“I am sorry you showed my brother my journal from
Edinburgh to London. Although I do not think it contains anything, as far as I
can now recollect, to entitle me to the abhorrence of those who shall peruse
it, yet I am sensible that my mind, at the
| REASONS FOR TRAVEL. | 29 |
“But why do I put these questions to you? Can you answer them any more than myself?
“Abhorrence! Do you abhor me, Godwin? I cannot recollect all that I wrote, but this I remember, that your sensations upon having read it seemed to me to be not those of abhorrence. My brother is a good young man, as men go; I do not doubt his honour, but I doubt very much if his sense of right and wrong is either more just or more acute than yours. . . .
“Man, as you justly observe, is the creature of
success. If I finish my undertaking successfully, I shall ever acknowledge that
the concern you had in it, though accidental, was far from trivial. I formed
the design before I knew or had any hopes of knowing you; without you I would
certainly have attempted it, but without the assistance which I have derived by
your means, I should as certainly have sunk under the execution. When I
consider the history of my own mind, I may almost say that to travel was my
destiny. I was driven to it by an irresistible impulse; by an inextinguishable
thirst of knowledge, which is probably inherent in every youthful uncorrupted
mind. The dangers, and even the hardships which I have already overcome,
although great, are not superior to those which, by all accounts, I shall still
have to encounter. I may be cut off: such an event may well happen: but I see
no reason that you should therefore have a portion of remorse, as if you had
been my murderer. You know better than any others the motives by which you have
been influenced in giving me the encouragement and assistance you have done;
and the
| 30 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
