Accustomed in early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all
the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the
Moors;
In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superstitious
Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to
herself.
Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates
style—and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of
audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a
lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or
sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery,
appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself,
added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love;
A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a
burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was
from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and deliquia:
Frightened at her Uncle's, by reading to him Dante's books of Hell
and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood
because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory— and that
purgatory here was a cheap expiation for Hell for ever;
Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh
page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a
creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well
peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame,
often pleasurable approaches to deliquium for divine raptures;
and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind
unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving
and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of
most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain?
One source it is almost criminal to have forgotten, and which p. 12.
of the first Part brought back to my recollection; I mean, the
effects—so super-sensual that they may easily and most venially pass
for supernatural, so very glorious to human nature that, though in truth
they are humanity itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful
word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united
in one person with this one nobler nature we attribute them to a
divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its
misapplication of space and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing
itself, for it is verily
,)
the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the
whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the will has
preserved its perfect freedom by a vehement energy of perfect obedience
to the pure or practical reason, or conscience. [Thence] flows in upon and
fills the soul that peace which passeth understanding, a state
affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and
mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that
morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion,
and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim
and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state
(known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human
nature! Under all forms of positive or philosophic religion, it has
developed itself, too glorious an attribute of man to be confined to any
name or sect; but which, it is but truth and historical fact to say, is
more especially fostered and favoured by Christianity; and its frequent
appearance even under the most selfish and unchristian forms of
Christianity is a stronger evidence of the divinity of that religion,
than all the miracles of Brahma and Veeshnou could afford, even though
they were supported with tenfold the judicial evidence of the Gospel
miracles[2].