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
