I had not enjoyed the play
of youthful companions except in a fugitive way, I had not gone to
school nor passed three years of muscular and buoyant activity in the
usual pastimes and pleasures of childhood. I had a precocious nature and
it had been unfolded in an atmosphere of strictly intellectual ideas. My
mother had been a constant joy to me during the short years of her life
on earth, but somehow by reason of sickness I had not enjoyed even her
endearment as I might have.
So in my father and his aspirations, and the later hopes of his excited
and passionate longing to regain some trace of my mother, my life from
four years of age was actually and potentially concentrated. My father
cherished me with a great consuming love. He saw in me the
representation in face and partially in temperament of his wife. He
lavished on me every care. Yet because of his eager affection, and his
complete suspense from social connections I was made too largely
dependent on him alone. I lived in his companionship only. My
conversation became prematurely advanced in terms and principles, and my
childish confidence was nurtured by nothing less wonderful than books
and theories, experiments and dissertations.
The wonderful beauty of our new surroundings, the strangeness of our
sudden removal from America, the long distances travelled, awoke in me
new thoughts and I readily surrendered myself at times to the incoherent
struggles of my nature, to find someone, something, more responsive to
my young feelings than essays on magnetism, and a man, father though he
was, immersed in demonstrations and problems.
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