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74 equal power and passion. Whatever her fiery mind fastened upon it fused into itself, nor was there anything her cunning right-hand sought to do in which it did not excel. At fourteen her precocity was so great that her father cut short her studies, because she "knew enough for a woman," and made her a teacher in his school. At sixteen she married a young clergyman. Children came fast. Her health gave way, but her energy remained. She was never idle a moment; but, alas! neither father nor husband, nor one of all her twelve brothers and brothers-in-law, saw that it would be better economy to give the genius they were all so proud of, a musical or an artistic or a medical education, that she might pay with her earnings some commoner mortal to make clothes for her little ones, than to let her do it herself with the painful toil of the needle. And she had been brought up with too narrow a vision of woman's duties and destinies to understand herself that she was wasting her life and abusing her powers. All her ready gifts were, in her eyes, merely appropriate feminine "accomplishments," and to make fame or money out of them never occurred to her as a possibility, far less as a duty. And yet her mind was ever in a fever of desire, of invention, of agonized craving for the realization of the dreams of beauty, of beneficence, of friendship, that tormented her. The music rang in her ears; the pictures floated before her eyes; the fearful and wonderful human organism haunted her brain; the dread mysteries of sin and suffering, the awfulness of human responsibility, the glories of salvation, burned upon her lips as she taught her children their daily Bible lesson; and still, nailed to her chair, the swift needle went in and out,—went, as it often seemed to her, through her delicate lungs as well as through the cloth,—until at nine-and-thirty the struggle ended; the body, after long paroxysms of exquisite anguish, gave up its strong hold on life, and the rich soul exhaled away to Heaven, rejoicing to escape from the bars against which it had so long beaten its bright wings in vain. I saw her in her coffin, with an expression of freedom and exaltation upon her marble features that seemed a glory