it from a need of testing their powers; or was it simply
through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes united to deprive me of the
sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had made
me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling hearts
rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed feelings turn
to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth from which, in
after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many characters the
habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear, and fear ends
in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a man, and makes him
more or less a slave. But in my case these perpetual tortures led to the
development of a certain strength, which increased through exercise
and predisposed my spirit to the habit of moral resistance. Always
in expectation of some new grief--as the martyrs expected some fresh
blow--my whole being expressed, I doubt not, a sullen resignation which
smothered the grace and gaiety of childhood, and gave me an appearance
of idiocy which seemed to justify my mother's threatening prophecies.
The certainty of injustice prematurely roused my pride--that fruit
of reason--and thus, no doubt, checked the evil tendencies which an
education like mine encouraged.

Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her
solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous
of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such times
when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would inflict
upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced that I
could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and watch the
insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. Though my loneliness
naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation was first
aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my early troubles.
So little notice was taken of me that the governess occasionally forgot
to send me to bed. One evening I was peacefully crouching under a
fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of curiosity which takes
possession of a child's mind, and to which my precocious melancholy
gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters were playing about
and laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an accompaniment to my
thoughts. After a while the noise ceased and darkness fell. My mother
happened to notice my absence. To escap