bitter tongue, before he fell in love with Fanny Brawne.
"When I was a schoolboy, I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.... When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood. Yet with such feelings I am happier alone, among crowds of men, by myself, or with a friend or two."
He ascribes this peculiarity to his love for his brothers, "passing the love of women:"
"I have been ill-tempered with them, I have vexed them,—but the thought of them has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made on me."
He saw but little to choose, in his satirical moods, between men and hawks:—
"The hawk wants a mate; so does the Man. Look at them both; they set about it and procure one in the same manner; they want both a nest, and they set about one in the same manner. The noble animal
