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AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
—~——.
Tue first word which my infant lips uttered in this sub-
lunary world was “Moon.” Eight years later I wrote my
first verses, “ A la lune.” My first juvenile feelings, so far
as I can now recollect, were immoderate greediness after
sweetmeats, and likewise an immoderate desire to distin-
guish myself and be spoken of. These were soon suc-
ceeded by warmer feelings and nobler desires, which all
wore the stamp of passion. My first love was my native
country. I loved it as Elizabeth in “Sketches of Every-
day Life.” In the description which she gives of her youth
and her feelings, I have portrayed my own. By degrees,
as my intelligence and my mind became developed (both
equally warped and chaotic), a spirit of inquiry was also de-
veloped within me—a why and wherefore — which none
of those who were around me could, or cared to, answer or
enlighten. My education was of a very desultory kind.
They stuffed my head full of fine precepts against vanity,
but they planted vanity itself in my heart. During my
endeavors to deaden wild sensations, I went for the first
time to the Lord’s table. An atmosphere of innocence
and purity, emanating from my mother’s whole being,
breathed round my home, and for a long time kept aloof
from the children’s souls all knowledge of evil; but the
desire for it was, unconscious to me, slumbering in my soul.
Modesty, in its widest sense, I knew not. But I had an
ardent and enthusiastic feeling for all heroic virtues, a
boundless capacity to love and to sacrifice myself with joy,
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