And then, when in answer to my peevish words, I saw his countenance bent with living pity on me[,] when I saw him

    Gli occhi drizzo ver me con quel sembiante
    Che madre fa sopra figlioul deliro P[a]radiso.  C 1.[62]

I wept and said, “Oh, pardon me!  You are good and kind but I am not fit for life.  Why am I obliged to live?  To drag hour after hour, to see the trees wave their branches restlessly, to feel the air, & to suffer in all I feel keenest agony.  My frame is strong, but my soul sinks beneath this endurance of living anguish.  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.  I am a farce and play to him, but to me this is all dreary reality:  he takes all the profit and I bear all the burthen.

CHAPTER XI

It is a strange circumstance but it often occurs that blessings by their use turn to curses; and that I who in solitude had desired sympathy as the only relief I could enjoy should now find it an additional torture to me.  During my father’s life time I had always been of an affectionate and forbearing disposition, but since those days of joy alas!  I was much changed.  I had become arrogant, peevish, and above all suspicious.  Although the real interest of my narration is now ended and I ought quickly to wind up its melancholy catastrophe, yet I will relate one instance of my sad suspicion and despair and how Woodville with the goodness and almost the power of an angel, softened my rugged feelings and led me back to gentleness.[65]