As these again re-acted on the
brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling,
there was finally produced a state of being both too active
and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring
me,--even although I have learned to understand and regulate
my now morbid temperament,--to a premature grave.
'No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew
why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling
to retire. My aunts cried out upon the "spoiled child, the
most unreasonable child that ever was,--if brother could but
open his eyes to see it,--who was never willing to go to bed."
They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away,
she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her,
the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as
they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon
her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but
only to return when she lay down again. They did not know
that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of
horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright;
or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees
that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could
not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over
her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it
would reach her lips.
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