The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

sharply transferred her into adulthood. She knew my grief over the curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she did her hair in a childlike way again. What a wonderful day my birthday was! She gave me a cast-iron ring with a silver lining; on it was carved her name, some sort of motto, some sign, a snake’s head, etc.; in the evening we recited from memory an excerpt from "Fingal"—she was Moina, I was Fingal (it is likely I had memorized the verses for my birthday as a surprise for myself), and since then I have not once opened Ozerov. Studies became lazy again: lively sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one and never before her had I spoken of feelings, and meanwhile there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and the reading of novels; it was to her that I imparted my first dreams, dreams as colorful as birds of paradise and as pure as child’s prattle; I wrote in her album about twenty times in Russian, in French, in German, and even, I recall, in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me even more that I was born to be a Roland Rollandini or an Alcibiades; I loved her even more for these affirmations. I was warming myself then against the entire coldness of my short life with the dear friendship of the Melenki peri. Having exchanged the fruits of our feelings, we began to read together—first various tales, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, and so on, drenching them in rivers of burning tears; then we began "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-sacrifice to listen to this—let us assume extremely learned, useful, and smart, but nonetheless boring and lifeless—compilation in seven volumes.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in all respects. Despite many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is instilled in girls in the dormitories of female 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; she was also not free from moral maxims, that weeds 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 would not