he other carried the day.
This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer.
We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I
remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her
character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that
she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would
say with emphasis the very word.

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,