The month of October brought round one of the most disagreeable anniversaries in my life. I was arrested on the 13th of that month in the preceding year. Other recollections of the same period, also pained me. That day two years, a highly valued and excellent man whom I truly honoured, was drowned in the Ticino. Three years before, a young person, Odoardo Briche, [18] whom I loved as if he had been my own son, had accidentally killed himself with a musket. Earlier in my youth another severe affliction had befallen me in the same month.

Though not superstitious, the remembrance of so many unhappy occurrences at the same period of the year, inspired a feeling of extreme sorrow. While conversing at the window with the children, and with my fellow prisoners, I assumed an air of mirth, but hardly had I re-entered my cave than an irresistible feeling of melancholy weighed down every faculty of my mind. In vain I attempted to engage in some literary composition; I was involuntarily impelled to write upon other topics. I thought of my family, and wrote letters after letters, in which I poured forth all my burdened spirit, all I had felt and enjoyed of home, in far happier days, surrounded by brothers, sisters, and friends who had always loved me. The desire of seeing them, and long compulsory separation, led me to speak on a variety of little things, and reveal a thousand thoughts of gratitude and tenderness, which would not otherwise have occurred to my mind.

In the same way I took a review of my former life, diverting my attention by recalling past incidents, and dwelling upon those happier periods now for ever fled. Often, when the picture I had thus drawn, and sat contemplating for hours, suddenly vanished from my sight, and left me conscious only of the fearful present, and more threatening future, the pen fell from my hand; I recoiled with horror; the contrast was more than I could bear. These were terrific moments; I had already felt them, but never with such intense susceptibility as then. It was agony. This I attributed to extreme excitement of the passions, occasioned by expressing them in the form of letters, addressed to persons to whom I was so tenderly attached.

I turned to other subjects, I determined to change the form of expressing my ideas, but could not. In whatever way I began, it always ended in a letter teeming with affection and with grief.

“What,” I exclaimed, “am I no more master of my own will? Is this strange necessity of doing that which I object to, a distortion of my brain? At first I could have accounted for it; but after being inured to this solitude, reconciled, and supported by religious reflections; how have I become the slave of these blind impulses, these wanderings of heart and mind? let me apply to other matters!” I then endeavoured to pray; or to weary my attention by hard study of the German. Alas! I commenced and found myself actually engaged in writing a letter!