other,
appears to be the incentive of early genius, was hid beneath her
pillow, and read and re-read with tireless avidity. Those illustrious
heroes of antiquity became the companions of her solitude and of her
hourly thoughts. She adored them and loved them as her own most
intimate personal friends. Her character became insensibly molded to
their forms, and she was inspired with restless enthusiasm to imitate
their deeds. When but twelve years of age, her father found her, one
day, weeping that she was not born a Roman maiden. Little did she then
imagine that, by talent, by suffering, and by heroism, she was to
display a character the history of which would eclipse the proudest
narratives in Greek or Roman story.

Jane appears never to have known the frivolity and thoughtlessness of
childhood. Before she had entered the fourth year of her age she knew
how to read. From that time her thirst for reading was so great, that
her parents found no little difficulty in furnishing her with a
sufficient supply. She not only read with eagerness every book which
met her eye, but pursued this uninterrupted miscellaneous reading to
singular advantage, treasuring up all important facts in her retentive
memory. So entirely absorbed was she in her books, that the only
successful mode of withdrawing her from them was by offering her
flowers, of which she was passionately fond. Books and flowers
continued, through all the vicissitudes of her life, even till the
hour of her death, to afford her the most exquisite pleasure. She had
no playmates, and thought no more of play than did her father and
mother, who were her only and her constant companions. From infancy
she was accustomed to the thoughts and the emotions of mature minds.
In personal appearance she was, in earliest childhood and through
life, peculiarly interesting rather than beautiful. As mature years
perfected her features and her form, there was in the contour of her
graceful figure, and her intellectual countenance, that air of
thoughtfulness, of pensiveness, of glowing tenderness and delicacy,
which gave her a power of fascination over all hearts. She sought not
this power; she thought not of it; but an almost resistless attraction
and persuasion accompanied all her words and actions.

It was, perhaps, the absence of playmates, and the habitual converse
with mature minds, which, at so early an age, inspired Jane with that
insatiate thirst for knowledge which she ever mani