The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866, page 19 by Various Authors
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ch I was alone, and did my scanty little thinkings and imaginings alone. The rest of the living were outside, unreal,--phantoms moving to and fro, around and without, but never coming within that limit,--never entering into living communion with me. This constitutional solitude of mind has a useful office, perhaps not to be easily explained, but sometimes not otherwise to be performed.
This isolation was, in part, unnecessary. To a certain extent the necessity for it still remains. But in part it was artificial,--my unconscious reaction against an ill-adapted influence,--the resisting force of a trait which, like all those other early traits, has become visible to me, like the blind paths over bogs, now that I am a long way off. This trait I have already spoken of. It was an insensibility to a certain motive, rather prominent among those commonly proposed to me for my own government of myself. This was variously framed thus:--It is not usual to do this; it is usual to do that; if you proceed so and so, it will seem singular; people will talk about it; you will offend people's usages and habits; you will seem singular and odd. Against such cautions I rebelled with a mute, indignant impulse, which I was not old enough to enounce or to argue. It was, however, the result of two characteristics;--one, the natural lack of instinctive desire for the good opinion of others; and the other, a corresponding instinct for living out my own life fully and freely, not so as to infringe upon the just rights of others, but not stinting or distorting or amputating myself, even though others set the example. It was the old fable reversed,--the fox disinclined to cut off his tail, even though all the other foxes had cut off theirs. And the fact that people older than I, and several of them, and for year after year, urged upon me the considerations I have spoken of, never availed. That key would not move the mechanism of my mind. It did not fit.
My childhood seems to me far more memorable for what it had not, was not, t