There Are Periods Of Despondency And Suffering

Even As A Child She Had Lived Her Own Small Life Within Herself. At A Very Early Period She Had Apprehended Instinctively The Dual Life - That Outward Existence Which Conforms, The Inward Life Which Questions.

But Whatever Came, She Had Resolved Never Again To Belong To Another Than Herself.

I Dance With People I Despise; Amuse Myself With Men Whose Only Talent Lies In Their Feet, Gain The Disapprobation Of People I Honor And Respect; Return Home At Day Break With My Brain In A State Which Was Never Intended For It; And Arise In The Middle Of The Next Day Feeling Infinitely More, In Spirit And Flesh Like A Liliputian, Than A Woman With Body And Soul. Entry (when She Was Eighteen) In Her Commonplace Book, 1868-1869.

There Were Days When She Was Unhappy, She Did Not Know Why,--when It Did Not Seem Worthwhile To Be Glad Or Sorry, To Be Alive Or Dead; When Life Appeared To Her Like A Grotesque Pandemonium And Humanity Like Worms Struggling Blindly Toward Inevitable Annihilation.

But The Beginning Of Things, Of A World Especially, Is Necessarily Vague, Tangled, Chaotic, And Exceedingly Disturbing. How Few Of Us Ever Emerge From Such Beginning! How Many Souls Perish In Its Tumult!