Letter XXXVI - Mr. Lovelace to Miss Clarissa Harlowe

Monday, Aug. 7

Little as I have reason to expect either your patient ear, or forgiving heart, yet cannot I forbear to write to you once more (as a more pardonable intrusion, perhaps, than a visit would be), to beg of you to put it in my power to atone, as far as it is possible to atone, for the injuries I have done you.

Your angelic purity, and my awakened conscience, are standing records of your exalted merit and of my detestable baseness: but your forgiveness will lay me under an eternal obligation to you—forgive me, then, my dearest life, my earthly good, the visible anchor of my future hope! As you (who believe you have something to be forgiven for) hope for pardon yourself, forgive me, and consent to meet me, upon your own conditions, and in whose company you please, at the holy altar, and to give yourself a title to the most repentant and affectionate heart that ever beat in a human bosom.

But perhaps a time of probation may be required. It may be impossible for you, as well from indisposition as doubt, so soon to receive me to absolute favour as my heart wishes to be received. In this case I will submit to your pleasure; and there shall be no penance which you can impose that I will not cheerfully undergo, if you will be pleased to give me hope that, after an expiation, suppose of months, wherein the regularity of my future life and actions shall convince you of my reformation, you will at last be mine.

Let me beg the favour then of a few lines, encouraging me in this conditional hope, if it must not be a still nearer hope, and a more generous encouragement. 

If you refuse me this, you will make me desperate. But even then I must, at all events, throw myself at your feet, that I may not charge myself with the omission of any earnest, any humble effort, to move you in my favour: for in YOU, madam, in YOUR forgiveness, are centred my hopes as to both worlds: since to be reprobated finally by you will leave me without expectation of mercy from above! For I am now awakened enough to think that to be forgiven by injured innocents is necessary to the Divine pardon; the Almighty putting into the power of such (as is reasonable to believe) the wretch who causelessly and capitally offends them. And who can be entitled to this power if YOU are not?

Your cause, madam, in a word, I look upon to be the cause of virtue, and as such, the cause of God. And may I not expect that He will assert it in the perdition of a man, who has acted by a person of the most spotless purity as I have done, if you, by rejecting me, show that I have offended beyond the possibility of forgiveness? 

I do most solemnly assure you that no temporal or worldly views induce me to this earnest address. I deserve not forgiveness from you. Nor do my Lord M. and his sisters from me. I despise them from my heart for presuming to imagine that I will be controlled by the prospect of any benefits in their power to confer. There is not a pearson breathing but yourself who shall prescribe to me. Your whole conduct, madam, has been so nobly principled, and your resentments are so admirably just, that you appear to me even in a divine light; and in an infinitely more amiable one at the same time, than you could have appeared in, had you not suffered the barbarous wrongs that now fill my mind with anguish and horror at my own recollected villainy to the most excellent of women.

I repeat that all I beg for the present is a few lines, to guide my doubtful steps; and (impossible for you so far to condescend) to encourage me to hope that, if I can justify my present vows by my future conduct, I may be permitted the honour to style myself

                        Eternally yours,

                                                R. Lovelace.

 

—oOo—