Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/40

22 lectual forcing process. It was the custom of the time. Rev. Dr. Hedge, afterwards her intimate intellectual companion, assures me that there was nothing peculiar, for that period, in Mr. Fuller’s method, except that it was applied to a girl. Cambridge boys, if the sons of college-bred men, were brought up in much the same way. Dr. Hedge himself was fitted for college at eleven, and had read half the body of Latin literature before that time. What made the matter worse in her case was not the mere fact that she was a girl, though that doubtless created a need of such watchful care as only a mother can give. There was the serious additional evil that all her lessons must be recited after her father came back from his office, and therefore at irregular hours, often extending late into the evening. High pressure is bad enough for an imaginative and excitable child, but high pressure by candle-light is ruinous; yet that was the life she lived. The fragment of autobiographical romance in which she vividly describes the hcrrors of this method must not, as her brother Arthur has suggested, be taken too literally; but frequent references in her later journals show her deep sense of the wrong she suffered in mind and body by the mistaken system applied in her early youth. Writing in her diary, many years afterwards, of some improvements in physical training, especially as to tightlacing, she says: —

“If we had only been as well brought up in these