spirit so attuned to romance. Reality became insipid, almost hateful to
me; conversation, except that of the literary men to whom I have
alluded, a burden. I imbibed a thorough contempt for women, children,
and household affairs, intrenching myself behind invisible barriers that
few, very few, could pass. Oh how many wasted hours, how much of
unprofitable labor, what wrong to my fellow-creatures, what robbery of
God, must I refer to this ensnaring book. My mind became unnerved, my
judgment perverted, my estimate of people and things wholly falsified,
and my soul wrapped in the vain solace of unsubstantial enjoyments
during years of after sorrow, when but for this I might have early
sought the consolations of the gospel. Parents know not what they do,
when from vanity, thoughtlessness, or overindulgence, they foster in a
young girl what is called a poetical taste. Those things highly esteemed
among men are held in abomination with God; they thrust him from his
creatures' thoughts, and enshrine a host of polluting idols in his
place.

My father, I am sure, wished to check the evil which, as a sensible man,
he could not but foresee; my state of health, however, won a larger
portion of indulgence than was good for me. The doctors into whose hands
I had fallen, were of the school now happily very much exploded: they
had one panacea for almost every ill, and that was the perilous drug
mercury. With it, they rather fed than physicked me; and its deleterious
effects on the nervous system were doubly injurious to me, as increasing
tenfold the excitability that required every curb. Among all the marvels
of my life, the greatest is that of my having grown up to be one of the
healthiest of human beings, and with an inexhaustible flow of even
mirthful spirits; for certainly I was long kept hovering on the verge of
the grave by the barbarous excess to which medical experiments were
carried; and I never entertained a doubt that the total loss of my