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struggle: I do nothing right.
I yield to temptation almost as soon as it assails me. My deepest feelings are very evanescent.
I am beset behind and before, and my sins take away all my happiness.
But that which most constantly besets me is pride — I can trace almost all my sins back to it.
In the mean time, the school is prospering.
February 16, 1827, Catherine writes to
Dr. Beecher:
My affairs go on well.
The stock is all taken up, and next week I hope to have out the prospectus of the Hartford Female Seminary.
I hope the building will be done, and all things in order, by June.
The English lady is coming with twelve pupils from New York.
Speaking of Harriet, who was at this time with her father in
Boston, she adds:
I have received some letters from Harriet to-day which make me feel uneasy.
She says, “I don't know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought that I could wish to die young, and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave, rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to every one.
You don't know how perfectly wretched I often feel: so useless, so weak, so destitute of all energy.
Mamma often tells me that I am a strange, inconsistent being.
Sometimes I could not sleep, and have groaned and cried till midnight, while in the daytime I tried to appear cheerful and succeeded so well that papa reproved me for laughing so much.
I was so absent sometimes that I made strange mistakes, and then they all laughed at me, and I laughed, too, though I felt as though I should go distracted.
I wrote rules; made out a regular system for dividing my time; but my feelings vary so much that it is almost impossible for me to be regular.”
