Second edition of Memoirs of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
William Godwin. London, 1798.
She was affectionate and compliant to the last I observed on Friday and Saturday nights that whenever her attendants recommended her to sleep,
she discovered her willingness to yield by breathing,
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.
She was not tormented by useless contradiction.
One night, the servant from an error of judgement teased her with idle postulations, but she complained of it grievously.
And it was corrected. Pray. Pray.
Do not let her reason with me was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so dreadful to the enfeebled frame as the monotonous inputs,
unity of nurses, everlastingly repeated, seeing that every hope was extinct.
I was very desirous of obtaining from her any directions that she might wish to have followed after her decease.
Accordingly, on Saturday morning,
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.
I was obliged to manage my expressions.
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.
She could expect to be well,
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.
After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length sat with significant tone of voice.
I know what you are thinking of, but added that she had nothing to communicate to me upon the subject.
The shivering fits had ceased entirely for the last two days.
Mr. Carlyle observed that her continuance was almost miraculous and that he was on watch for favourable appearances,
believing it highly improper to give up all hope, and remarking that perhaps one in a million of persons her state might possibly recover.
I could see that not one in a million unites so good a constitution of body and of mind.
These were the amusements of persons in the very gulf of despair.
At 6:00 on Sunday morning, September the 10th. Mr. Carlyle called me from my bed,
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.
She expired 20 minutes before eight.
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.
A few of the person she most esteemed attended the ceremony and a plane monument is
now erecting on the spot by some of her friends with the following inscription.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Born 27th of April 1759, died 10th of September 1797.
The loss of the world in this admirable woman I leave to other men to collect my own, I will know.
Nor can it be improper to describe it. I do not hear allude to the personal pleasures I enjoyed in her conversation.
These increased every day in proportion as we knew each other better and as our mutual confidence increased.
They can be measured only by the treasures of her mind and the virtues of her heart.
But this is a subject for mediation, not for words.
What I purposed alluding to was the improvement that I have forever lost.
We have cultivated our powers.
If I may venture to use this sort of language in different directions, I chiefly an attempt at logical and metaphysical distinction.
She I taste for the picturesque. One of the leading passions of my mind has been an anxious desire not to be deceived.
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.
But it was not merely to judge, at least from all the reports of my memory in this respect,
the difference of propensities that made the difference in our intellectual habits.
I have been stimulated as long as I can remember, by an ambition for intellectual distinction.
But as long as I can remember,
I have been discouraged when I have endeavoured to cast the sum of my intellectual value by finding that I did not possess,
in the degree of some other men, an intuitive perception of intellectual beauty.
I have, perhaps. A strong and lively sense of the pleasures of the imagination.
But I have seldom been right in assigning them their proportionate value.
But by dint of persevering examination and the change and correction of my first opinions,
what I wanted in this respect, Mary, possessed in a degree superior to any other person I knew.
The strength of her mind lay in intuition.
She was often right by this means only in matters of mere speculation.
Her religion, her philosophy, and both of which the errors were comparatively few.
And the strange, dignified and generous were, as I have already said, the pure result of feeling and taste.
She adopted one opinion and rejected another spontaneously by a sort of tact and the force of a cultivated imagination.
And yet, though, perhaps in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little,
it is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her determinations.
But if this quality was used to her in topics that seemed the proper provenance of reasoning,
it was much more so in matters directly appealing to the intellectual taste in a robust and unwavering judgement of this sort.
There was a kind of witchcraft. When it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenious mind.
In this sense, I oscillation and scepticism were fixed by her boldness.
When a true opinion emanated in this way from another mind, the conviction produced in my own, assumed a similar character, instantaneous and firm.
This species of intellect probably differs from the other,
chiefly in the relation of earlier and later what one perceives instantaneously circumstances having produced in it
either premature attention to objects of this sort or a greater bold decision the other receives only by degrees.
What it wants seems to be nothing more than a minute attention to first impressions and a just appreciation of them.
Habits that are never so effectually generated as by the daily recurrence of a striking example.
This light was lent to me for a very short period and is now extinguished forever.
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.