Next year (1826), we find her studying Mme de Stael,
Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Spanish ballads, 'with great delight.'
Anon she is engrossed with the elder Italian poets, from Berni down to
Pulci and Politian; then with Locke and the ontologists; then with the
_opera omnia_ of Sir William Temple. She pursued at this time no
systematic study, but 'read with the heart, and was learning more
from social experience than from books.' The interval of her life,
between sixteen and twenty-five, is characterised by one of her
biographers as a period of 'preponderating sentimentality, of romance
and dreams, of yearning and of passion.' While residing at Cambridge,
she suffered from profound despondency--conscious of the want of a
home for her heart. A sterner schooling awaited her at Groton, whither
her father removed in 1833. Here he died suddenly of cholera in 1835.
Now she was taught the miserable perplexities of a family that has
lost its head, and was called to tread a path for which, as she says,
she had no skill and no call, except that it must be trodden by some
one, and she alone was ready. In 1836 she went to Boston, to teach
Latin and French in an academy of local repute; and in the ensuing
year she accepted a 'very favourable offer,' to become 'lady-superior'
in an educational institution at Providence, where she seems to have
exercised an influence analogous to that of Dr Arnold at
Rugby--treating her pupils as ladies, and thus making them anxious to
prove that they deserved to be so treated.
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