Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for me to live at
all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced
to wean myself, and suddenly to assume the harness of life. Else under
the morbid languishing of grief, and of what the Romans called
_desiderium_, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable
face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh
was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered
broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than
two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily
strength, the danger had passed over.

In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks for having been
trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, and not under "horrid
pugilistic brothers." Meantime, one such brother I had, senior by much
to myself, and the stormiest of his class: him I will immediately
present to the reader; for up to this point of my narrative he may be
described as a stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at
this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom would have been
able to challenge me as a relative, nor I _him_, had we happened to
meet on the public roads.

In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived
abroad for a space that, measured against _my_ life, was a very long
one. First, he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra;
next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica,
sometimes in St. Kitt's; courting the supposed benefit of hot climates
in his complaint of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, repeatedly
returned to England, and met my mother at watering-places on the south
coast of Devonshire, &c. But I, as a younger child, had not been one
of the party selected for such excursions from home. And now, at last,