only what any child of early cleverness might be made by forcing and
injudicious admiration. In our own language, except in the cases of
Chatterton and Kirke White, we can call to mind no instance of so early,
so ardent, and so fatal a pursuit of intellectual advancement.

"She composed with great rapidity; as fast as most persons usually copy.
There are several instances of four or five pieces on different
subjects, and containing three or four stanzas each, written on the
same day. Her thoughts flowed so rapidly, that she often expressed the
wish that she had two pair of hands, that she might employ them to
transcribe. When 'in the vein,' she would write standing, and be wholly
abstracted from the company present and their conversation. But if
composing a piece of some length, she wished to be entirely alone; she
shut herself into her room, darkened the windows, and in summer placed
her Aeolian harp in the window:" (thus by artificial excitement, feeding
the fire that consumed her.) "In those pieces on which she bestowed more
than ordinary pains, she was very secret; and if they were, by any
accident, discovered in their unfinished state, she seldom completed
them, and often destroyed them. She cared little for any of her works
after they were completed: some, indeed, she preserved with care for
future correction, but a great proportion she destroyed: very many that
are preserved, were rescued from the flames by her mother. Of a complete
poem, in five cantos, called 'Rodri,' and composed when she was thirteen
years of age, a single canto, and part of another, are all that are
saved from a destruction which she supposed had obliterated every
vestige of it."

She was often in danger, when walking, from carriages, &c., in
consequence of her absence of mind. When engaged in a poem of some
length, she has often forgotten her meals. A single incident,