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Second edition of Memoirs of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

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William Godwin. London, 1798.

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She was affectionate and compliant to the last I observed on Friday and Saturday nights that whenever her attendants recommended her to sleep,

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she discovered her willingness to yield by breathing,

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perhaps for the space of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps through the effort from the state of her disorder usually proved ineffectual.

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She was not tormented by useless contradiction.

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One night, the servant from an error of judgement teased her with idle postulations, but she complained of it grievously.

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And it was corrected. Pray. Pray.

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Do not let her reason with me was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so dreadful to the enfeebled frame as the monotonous inputs,

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unity of nurses, everlastingly repeated, seeing that every hope was extinct.

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I was very desirous of obtaining from her any directions that she might wish to have followed after her decease.

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Accordingly, on Saturday morning,

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I talk to her for a good while of the two children in conformity to Mr. Carlyle's maxim of not impressing the idea of death.

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I was obliged to manage my expressions.

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I therefore effected to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been very ill and that it would be some time before she did.

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She could expect to be well,

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wishing her to tell me anything that she would choose to have done respecting the children as they would now be, principally under my care.

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After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length sat with significant tone of voice.

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I know what you are thinking of, but added that she had nothing to communicate to me upon the subject.

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The shivering fits had ceased entirely for the last two days.

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Mr. Carlyle observed that her continuance was almost miraculous and that he was on watch for favourable appearances,

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believing it highly improper to give up all hope, and remarking that perhaps one in a million of persons her state might possibly recover.

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I could see that not one in a million unites so good a constitution of body and of mind.

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These were the amusements of persons in the very gulf of despair.

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At 6:00 on Sunday morning, September the 10th. Mr. Carlyle called me from my bed,

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to which I had retired at one in conformity to my request that I might not be left to receive all at once the intelligence that she was no more.

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She expired 20 minutes before eight.

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Her remains were deposited on the 15th of September at 10:00 in the morning in a churchyard of the Parish Church of St Pancras, Middlesex.

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A few of the person she most esteemed attended the ceremony and a plane monument is

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now erecting on the spot by some of her friends with the following inscription.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Born 27th of April 1759, died 10th of September 1797.

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The loss of the world in this admirable woman I leave to other men to collect my own, I will know.

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Nor can it be improper to describe it. I do not hear allude to the personal pleasures I enjoyed in her conversation.

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These increased every day in proportion as we knew each other better and as our mutual confidence increased.

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They can be measured only by the treasures of her mind and the virtues of her heart.

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But this is a subject for mediation, not for words.

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What I purposed alluding to was the improvement that I have forever lost.

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We have cultivated our powers.

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If I may venture to use this sort of language in different directions, I chiefly an attempt at logical and metaphysical distinction.

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She I taste for the picturesque. One of the leading passions of my mind has been an anxious desire not to be deceived.

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This has led me to view the topics of my reflection on all sides and to examine and re-examine without end the questions that interest me.

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But it was not merely to judge, at least from all the reports of my memory in this respect,

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the difference of propensities that made the difference in our intellectual habits.

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I have been stimulated as long as I can remember, by an ambition for intellectual distinction.

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But as long as I can remember,

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I have been discouraged when I have endeavoured to cast the sum of my intellectual value by finding that I did not possess,

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in the degree of some other men, an intuitive perception of intellectual beauty.

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I have, perhaps. A strong and lively sense of the pleasures of the imagination.

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But I have seldom been right in assigning them their proportionate value.

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But by dint of persevering examination and the change and correction of my first opinions,

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what I wanted in this respect, Mary, possessed in a degree superior to any other person I knew.

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The strength of her mind lay in intuition.

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She was often right by this means only in matters of mere speculation.

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Her religion, her philosophy, and both of which the errors were comparatively few.

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And the strange, dignified and generous were, as I have already said, the pure result of feeling and taste.

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She adopted one opinion and rejected another spontaneously by a sort of tact and the force of a cultivated imagination.

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And yet, though, perhaps in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little,

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it is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her determinations.

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But if this quality was used to her in topics that seemed the proper provenance of reasoning,

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it was much more so in matters directly appealing to the intellectual taste in a robust and unwavering judgement of this sort.

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There was a kind of witchcraft. When it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenious mind.

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In this sense, I oscillation and scepticism were fixed by her boldness.

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When a true opinion emanated in this way from another mind, the conviction produced in my own, assumed a similar character, instantaneous and firm.

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This species of intellect probably differs from the other,

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chiefly in the relation of earlier and later what one perceives instantaneously circumstances having produced in it

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either premature attention to objects of this sort or a greater bold decision the other receives only by degrees.

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What it wants seems to be nothing more than a minute attention to first impressions and a just appreciation of them.

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Habits that are never so effectually generated as by the daily recurrence of a striking example.

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This light was lent to me for a very short period and is now extinguished forever.

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While I have described the improvement I was in the act of receiving, I believe I will put down the leading traits of an intellectual character.