I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament.  In the first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner,—­that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk.  She had a strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her fate.  She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration.  She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed formed for high emergencies.

Her life concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy moments.  The rest was a void.  She had read that a man of letters must lose many days, to work well in one.  Much more must a Sappho or a sibyl.  The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain.  ‘If I had wist!—­’ she writes, ’I am a worse self-tormentor than Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire.  My beautiful lore, like the tropic clime, hatches scorpions to sting me.  There is a verse, which Annie of Lochroyan sings about her ring, that torments my memory, ‘tis so true of myself.’

When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises, and had a feeling as if a voice cried, Stand from under!—­as if, a little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses, which no friendship could avert or console.  This feeling partly wore off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more purely intellectual natures.  She seemed more vulnerable.  For the same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my strength,—­her powers were a surprise.  She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better.  It were long to tell her peculiarities.  Her childhood was full of presentiments.  She was then a somnambulist.  She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions.  When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head.  ‘My parents,’ she said,

    ’were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion
    destroyed.  My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but
    I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.’