engroses

Updated: July 18, 2025

Your heart I fear, replied Diotima, was broken by your sufferings but if you had struggled if when you found all hope of earthly happiness wither within you while desire of it scorched your soul if you had near you a friend to have raised you to the contemplation of beauty & the search of knowledge you would have found perhaps not new hopes spring within you but a new life distinct from that of passion by which you had before existed relate to me what this misery was that thus engroses you tell me what were the vicissitudes of feeling that you endured on earth after death our actions & worldly interest fade as nothing before us but the traces of our feelings exist & the memories of those are what furnish us here with eternal subject of meditation.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Mathilda