strong-minded but abnormally retired, jealous of her brother, and not
much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more
companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea;
and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden,
apparently as recluse as the rest. With these feminine members of the
household Elizabeth Peabody made friends, and though a year elapsed in
the process, she then had her reward in receiving Hawthorne and his
sisters, who one evening came to call. She ran upstairs to her sister,
exclaiming, "Oh, Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down! The
Hawthornes are here, and you never saw anything so splendid as he
is,--he is handsomer than Lord Byron!" But Sophia did not come down, and
it was only on the second call that the two met as has been described.

Sophia Peabody was at this time twenty-six years old, having been born
in 1811, and had been an invalid through her girlhood; she was afflicted
with an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly, says her
son, from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, though the pain was not
so severe, her sister remarks, but that she could sometimes read. She
had received her education at home, mainly from her sister, who kept a
school in the house, and in spite of her ill-health had many and varied
acquisitions. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was somewhat
familiar with history. Passages in her journal show the character and
range of her reading, which was of that strangely mixed sort that
belonged to the notion of culture in those days; thus, for instance, in
her twentieth year, she records having read on one day De Gerando,
Fenelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, Addison, and four comedies of
Shakspere, besides doing some sewing. She was a good French and Italian
scholar. Filled with intellectual enthusiasm and ambition as she was,
her sensibilities seem rather to have been roused by natural beauty,
effects of sky and weather and color, and her active powers took the