Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/199

Rh love she craved. Imlay had given it to her for a while, and her short-lived happiness with him made her present loneliness seem more unendurable. Her separation from him really dated back to the time when she left Havre. Her affection for him had been destroyed sooner than she thought, because she had struggled bravely to retain it for the sake of her child. The gaiety and many distractions of London life could not drown her heart's wretchedness. It was through Godwin that she became reconciled to England, to life, and to herself. He revived her enthusiasm and renewed her interest in work and in mankind; but above all he gave her that special devotion without which she but half lived. In the restlessness that followed her loss of Imlay's love, she had resolved to make the tour of Italy or Switzerland. Therefore, when she had returned to London, expecting it to be but a temporary resting-place, she had taken furnished lodgings. "Now, however," as Godwin says in his Memoirs, "she felt herself reconciled to a longer abode in England, probably without exactly knowing why this change had taken place in her mind." She moved to other rooms in the extremity of Somer's Town, and filled them with the furniture she had used in Store Street in the first days of her prosperity, and which had since been packed away. The unpacking of this furniture was with her what the removal of widows' weeds is with other women. Her first love had perished; but from it rose another, stronger and better; just as the ripening of autumn's fruits follows the withering of spring's blossoms. She mastered the harvest-secret, learning the value of that death which yields higher fruition.