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106 AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
I suffered like Tantalus. Within a year we had returned
to our quiet home in the north. Then began for us a life,
the heaviness and torture of which it would be vain to at-
tempt to paint. Our home became to us a prison, compared
with which a real prison would, so it appeared to me, have
been a delicious retreat. We saw nobody in our house,
and those whom we saw in the houses of others were un-
kind and unfriendly to us on account of our foreign jour-
ney, and on account of the airs which people fancied we
wanted to give ourselves. Year after year a heavier and
darker cloud lowered itself over my home, and still more
over my soul. Gradually all illusions vanished. With a
soul infinitely lively and active, I found myself shut out
from all activity. If a charitable hand had then pointed
out to me the road to light and future usefulness, through
cultivation of my intellect and a judicious division of the
time to be devoted to this purpose, —oh! then so many
years would not have rolled past me like zeroes, and I
would have borne better every day’s bitterness and pain.
But my soul was still, as it were, in its swaddling clothes.
I read heaps of novels ; they awakened within me a longing
for happiness and love, which could not be realized. I
read large quantities of sermons, which did not make me
a bit better or less unhappy. I played the piano, and occu-
pied myself in one way or other, but more and more list-
lessly. I waited for a turn in events, in order to enter into
activity, but no such events happened. Embroidering an
interminable gray neckerchief, I became more and more
benumbed, that is to say, in my vital powers, in my desire
to live. The sense of pain did not become benumbed ; it
became, on the contrary, more sharp every day, like the
frost in a steadily increasing winter. The flame in my soul
was flickering fearfully, and wanted only one thing — to be
extinguished forever. My sisters suffered with me; they
suffered in me and I in them. During the common sor-
rows of our continental journey, we had become sincerely
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