LETTER XIX.
Harrington to Harriot.
IF a wish, arising from the most tender affection, could transport me to the object of my love, I persuade myself that you would not be troubled with reading this letter.
YOU must expect nothing like wit or humour, or even common sense, from me; wit and humour are flown with you, and your return only can restore them. I am sometimes willing to persuade myself that this is the case—I think I hear the well known voice, I look around me with the ecstasy of Orpheus, but that look breaks the charm, I find myself alone, and my Eurydice vanished to the shades.
I HOPE you will not permit yourself to grow envious of the beauties of Rhodeisland. Of the force of their charms I am experimentally acquainted. Wherever fortune has thrown me, it has been my happiness to imagine myself in love with some divine creature or other; and after all it is but truth to declare that the passion was seated more in fancy than the heart; and it is justice to acknowledge to you that I am now more provident of my passion, and never suffer the excursion of fancy, except when I am so liberal as to admit the united beauty of the Rhodeisland ladies in competition with yours.
WHERE there are handsome women there will necessarily be fine gentlemen, and should they be smitten with your external graces, I cannot but lament their deplorable situation, when they discover how egregiously they have been cheated. What must be his disappointment, who thought himself fascinated by beauty, when he finds he has unknowingly been charmed by reason and virtue!
BUT this you will say contains a sentiment of jealously, and is but a transcript of my apprehensions and gloomy anxieties: When will your preference, like the return of the sun in the spring, which dispels glooms, and reanimates the face of nature, quiet these apprehensions? If it be not in a short time, I shall proceed on a journey to find you out; until then I commit you to the care of your guardian angel.