Lucky’s Reviews > Frankenstein: The 1818 Text > Status Update

You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more.

For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?

I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.

Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.

What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin. He seems to feel his own worth, and the greatness of his fall.

I have but one resource; and I devote mysel either in my life or death, to his destruction.

But the apple was already eaten, and the angel's arm bared to drive me from all hope.

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away blooming children, the only hopes of their parents: how many brides and lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could resist so many shocks, which continually renewed the torture.

But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked hu-manity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself.

"The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to him An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."
- Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”