But, without seeking further to analyze and account for such
a spirit, it is quite sufficient if I have described it. Perhaps,
there are other hearts equally froward and wayward with my own. I
know not if my story will amend--perhaps it may not even instruct
or inform them--I feel that no story, however truthful, could have
disarmed the humor of that particular mood of mind which shows
itself in the blindness of the heart under which it was my lot to
labor. I did not want knowledge of my own perversity. I knew--I
felt it--as clearly as if I had seen it written in characters of
light, on the walls of my chamber. But, until it had exhausted
itself and passed away by its own processes, no effort of mine could
have overcome or banished it. I stalked apart, under its influence,
a gloomy savage--scornful and sad--stern, yet suffering--denying
myself equally, in the perverse and wanton denial to which I
condemned all others.
Perhaps something of this temper is derived from the yearnings of
the mental nature. It may belong somewhat to the natural direction
of a mind having a decided tendency to imaginative pursuits. There
is a dim, vague, indefinite struggle, for ever going on in the nature
of such a person, after an existence and relations very foreign to
the world in which it lives; and equally far from, and hostile to
that condition in which it thrives. The vague discontent of such
a mind is one of the causes of its activity; and how far it may be
stimulated into diseased intensity by injudicious treatment, is a
question of large importance for the consideration of philosophers.
The imaginative nature is one singularly sensitive in its conditions;
quick, jealous, watchful, earnest, stirring, and perpetually
breaking down the ordinary barriers of the actual, in its struggles
to ascertain the extent of the possible. The tyranny which drives
it from the ordinary resources and enjoyments of the young,
by throwing it more completely on its own, impels into desperate
activity that daring of the imaginative mood, which, at no time,
is wanting in courage and audacity. My mind was one singularly
imaginative in its structure; and my ardent temperament contributed
largely to its activity. Solitude, into which I was forced by the
repulsive and unkind treatment of my relatives, was also favorable
to the exercise of this influence; and my heart may be said to have
taken, in turn, every color and aspect which informed my eyes. It
was a blind heart for this very reason, in respect to all those
things for which it should have had a color of its own. Books and
the woods--the voice of waters and of song--the dim mysteries of
poetry, and the whispers of lonely forest-walks, which beguiled me
into myself, and more remotely from my fellows, were all, so far
as my social relations were concerned, evil influences! Influences
which were only in part overcome by the communion of such gentle
beings as William Edgerton and Julia Clifford.