The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

sharply shifted her into adulthood. She knew my grief over her curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she combed her hair like a child again. That birthday of mine was a wonderful day! She gave me a cast-iron ring on a silver lining; on it were engraved her name, some motto, some sign, a snake's head, and so on. In the evening, we read from memory an excerpt from "Fingal"—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I had probably studied the verses for my birthday as a surprise for myself); since then, I have not opened Ozerov even once. Studies became lazier again: lively sympathy pleased me more than books. With no one and never before her did I speak about feelings, and meanwhile, there were many of them already, thanks to the rapid development of the soul and the reading of novels. It was to her that I imparted my first dreams—dreams motley as birds of paradise and pure as a child's babble; I wrote to her in her album about twenty times in Russian, French, German, and, I remember, even in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me all the more that I was born to be Roland Rolandi or Alcibiades; I loved her even more for these assurances. I was thawing out then for all the cold of my short life through the sweet friendship of the Melenki peri. Having passed the fruits of our sentiments to each other, we began to read together—first various stories, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, etc., drenching them in rivers of hot tears; then we began "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-denial to listen to this—let us say extremely learned, useful, and clever, but nonetheless boring and lifeless seven-volume compilation.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in all respects. With many true and beautiful virtues, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is grafted onto girls in the dormitories of women's boarding schools, where they pierce monograms on their arms 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 weed which filled the novels and comedies of the last century. She loved to be called Temira, and all our relatives called her that; this alone proves the sentimentality. Honestly, a simple person is not