ul study of the best
writers.

In the comparatively limited circle to which for several years she was
confined, and under conditions of domestic life which were unfavourable
to the happy development of her genius, she would have found it very
difficult to indulge her literary tendencies, if the Countess
Sonnethjelm, a Norwegian lady, had not come to her assistance by
providing her with an asylum under her roof. There her powers began
rapidly to expand, and she herself to comprehend that literature offered
the sphere of action for which she had so ardently longed.

Afterwards, like the authoress of "Jane Eyre," she spent some time as a
governess in a ladies' school at Stockholm. We have already hinted that
her early life was not altogether happy; her parents do not appear to
have understood or sympathized with her, and the household concord was
frequently broken by the austere, not to say eccentric, temperament of
its head. She says of herself that "a dark cloud came over the splendour
of her youthful dreams; like early evening it came over the path of the
young pilgrim of life, and earnestly, but in vain, she endeavoured to
escape it. The air was dimmed as by a heavy fall of snow; darkness
increased and it became night. And in the depth of that endless winter's
night she heard lamenting voices from the east and from the west, from
plant and animal, from dying nature and despairing humanity; she saw
life with all its beauty, its love, its throbbing heart, buried alive
beneath a chill covering of ice."

* * * * *

In the summer of 1831 she paid a visit, which extended over a
twelvemonth, to a recently married sister, then settled at
Christianstadt. We are told that the young novelist had determined not
to mix in society or accept any invitations, but to live in retirement,
and develop herself for what she now considered to be her mission and
her vocation, namely, to become an authoress; and, enriched by
experience of the world, to devote her talents in a double measure to
the comfort and assistance of the suffering and unhappy.

"Frederika," says her sister,[9] "found and felt that she required to
learn much, and that she stood in need of a firm religious faith, which
she had hitherto lacked. The contradictions which she fancied she saw in
the Bible and the world had long shaken her belief, and raised doubts in
her soul to such a degree that, at times, with her reflecting and
inquiring