Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
At twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes
saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many
air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life
together. She prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle him on
the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be
an ideal wife. She agonizes before the glass on whether or not she is
pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers to think well
of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates over into
passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with
despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God because she
prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn English, both
of which He granted. At church some prayers and services seem directly
aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has no
motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. She has freaky and
very changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. When she
hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge,
prays God for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it
horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture
of altering her prayer about the duke. She is disgusted with common
people, harrowed by jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling,
yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and moving only on the surface.
When her voice improves she welcomes it with tears and feels an
all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never speak to another.
Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that ever
was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure
that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please
her; thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in
dreams her future husband, and quarrels with her photographs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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