The intellectual influences of her home life were not more happy than the moral ones. She was thought by her family anything but a clever child. Indeed, Dr. James Martineau (whose recollections are peculiarly valuable, both from his nearness to Harriet in age and from their great attachment in early life) still thinks that she really was a dull child. Her intelligence, he believes, awoke only in her later youth, coincidentally with some improvement in health. It is hard to guess what the impression of her childish intellectual powers might have been under different conditions. She suggestively remarks[1]: "It should never be forgotten that the happier a child is the cleverer he will be. This is not only because in a state of happiness the mind is free, and at liberty for the exercise of its faculties instead of spending its thoughts and energy in brooding over troubles, but also because the action of the brain is stronger when the frame is in a state of hilarity; the ideas are more clear, impressions of outward objects are more vivid, and the memory will not let them slip." Moreover, it is a fact worthy of note that the recognition by her family of her mental development followed upon her return home after she had been away for a time, and had been learning at a boarding-school under "the first person of whom she never felt afraid." Still, the fact remains that Harriet was the ugly duckling of her family, and supposed to be the most stupid of the group of Martineau children. [1] _Household Education_, p. 202. She was active-minded enough, however, to begin early that spontaneous self-education which only intellects of real power undertake, either in childhood or in later years. Milton was her master. When she was seven years old she came by accident upon a copy of _Paradise Lost_ lying open upon a table. Taking it up, she saw the heading "Argument," and in the text her eye caught the word "Satan." Instantly the mind which her relations thought so sluggish was fired by the desire to know how Satan could be argued about. She sought the passage which tells how the arch-fiend was-- Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire. For the ensuing seven years her thoughts dwelt daily in the midst of the solemn scenes, and moved to the sound of the sonorous music of Milton's poetry. "I wonder how much of it I knew by heart--enough to be always repeating it to myself with every change of light and darkness, and sound, and silence, the moods of the day and the seasons of the year." The dull child, who neglected her multiplication table, did so because her mind was pre-occupied with thoughts of this grander order.