Only in retrospect will the conclusion of this letter take on additional meaning from
the remarkably heightened rhetoric indulged in by Walton here at its end. For Walton
so to "testify" is to "bear witness" before the world to a dependence upon and need
for his sister. In a narrative in which solitude and obsessiveness will come to seem
a threat to all normative human relationships, this prior assertion of the primacy
of human affection bears an ideological import. Students of English Romantic poetry
may even be reminded of the highly emotional faith with which Wordsworth turns to
his sister Dorothy in "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", a poem that
will be quoted by Victor Frankenstein in an encomium to his friend Henry Clerval at
a point of structural balance with this passage, at the beginning of Volume 3 of the
novel (III:1:21).