From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most
prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with
danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance
or control whatever. The passionate craving for human sympathy and love,
which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of
her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the
one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled
and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger
of hardness and self-inclusion. The strong artist temperament, the power
of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye
and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to
concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if
it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no
sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious,
because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all
its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.
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