to her except to be rid of unrest and pain. She would be positively and not merely negatively wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her mental power. "Oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" "I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for love. Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately in earnest.[29] She began to teach school in a squalid, dismal Italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has made her famous. She lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill, lake, or large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write, friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, put on her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. The poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience. She craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes: "I have no name--my home a hovel damp; I grew up from the mire; Wretched and outcast folk my family, And yet within me burns a flame of fire."