I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct.

If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.

And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man.

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?

But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.

He could have endured poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable.

I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener.

He was a being formed in the "very poetry of nature." His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart.

Of what materials was I made that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture?