I have often
noticed what an imperceptible touch, what a slight shifting in the
balance of opposing forces, will alter the character. I have
observed a woman, for example, essentially the same at twenty and
thirty--who is there who is not always essentially the same?--and
yet, what was a defect at twenty, has become transformed and
transfigured into a benignant virtue at thirty; translating the whole
nature from the human to the divine. Some slight depression has been
wrought here, and some slight lift has been given there, and beauty
and order have miraculously emerged from what was chaotic. The same
thing may continually be noticed in the hereditary transmission of
qualities. The redeeming virtue of the father palpably present in
the son becomes his curse, through a faint diminution of the strength
of the check which caused that virtue to be the father's salvation.
The propensity, too, which is a man's evil genius, and leads him to
madness and utter ruin, gives vivid reality to all his words and
thoughts, and becomes all his strength, if by divine assistance it
can just be subdued and prevented from rising in victorious
insurrection. But this is a digression, useful, however, in its way,
because it will explain Mrs.
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