The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

She knew my grief over the curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she did her hair in a child-like way again. It was a wonderful day, the day of my birth! She gave me a cast-iron ring with a silver lining; on it was engraved her name, some motto, some sign, a snake’s head, etc.; in the evening we read from memory an excerpt from "Fingal"—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I had probably rehearsed the verses for my birthday as a surprise to myself); since then I have not opened Ozerov once. Study went lazily again: lively sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one and never before her did I speak of feelings, and yet there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of the soul and the reading of novels; it was to her that I confided my first dreams, dreams motley as birds of paradise and pure as baby talk; I wrote in her album about twenty times in Russian, in French, in German, and I even remember in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me all the more that I was born to be Roland Rollandini or Alcibiades; I loved her all the more for these assurances. I was warming myself then for all the coldness of my short life with the dear friendship of the Melenki peri. Having passed on to each other the fruits of our sentiments, we began to read together—first various stories, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, etc., bathing them in rivers of burning tears; then we took up "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-sacrifice to listen to this—let us say, extremely learned, useful, and intelligent, but nevertheless boring and lifeless seven-volume compilation.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in every sense. With many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the affected "sentimentality" which is instilled in girls in the dormitories of women’s boarding schools, where they prick initials on their hands with pins, where they make vows not to remove such-and-such a ribbon for a year; nor was she free from moralizing maxims, that darnel that filled the novels and comedies of the last century. She loved to be called Temira, and all the relatives called her that; this alone proves the sentimentality; truly, a simple person does not