“There is something that frightens me about the child. I know not whether elfish or angelic, but at all events supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of every thing, shrinks from nothing; has such comprehension of every thing; seeming at times to have but little delicacy; and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it; now so hard, now so tender; now so perfectly unreasonable, soon again so wise. In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell.”