In the next letter—endorsed by her Mother, “7th May, 1848”—she says,
“I whant to tell you that I feel so much less fear of a night....
“I will never say again (as I fear I often have) that God does not hear my prayer or that I do not derive comfort from it.... Please (for you say please wins everything) do not show this to anybody not even to dear Papa.
S. L. B.”[[2]]
Clearly the child at this time was learning to read and write. Of any formal teaching no record has been kept, but, if anything of the kind existed, it can have made no great demand on her brain power, which began at this time to find expression in a somewhat unusual way.
In common with most children, she dreamed dreams, but her dreams were not the random visions of an hour. They were singularly coherent and consecutive, aiming at nothing less than the construction of an ideal state ruled by a “despotic emperor” in some wonderful islands lying in an unknown sea. She was unable to throw the creations of her brain into anything like literary form, but numberless papers have been preserved, varying from large official-looking blue foolscap sheets giving the “constitution” of the state, down to tiny scraps about the minutest detail connected with it.
There are many maps of the islands, of which the largest, Sackermena, gave its name to the group; and these are supplemented by numberless poems in which she strove to give expression to the feelings her Utopia aroused in her mind. Poetry never came easy to her, dearly as she loved it.
She begins gallantly many times: (We all know the experience.)
“See how pretily the sunbeams dance
Upon the fair waves of Speed-the-lance