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.’

BOOKS.

’Thus passed my first years.  My mother was in delicate health, and much absorbed in the care of her younger children.  In the house was neither dog nor bird, nor any graceful animated form of existence.  I saw no persons who took my fancy, and real life offered no attraction.  Thus my already over-excited mind found no relief from without, and was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books.  I was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily.  In this branch of study, first by my father, and afterwards by a