Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/20

Rh and on subjects far beyond my age." These lessons were recited to her father after office hours; and as these hours were often prolonged, the child's mind was kept in a state of tension until long after the time when the little head should have rested serenely on its pillow. In consequence of this, it often rested very ill, and the youthful prodigy of the day-time was terrified at night by dreams and illusions, and disturbed by sleep-walking. From these efforts and excitements resulted, as she says, a state of being too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me, although I have learned to understand and to regulate my now morbid temperament, to a premature grave."

This was unhappy, certainly. The keen, active temperament did indeed acquire a morbid intensity, and the young creature thus spurred on to untimely effort began to live and to learn at a pace with which the slowness of circumstance was never able to keep abreast.

Even with the allowance which must be made for the notion of that time as to what a child should be able to accomplish, it must grieve and surprise us to find Margaret at the age of six years engaged in the study of Latin and of English grammar. Her father "demanded accuracy and clearness in everything."

Intelligible statement, seasoned thought, and a certainty, which excluded all suppositions and reservations, —these were his requirements from his young pupil. A certain guasi-dogmatic mode of enunciation in later life, which may have seemed, on a superficial view, to indicate an undue confidence and assumption, had probably its origin in the decided way in which the little Margaret was "taught to recite her lessons.