Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Letter 2

Archangel, 28th March, 17--

To Mrs. Saville, England

How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!

Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.  I have hired a

vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have

already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend and are certainly

possessed of dauntless courage.

But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and

the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I

have no friend, Margaret:  when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of

success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by

disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I

shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor

medium for the communication of feeling.  I desire the company of a man

who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may

deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a

friend.  I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a

cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my

own, to approve or amend my plans.  How would such a friend repair the

faults of your poor brother!  I am too ardent in execution and too

impatient of difficulties.  But it is a still greater evil to me that I

am self-educated:  for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild

on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas' books of voyages. At

that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own

country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive

its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived the

necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my

native country.  Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more

illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen.  It is true that I have

thought more and that my daydreams are more extended and magnificent,

but they want (as the painters call it) KEEPING; and I greatly need a

friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and

affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.  Well, these

are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the wide

ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen.  Yet

some feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in

these rugged bosoms.  My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of

wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory, or