affections. As soon
as the light was removed from her chamber at night, this ill-tended
girl was haunted by colossal faces, that advanced slowly towards her,
the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came;
till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up
with a shriek, which drove them away, but only to return when she lay
down again. 'No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep,
moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came
and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply
bade her "leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be
crazy"--never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these
horrors of the night.' Her home seems to have been deficient in the
charms and associations appropriate to childhood. Finding no relief
from without, her already overexcited mind was driven for refuge from
itself to the world of books. She tells us she was taught Latin and
English grammar at the same time; in Latin, which she began to read at
six years old, her father, and subsequently a tutor, trained her to a
high degree of precision, expecting her to understand the mechanism of
the language thoroughly, and to translate it tersely and
unhesitatingly, with the definite clearness of one perfectly _au fait_
in the philosophy of the classics. Thus she became imbued with an
abiding interest in the genius of old Rome--'the power of will, the
dignity of a fixed purpose'--where man takes a 'noble bronze in camps
and battle-fields,' his brow well furrowed by the 'wrinkles of
council,' and his eye 'cutting its way like the sword;' and thence she
loved to escape, at Ovid's behest, to the enchanted gardens of the
Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave,
the shadows on the hill--delighted to realise in those Greek forms the
faith of a refined and intense childhood. Reading was now to her a
habit and a passion. Its only rival attraction was the 'dear little
garden' behind the house, where the best hours of her lonely
child-life were spent. Within the house, everything, she says, was
socially utilitarian; her books told of a proud world, but in another
temper were the teachings of the little garden, where her thoughts
could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not
called to fly or sing before the time. A range of blue hills, at about
twelve miles' distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her