The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

continues from previous page: ...to my little room, and after the insulting "Oh, how you have grown!" she suddenly transferred me to adulthood. She knew my grief over my curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she combed her hair like a child again. My birthday was a wonderful day! She gave me a cast-iron ring on a silver lining; her name was engraved on it, along with a motto, a sign, a snake’s head, and so on; in the evening we read a passage from "Fingal" by heart referring to James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, which were highly influential in 18th and 19th-century European Romanticism—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I had likely been memorizing the verses for my birthday as a surprise), and since then I have not opened Ozerov Vladislav Ozerov, a Russian tragic poet of the early 19th century once. My studies became lazier again: vibrant sympathy pleased me more than books. I had never spoken to anyone about feelings before her, and yet there were many of them, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and the reading of novels; to her, I confided my first dreams, dreams as colorful as birds of paradise and as pure as a child’s babble; I wrote in her album about twenty times in Russian, French, German, and, I recall, even in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me even more firmly that I was born to be Roland Rolandi or Alcibiades; I loved her even more for these affirmations. I was warming myself against the cold of my short life through the sweet friendship of the Melenki peri an allusion to Persian mythology, often used in Romantic literature to describe an enchanting or beautiful woman. After sharing the fruits of our feelings, we began to read together—first various stories, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius" by Florian Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, a French poet and novelist, and the like, soaking them in rivers of hot tears; then we started on "Voyage of Anacharsis," and she had the selflessness to listen to this compilation in seven volumes—admittedly extremely scholarly, useful, and intelligent, but nonetheless boring and lifeless.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in every sense. Despite many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is instilled in young women in the dormitories of female boarding schools, where they prick monograms onto their hands with needles, and where they make vows not to remove a certain ribbon for a year; she was also not free from moral maxims, that chaff 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 her sentimentality; truly, a simple person would not agree in the nineteenth century to be called Plenira, Temira, Selena, or Uslad.