“My mother certainly made me do dreadfully too much. But I blame others, as we usually do when we are ourselves the most to blame--I had attempted that which could not be done. By suppressing all outward sign of suffering, allowing no vent for sorrow in words or tears--by actual force of compression--I thought at once to extinguish my feelings. Little did I know of the human heart when I thought this! The weak are wise in yielding to the first shock. They cannot be struck to the earth who sink prostrate; sorrow has little power where there is no resistance.--‘The flesh will follow where the pincers tear.’ Mine was a presumptuous--it had nearly been a fatal struggle. That London season at last over, we got into the country; I expected rest, but found none. The pressing necessity for exertion over, the stimulus ceasing, I sunk--sunk into a state of apathy. Time enough had elapsed between the breaking off of my marriage and the appearance of this illness, to prevent any ideas on my mother’s part of cause and effect, ideas indeed which were never much looked for, or well joined in her mind. The world knew nothing of the matter. My illness went under the convenient head ‘nervous.’ I heard all the opinions pronounced on my case, and knew they were all mistaken, but I swallowed whatever they pleased. No physician, I repeated to myself, can ‘minister to a mind diseased.’ “I tried to call religion to my aid; but my religious sentiments were, at that time, tinctured with the enthusiasm of my early character. Had I been a Catholic, I should have escaped from my friends and thrown myself into a cloister; as it was, I had formed a strong wish to retire from that world which was no longer anything to me: the spring of passion, which I then thought the spring of life, being broken, I meditated my resolution secretly and perpetually as I lay on my bed. They used to read to me, and, among other things, some papers of ‘The Rambler,’ which I liked not at all; its tripod sentences tired my ear, but I let them go on--as well one sound as another. “It chanced that one night, as I was going to sleep, an eastern story in ‘The Rambler,’ was read to me, about some man, a-weary of the world, who took to the peaceful hermitage. There was a regular moral tagged to the end of it, a thing I hate, the words were, ‘No life pleasing to God that is not useful to man.’ When I wakened in the middle of that night, this sentence was before my eyes, and the words seemed to repeat themselves over and over again to my ears when I was sinking to sleep. The impression remained in my mind, and though I never voluntarily recurred to it, came out long afterwards, perfectly fresh, and became a motive of action.