I showed, when quite a child, an extreme sensibility. Every thing
affected me violently. While yet an infant in my mother's arms, and
before I had learnt to talk, I could be wrought upon to a wonderful
degree of anguish or delight by the power of music. As I grew older my
feelings remained equally acute, and I was easily transported into
paroxysms of pleasure or rage. It was the amusement of my relatives and
of the domestics to play upon this irritable temperament. I was moved
to tears, tickled to laughter, provoked to fury, for the entertainment
of company, who were amused by such a tempest of mighty passion in a
pigmy frame. They little thought, or perhaps little heeded the
dangerous sensibilities they were fostering. I thus became a little
creature of passion, before reason was developed. In a short time I
grew too old to be a plaything, and then I became a torment. The tricks
and passions I had been teased into became irksome, and I was disliked
by my teachers for the very lessons they had taught me.

My mother died; and my power as a spoiled child was at an end. There
was no longer any necessity to humor or tolerate me, for there was
nothing to be gained by it, as I was no favorite of my father. I
therefore experienced the fate of a spoiled child in such situation,
and was neglected or noticed only to be crossed and contradicted. Such
was the early treatment of a heart, which, if I am judge of it at all,
was naturally disposed to the extremes of tenderness and affection.

My father, as I have already said, never liked me--in fact, he never
Understood me; he looked upon me as wilful and wayward, as deficient in
natural affection:--it was the stateliness of his own manner; the
loftiness and grandeur of his own look that had repelled me from his
arms. I always pictured him to myself as I had seen him clad in his