Personal Recollections | Page 9

farce--and like a child I gazed upon the glitter, and enjoyed the bustle; but now, seated in a corner, all quiet about me, and nothing to interfere with the mental world, I drank a cup of intoxication under which my brain reeled for many a year. The character of Shylock burst upon me, even as Shakspeare had conceived it. I revelled in the terrible excitement that it gave rise to; page after page was stereotyped upon a most retentive memory without an effort, and during a sleepless night I feasted on the pernicious sweets thus hoarded in my brain.
Pernicious indeed they were; for from that hour my diligence in study, my docility of conduct, every thing that is usually regarded as praiseworthy in a child, sprung from a new motive. I wanted to earn a reward, and that was no longer a sweet story from the Bible, but permission to carry into my retreat a volume of Shakspeare. A taste so unusual at my age was hailed with applause; visitors questioned me on the different plays, to ascertain my intimate acquaintance with the characters; but no one, not even my father, could persuade me to recite a line, or to listen when another attempted it, or to witness the representation of any play of Shakspeare. This I mention to prove what a powerful hold the enemy of all godliness must have expected to take on a spirit so attuned to romance. Reality became insipid, almost hateful to me; conversation, except that of the literary men to whom I have alluded, a burden. I imbibed a thorough contempt for women, children, and household affairs, intrenching myself behind invisible barriers that few, very few, could pass. Oh how many wasted hours, how much of unprofitable labor, what wrong to my fellow-creatures, what robbery of God, must I refer to this ensnaring book. My mind became unnerved, my judgment perverted, my estimate of people and things wholly falsified, and my soul wrapped in the vain solace of unsubstantial enjoyments during years of after sorrow, when but for this I might have early sought the consolations of the gospel. Parents know not what they do, when from vanity, thoughtlessness, or overindulgence, they foster in a young girl what is called a poetical taste. Those things highly esteemed among men are held in abomination with God; they thrust him from his creatures' thoughts, and enshrine a host of polluting idols in his place.
My father, I am sure, wished to check the evil which, as a sensible man, he could not but foresee; my state of health, however, won a larger portion of indulgence than was good for me. The doctors into whose hands I had fallen, were of the school now happily very much exploded: they had one panacea for almost every ill, and that was the perilous drug mercury. With it, they rather fed than physicked me; and its deleterious effects on the nervous system were doubly injurious to me, as increasing tenfold the excitability that required every curb. Among all the marvels of my life, the greatest is that of my having grown up to be one of the healthiest of human beings, and with an inexhaustible flow of even mirthful spirits; for certainly I was long kept hovering on the verge of the grave by the barbarous excess to which medical experiments were carried; and I never entertained a doubt that the total loss of my hearing before I was ten years old, was owing to a paralysis induced by such severe treatment. God, however, had his own purposes to work out, which neither Satan nor man could hinder. He overruled all for the furtherance of his own gracious designs.
Shut out by this last dispensation from my two delightful resources, music and conversation, I took refuge in books with tenfold avidity. By this time I had added the British poets generally to my original stock, together with such reading as is usually prescribed for young ladies; and I underwent the infliction of reading aloud to my mother the seven mortal volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. It was in the fulfilment of this awful task that I acquired a habit particularly mischievous and ensnaring--that of reading mechanically, with a total abstraction of mind from what I was about. This became the easier to me from the absence of all external sound; and its consequences are exceedingly distressing to this day, as experienced in a long-indulged, and afterwards most bitterly lamented wandering of the mind in prayer and in reading the Scriptures. In fact, through the prevalence of this habit, my devotions, always very punctually performed, became such an utter lip-service, as frequently to startle and terrify my conscience, when I found myself saying prayers and thinking idle songs or scraps of plays; but