How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy,bewildering,dreadful years?Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and waking.Sometimes a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes towards it that I lost sight of all else,and was ready to forget all my fears and find myself at her side,like other youths by the side of young maidens,--happy in their cheerful companionship,while I,--I,under the curse of one blighting moment,looked on,hopeless.
Sometimes the glimpse of a fair face or the tone of a sweet voice stirred within me all the instincts that make the morning of life beautiful to adolescence.I reasoned with myself:
Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been the nightmare of my earlier years?Why should not the rising tide of life have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows of childhood?How many children there are who tremble at being left alone in the dark,but who,a few years later,will smile at their foolish terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber!Why should I any longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown into a half insane habit of mind?I was familiarly acquainted with all the stories of the strange antipathies and invincible repugnances to which others,some of them famous men,had been subject.I said to myself,Why should not I overcome this dread of woman as Peter the Great fought down his dread of wheels rolling over a bridge?Was I,alone of all mankind,to be doomed to perpetual exclusion from the society which,as it seemed to me,was all that rendered existence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?
Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely,and without regard to any possible danger,some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile,whose graceful movements,at once attracted and agitated me?
I can only answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of which I was the subject.For this I shall have to refer to a paper of which I have made a copy,and which will be found included with this manuscript.It is enough to say here,without entering into the explanation of the fact,which will be found simple enough as seen by the light of modern physiological science,that the "nervous disturbance"which the presence of a woman in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of impending death,sudden,overwhelming,unconquerable,appalling.It was a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that which flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he comes into the presence of the object of his passion.No one who has ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an imperative summons,which commands instant and terrified submission.
It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily and mental condition.I say bodily as well as mental,for I was too slender for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a cause of anxiety.That the mind was largely concerned in these there was no doubt,but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often too complex to admit of satisfactory analysis.Each is in part cause and each also in part effect.
We passed some years in Italy,chiefly in Rome,where I was placed in a school conducted by priests,and where of course I met only those of my own sex.There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under which certain young Catholics,destined for the priesthood,are led to separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated in their minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul can be exposed.I became in some degree reconciled to the thought of exclusion from the society of women by seeing around me so many who were self-devoted to celibacy.The thought sometimes occurred to me whether I should not find the best and the only natural solution of the problem of existence,as submitted to myself,in taking upon me the vows which settle the whole question and raise an impassable barrier between the devotee and the object of his dangerous attraction.
How often I talked this whole matter over with the young priest who was at once my special instructor and my favorite companion!But accustomed as I had become to the forms of the Roman Church,and impressed as I was with the purity and excellence of many of its young members with whom I was acquainted,my early training rendered it impossible for me to accept the credentials which it offered me as authoritative.My friend and instructor had to set me down as a case of "invincible ignorance."This was the loop-hole through which he crept out of the prison-house of his creed,and was enabled to look upon me without the feeling of absolute despair with which his sterner brethren would,I fear,have regarded me.
