Explore "Roxana" by Daniel Defoe on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
With this estate settled as you have heard, and with the best husband in the world, I left England again. I had not only in human prudence and by the nature of the thing, being now married and settled in so glorious a manner--I say I had not only abandoned all the gay and wicked course which I had gone through before, but I began to look back upon it with that horror and that detestation which is the certain companion, if not the forerunner, of repentance.
Sometimes the wonders of my present circumstances would work upon me, and I should have some raptures upon my soul upon the subject of my coming so smoothly out of the arms of hell, that I was not engulfed in ruin, as most who lead such lives are, first or last; but this was a flight too high for me. I was not come to that repentance that is raised from a sense of Heaven's goodness; I repented of the crime, but it was of another and lower kind of repentance, and rather moved by my fears of vengeance than from a sense of being spared from being punished and landed safe after a storm.