< Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu
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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN.

sophy. The lover becomes the philosopher quite unconsciously. He writes in another letter:—

One of the pleasures I promised myself in my excursion was to increase my value in your estimation, and I am not disappointed. What we possess without intermission, we inevitably hold light; it is a refinement in voluptuousness to submit to voluntary privations. Separation is the image of death, but it is death stripped of all that is most tremendous, and his dart purged of its deadly venom. I always thought St. Paul's rule, that we should die daily, an exquisite Epicurean maxim. The practice of it would give to life a double relish.

Imlay, too, had found absence a stimulus to love, but there was this difference in what at first appears to be a similarity of opinion between himself and Godwin; while the former sought it that he might not tire of Mary, the latter hoped it would keep her from growing tired of him.

Mary's letters to her husband are full of the tender love which no woman knew how to express as well as she did. They are not as passionate and burning as those to Imlay, but they are sincerely and lovingly affectionate, and reveal an ever-increasing devotion and a calmer happiness than that she had derived from her first union.

Once during this trip the peaceful intercourse between husband and wife was interrupted. Godwin might philosophize to his heart's content about the advantages of separation, but Mary could not be so sure of them. Absence in Imlay's case had not in the end brought about very good results; and as the days went by, Godwin's letters, at least so it seemed to her, became more descriptive and statistical, and less tender and affectionate. Interest in Dr. Parr and the Wedgwoods and the country through which he was travel-

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