how to die peacefully and innocently and I will bless you: all that I, poor wretch, can desire is a painless death." But Woodville's words had magic in them, when beginning with the sweetest pity, he would raise me by degrees out of myself and my sorrows until I wondered at my own selfishness: but he left me and despair returned; the work of consolation was ever to begin anew.

I often desired his entire absence; for I found that I was grown out of the ways of life and that by long seclusion, although I could support my accustomed grief, and drink the bitter daily draught with some degree of patience, yet I had become unfit for the slightest novelty of feeling.

Expectation, and hopes, and affection were all too much for me.

I knew this, but at other times I was unreasonable and laid the blame upon him, who was most blameless, and pevishly thought that if his gentle soul were more gentle, if his intense sympathy were more intense, he could drive the fiend from my soul and make me more human.
I am, I thought, a tragedy; a character that he comes to see act: now and then he gives me my cue[64] that I may make a speech more to his purpose: perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure.