Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
and a coming world. This is a deplorable, yet just, picture of myself. How totally the
reverse of what I once appeared!
Let it warn you, my friend, to shun the dangerous paths which I have trodden,
that you may never be involved in the hopeless ignominy and wretchedness of
PETER SANFORD.
Letter LXIII
TO MISS JULIA GRANBY.
BOSTON.
A melancholy tale have you unfolded, my dear Julia; and tragic indeed is the
concluding scene.
Is she then gone? gone in this most distressing manner? Have I lost my onceloved
friend? lost her in a way which I could never have conceived to be possible?
Our days of childhood were spent together in the same pursuits, in the same
amusements. Our riper years increased our mutual aection, and maturer judgment
most rmly cemented our friendship. Can I, then, calmly resign her to so severe
a fate? Can I bear the idea of her being lost to honor, to fame, and to life? No; she
shall still live in the heart of her faithful Lucy, whose experience of her numerous
virtues and engaging qualities has imprinted her image too deeply on the memory
to be obliterated. However she may have erred, her sincere repentance is sucient
to restore her to charity.
Your letter gave me the rst information of this awful event. I had taken a
short excursion into the country, where I had not seen the papers, or, if I had, paid
little or no attention to them. By your directions I found the distressing narrative
of her exit. The poignancy of my grief, and the unavailing lamentations which the
intelligence excited, need no delineation. To scenes of this nature you have been
habituated in the mansion of sorrow where you reside.
How sincerely I sympathize with the bereaved parent of the dear, deceased
Eliza, I can feel, but have not power to express. Let it be her consolation that her
child is at rest. The resolution which carried this deluded wanderer thus far from
her friends, and supported her through her various trials, is astonishing. Happy
would it have been had she exerted an equal degree of fortitude in repelling the
rst attacks upon her virtue. But she is no more, and Heaven forbid that I should
accuse or reproach her.
Yet in what language shall I express my abhorrence of the monster whose
detestable arts have blasted one of the fairest owers in creation? I leave him to
God and his own conscience. Already is he exposed in his true colors. Vengeance
already begins to overtake him. His sordid mind must now suer the deprivation
of those sensual gratications beyond which he is incapable of enjoyment.
Upon your reecting and steady mind, my dear Julia, I need not inculcate the
lessons which may be drawn from this woe-fraught tale; but for the sake of my sex
in general, I wish it engraved upon every heart, that virtue alone, independent of
the trappings of wealth, the parade of equipage, and the adulation of gallantry,
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