either pleasure or edification; I had increased rapidly in size and in
strength: the growth of the mind, however, had by no means corresponded
with that of the body. It is true, I had acquired my letters, and was by
this time able to read imperfectly; but this was all: and even this poor
triumph over absolute ignorance would never have been effected but for
the unremitting attention of my parents, who, sometimes by threats,
sometimes by entreaties, endeavoured to rouse the dormant energies of my
nature, and to bend my wishes to the acquisition of the rudiments of
knowledge; but in influencing the wish lay the difficulty. Let but the
will of a human being be turned to any particular object, and it is ten
to one that sooner or later he achieves it. At this time I may safely
say that I harboured neither wishes nor hopes; I had as yet seen no
object calculated to call them forth, and yet I took pleasure in many
things which perhaps unfortunately were all within my sphere of
enjoyment. I loved to look upon the heavens, and to bask in the rays of
the sun, or to sit beneath hedgerows and listen to the chirping of the
birds, indulging the while in musing and meditation as far as my very
limited circle of ideas would permit; but, unlike my brother, who was at
this time at school, and whose rapid progress in every branch of
instruction astonished and delighted his preceptors, I took no pleasure
in books, whose use, indeed, I could scarcely comprehend, and bade fair
to be as arrant a dunce as ever brought the blush of shame into the
cheeks of anxious and affectionate parents.

But the time was now at hand when the ice which had hitherto bound the
mind of the child with its benumbing power was to be thawed, and a world
of sensations and ideas awakened to which it had hitherto been an entire
stranger. One day a young lady, an intimate acquaintance of our family,
and godmother to my brother, drove up to the house in which we dwelt; she
stayed some time conversing with my mother, and on rising to depart, she