'My father,--all whose feelings were now concentred on
me,--instructed me himself. The effect of this was so far good
that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak
persons as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at
once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the
same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented
to me. My father was a man of business, even in literature; he
had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached
to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had
derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated
memories of success and good repute. He was, beside, well read
in French literature, and in English, a Queen Anne's man. He
hoped to make me the heir of all he knew, and of as much more
as the income of his profession enabled him to give me
means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he made one
great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last
generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit
it to be with the next. He thought to gain time, by bringing
forward the intellect as early as possible. Thus I had tasks
given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and
on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage
of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his
office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often
kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both
from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings
were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus
frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with
nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature
development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by
day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare,
and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious
development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while,
later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous
affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the
brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling,
there was finally produced a state of being both too active
and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring
me,--even although I have learned to understand and regulate
my now morbid temperament,--to a premature grave.
'No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew
why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling
to retire. My aunts cried out upon the "spoiled child, the
most unreasonable child that ever was,--if brother could but
open his eyes to see it,--who was never willing to go to bed."
They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away,
she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her,
the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as
they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon
her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but
only to return when she lay down again. They did not know
that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of
horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright;
or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees
that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could
not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over
her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it
would reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked in
her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they
heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had
dreamed, her father sharply bid her "leave off thinking of
such nonsense, or she would be crazy,"--never knowing that he
was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often
she dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother,
as she had done that of her sister, and woke to find the
pillow drenched in tears. These dreams softened her heart too
much, and cast a deep shadow over her young days; for then,
and later, the life of dreams,--probably because there was in
it less to distract the mind from its own earnestness,--has
often seemed to her more real, and been remembered with more
interest, than that of waking hours.
'Poor child! Far remote in time, in thought, from that
period, I look back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was
enveloped, and perceive that I had no natural childhood.'