Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I | Page 3

more as the income of his profession
enabled him to give me means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he
made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last
generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit it to be with
the next. He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as
early as possible. Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as
the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the
additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he
returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was
often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from
his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on
the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to
bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The
consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a
"youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions,
nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the
harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth,
while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous
affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving
undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally

produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted
my constitution, and will bring me,--even although I have learned to
understand and regulate my now morbid temperament,--to a premature
grave.
'No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew why this
child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling to retire. My aunts
cried out upon the "spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever
was,--if brother could but open his eyes to see it,--who was never
willing to go to bed." They did not know that, so soon as the light was
taken away, she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards
her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they
came, till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up
with a shriek which drove them away, but only to return when she lay
down again. They did not know that, when at last she went to sleep, it
was to dream of horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in
fright; or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees that
dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get
out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet, and rose
higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. No
wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the
house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she
told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her "leave off
thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,"--never knowing that
he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often she
dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother, as she had
done that of her sister, and woke to find the pillow drenched in tears.
These dreams softened her heart too much, and cast a deep shadow
over her young days; for then, and later, the life of dreams,--probably
because there was in it less to distract the mind from its own
earnestness,--has often seemed to her more real, and been remembered
with more interest, than that of waking hours.
'Poor child! Far remote in time, in thought, from that period, I look
back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and
perceive that I had no natural childhood.'

BOOKS.
'Thus passed my first years. My mother was in delicate health, and

much absorbed in the care of her younger children. In the house was
neither dog nor bird, nor any graceful animated form of existence. I
saw no persons who took my fancy, and real life offered no attraction.
Thus my already over-excited mind found no relief from without, and
was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. I was taught
Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at
six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily. In this branch
of study, first by my father, and afterwards by a tutor, I was trained to
quite a high degree of precision. I was expected to understand the
mechanism of the language thoroughly, and in translating to give the
thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and without