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needs have been strong-winged, and bold to do that.
Clearly she was a many-sided woman, whom heart and imagination alone would have made a devotee, and her keen intellection alone a free lance, and who thus alternately believed much and nothing, alternately accepted and defied destiny.
So much one might read of her history in this book.
Society knew also that she was born and reared in New York, her father being a wealthy banker, well-bred, and scholarly.
Determined that this pet daughter — a wise little atom even in her babyhood — should not be merely a fashionable girl, he gave her teachers and books, appealed to her ambition, aroused her artistic instinct, and kindled her religious nature.
The quick spirit responded to every touch.
A wise and loving man meant only to mould a wise and loving woman; but day by day the steady eyes grew more intent in their questioning; day by day the broad brow wore lines of deeper thought; day by day the elder mind caught glimpses in the younger of that strange, ineffable gift which men call genius.
The brilliant girl had written verses almost as soon as she could write at all. French and Italian she readily mastered, and in time, leaving behind her the waste and weary land of German grammar, she came into such a shining inheritance of German literature as seemed to create in her new faculties of comprehension.
Goethe and Schiller were her prophets and kings, and she received with large welcome the subtile philosophers of their speculative nation.
While a school-girl she published first, a review of Lamartine's Jocelyn, with translations in English verse, and afterwards a more thoughtful review of Dwight's translation of the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller.
So she grew to ripe girlhood,--reading, writing, dreaming; fiery within, as her warm tints and rich bright hair declared her, but cold without, under the repression of her education.
To this day it is plain that she cannot easily reconcile her
S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
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