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 eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the
name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She would like
to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the _prix de Rome_
under the guise of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On winning a medal for
her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness,
but the next day is scolded and grows discouraged. She has an immense
sense of growth and transformation, so that not a trace of her old
nature remains; feels that she has far too much of some things, and
far too little of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's
character, whose pertinacity is like a disease; realizes that one of
her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel love; that her
temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family
expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of
expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for
every word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely
hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is
right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for
such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is
grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual
world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires Balzac because he
describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown
her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling
complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she
is losing her grip on art and also on God, who no longer hears her
prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at thirty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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