"An automaton might have filled my place, and could have done all that was expected of me. In England, as elsewhere, the divers interests that do honor to humanity worthily occupy the leisure of men, whatever their retirement; but what remained for women in this isolated corner of the earth? Among the ladies who visited us there were some not deficient in mind, though they concealed it as a superfluity; and towards forty this slight impulse of the brain was benumbed like all the rest. Some of them I suspected, must, by reflection, have matured their natural abilities; sometimes a look or murmured accent told of thoughts that strayed from the beaten track; but the petty opinions, all-powerful in their own little sphere, repressed these inclinations. A woman was considered insane, or of doubtful virtue, if she ventured in any way to assert herself; and, what was worse than all these inconveniences, she could gain not one advantage by the attempt. At first, I endeavored to rouse this sleeping world. I proposed poetic readings and music, and a day was appointed for this purpose: but suddenly, one woman remembered that she had been three weeks invited to sup with her aunt; another, that she was in mourning for an old cousin she had never seen, and who had been dead for months; a third, that she had some domestic arrangements to make at home; all very reasonable; yet thus forever were intellectual pleasures rejected; and I so often heard them say, 'that cannot be done,' that, amid so many negations, _not to live_ would have been to me the best of all. After some debates with myself I gave up my vain schemes, not that my father forbade them, he even enjoined his wife to cease tormenting me on my studies; but her insinuations, her stolen glances while I spoke, a thousand trivial hinderances, like the chains the Lilliputians wove round Gulliver, rendered it impossible for me to follow my own will; so I ended by doing as I saw others do, though dying of impatience and disgust. By the time I had passed four weary years thus, I really found, to my severe distress, that my mind grew dull, and, in spite of me, was filled by trifles. Where no interest is taken in science, literature, and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds, strangers alike to activity and meditation, become so limited as to render all intercourse with them at once tasteless and oppressive. There was no enjoyment near me save in a certain methodical regularity, whose desire was that of reducing all things to its own level; a constant grief to characters called by heaven to destinies of their own. The ill-will I innocently excited, joined with my sense of the void all around me, seemed to check even my breath. Envy is only to be borne where it is excited by admiration; but oh the misery of living where jealousy itself awakens no enthusiasm! where we are hated as if powerful, though in fact allowed less influence than the obscurest of our rivals. It is impossible simply to despise the opinions of the herd: they sink, in spite of us, into the heart, and lie waiting the moments when our own superiority has involved us in distress; then, then, even an apparently temperate '_Well?_' may prove the most insupportable word we can hear. In vain we tell ourselves, 'such a man is unworthy to judge me, such a woman is incapable of comprehending me:' the human face has great power over the human heart; and when we read there a secret disapprobation, it haunts us in defiance of our reason. The circle which surrounds you always hides the rest of the world: the smallest object close before your eyes intercepts their view of the sun. So is it with the set among whom we dwell: nor Europe nor posterity can render us insensible to the intrigues of our next door neighbor; and whoever would live happily in the cultivation of genius ought to be, above all things, cautious in the choice of his immediate mental atmosphere."