Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.
But you think of someone else, you know it well; and you know that he doesn't think of you.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
It is not violence that best overcomes hate nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.