indefinite depth, German writers alone know how to make us feel.

I do not think that in my own instance the natural cowardice with which
I was femininely endowed was unusually or unduly cultivated in
childhood; but with a highly susceptible and excitable nervous
temperament and ill-regulated imagination, I have suffered from every
conceivable form of terror; and though, for some inexplicable reason, I
have always had the reputation of being fearless, have really, all my
life, been extremely deficient in courage.

Very impetuous, and liable to be carried away by any strong emotion, my
entire want of self-control and prudence, I suppose, conveyed the
impression that I was equally without fear; but the truth is that, as a
wise friend once said to me, I have always been "as rash and as cowardly
as a child;" and none of my sex ever had a better right to apply to
herself Shakespeare's line--

"A woman, naturally born to fears."

The only agreeable impression I retain of my school-days at Boulogne is
that of the long half-holiday walks we were allowed to indulge in. Not
the two-and-two, dull, dreary, daily procession round the ramparts, but
the disbanded freedom of the sunny afternoon, spent in gathering
wild-flowers along the pretty, secluded valley of the Liane, through
which no iron road then bore its thundering freight. Or, better still,
clambering, straying, playing hide-and-seek, or sitting telling and
hearing fairy tales among the great carved blocks of stone, which lay,
in ignominious purposelessness, around the site on the high, grassy
cliff where Napoleon the First--the Only--had decreed that his triumphal
pillar should point its finger of scorn at our conquered, "pale-faced