Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which is
the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my
mother's childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, and
to communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moral
nature. It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order of
gifts that have for their scope the exercise of the imagination through
the senses, no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet's passionate
inspiration, speaking to the senses through the imagination.
How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances that
influenced her childhood I know not. As I remember her, she was a frank,
fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably found in the
subsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield for these
virtues. How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and most
suffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can better
judge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience.
After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficulties
of every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption,
leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother,
not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and sole
support.
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