rful
and seemed her old self again. From that time forward she rapidly
recovered, and when I went back to college we began a close
correspondence which was the beginning of my real literary education,
for her taste in literature was excellent, if a little sentimental,
and her criticisms were so sound that in some respects they have never
lost their effect on my way of thinking and expressing thought. She
was persuaded to come to Schenectady and pass the period of my next
vacation in our family. Her insanity absolutely disappeared, she
returned to healthy activity in her old vocation as teacher, and the
year after, to my great annoyance, married her former fiance. I was
angry with her, not for marrying, but for marrying him after his
shameful treatment of her. She seemed to me, and to her family also,
to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly
unworthy any woman's devotion. All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted,
and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal,
the naive expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my
sincerity offered myself having passed away. Convinced, that I had
cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered
no visitation of contempt for women, and my indignation was the
deepest feeling that remained from the experience, except the
literary impulse born of the persistent effort to interest her in my
correspondence and the consequent search for material for letters in
the details of college life and the nature around us; and the habit
of noticing and memorizing what might be of interest to others in the
most trivial incidents of life never quite left me. I became a profuse
letter-writer from inclination, and, though all the letters of
that part of my life and for years after were recalled and burnt
scrupulously, I am convinced that what literary ability I possess is
in a great degree owing to the impulse I received in that romantic
attachment.

What was, perhaps, more important, was that the vicarious offering of
myself, made in my morbid enthusiasm, and the commonplace result of
it, hastened the end of that phase of my religious experience. It was
only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of
apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should
have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and
unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the
void in th