tments of
Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half
unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.'

* * * * *

'Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I
see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods. The
more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at
giving out thought and life in regulated rations,--the more I
weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without
props and sedan chairs.'

TO R.W.E.

'_Dec._ 26, 1839.--If you could look into my mind just now,
you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am
on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my
naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter,
describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to
send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this
might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm
and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in
magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due
direction.

'I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out
the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been
reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped
to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener
insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make
a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.'

She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been
supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of
the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account
of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon's, and, later, that
of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful
to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the
progress of intimacy, to write every day. 'I think less than a daily
offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems
to pass unspoken.' In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has
'more than a hundred correspondents;' and it was her habit there to
devote one day of every week to those distant friends. The facility
with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders
of the press would shrink from,--assumed and performed,--when her
friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonde