ion was unconscious
infiltration from a good home-atmosphere. This is an influence of
incalculable importance, a thousand times outweighing all the schools.
It is that for which God established the family; the one single possible
real and efficient means of well bringing up the young. And whatever
shades of repression, misunderstanding, ungeniality, restraint, may have
sometimes troubled me, still I constantly feel and fully know that that
pure, calm, quiet, bright, loving, intelligent, refined atmosphere of my
home silently and unconsciously penetrated and vivified all my being. If
now I should be told, "You are no very splendid exemplar of the results
of such influences," I should still say, "Most true, unfortunately true;
but what should I have been without them?"

I had brothers and sisters,--a few playmates; but neither they, nor any
other human beings, not even my parents, seem to have been during those
years, to any important extent, directly operative within or upon the
sphere and character of my own real conscious existence. That life
figures itself in my memory much like a magic circle, within which I was
alone, and did my scanty little thinkings and imaginings alone. The rest
of the living were outside, unreal,--phantoms moving to and fro, around
and without, but never coming within that limit,--never entering into
living communion with me. This constitutional solitude of mind has a
useful office, perhaps not to be easily explained, but sometimes not
otherwise to be performed.

This isolation was, in part, unnecessary. To a certain extent the
necessity for it still remains. But in part it was artificial,--my
unconscious reaction against an ill-adapted influence,--the resisting
force of a trait which, like all those other early traits, has become
visible to me, like the blind paths over bogs, now that I am a long way
off. This trait I have already spoken of. It was an insensibility to a
certain motive, rather prominent among those commonly proposed to me for
my own government of myself. This was variously framed thus:--It is not
usual to do this; it is usual to do that; if you proceed so and so, it
will seem singular; people will talk about it; you will offend people's
usages and habits; you will seem singular and odd. Against such cautions
I rebelled with a mute, indignant impulse, which I was not old enough to
enounce or to argue. It was, however, the result of two
characteristics;--one, the natural lack of