Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/30

 4 in Switzerland, contribute little to the knowledge of her history, while they are characteristic examples of her stjde of thought and composition.

Mathilde Blind's first schooling was in Belgium. She mentions in a letter having subsequently attended two or three very unsatisfactory schools in England, but her most reliable training was due to her mother, even though she states in her autobiography that from twelve to fourteen she "acted as her own teacher." At the latter age she was sent to another school, the best then to be had in St. John's Wood, but unfortunate in so far as concerned the Head Mistress, who is described as a clergyman's widow bringing up a family in narrow circumstances, with curled sandy hair, a washed-out complexion, and pale grey eyes which gazed on the world through very dim spectacles. Much of the lady's time was spent in meditating upon the Millennium, and composing an interpretation of the prophecies of Daniel. Left to themselves, the girls, at least the cleverest among them, "passed much of their time in writing novels and verses, in editing a journal, and in acting Dickens." As is so common with sensitive and imaginative young people, Mathilde fell violently in love with one of her schoolfellows. "The whole school was agreed that Amy was a beautiful girl, but to me she appeared a divinity." The charm would seem to have chiefly consisted in Amy's total unlikeness to her adorer, whose homage she accepted without comprehending it. Nor could her unsentimental and abrupt mother understand how so clever a girl as Matliilde should take a fancy to "a big lackadaisical useless kind of a creature, not good for much in the house or out of it." But there must have been true, if illusive, poetry in the attachment, for long after it had passed away Mathilde could write;—