Louisa Read Online Free PDF Page B

that had “artificial colouring,” she could easily dismiss it. “It is good! but it is not life!!!” Stories that were more roughly told, though, could produce “that electric surprise” that made her hair stand up. The “suppressed fear” would send a shudder through her and send her home in a “fever of excitement.” No one was better at telling these stories than her best friend. Sometimes Louisa would protest and try to “banter” with Pauline, butthe young woman would stop, turn “instantly pale,” and glance nervously around, and Louisa’s heart would race. “Living in a school like this; sickly and weak both in body and mind,” Louisa later wrote, “can you wonder that my mind became tainted, and infected by a weakness, of which I have tried to be ashamed; but which still clings to me as if it was a part of my nature?” And why not? Strange things happened, and even the most well-trained minds were susceptible. The “dread of things unknown,” she wrote, “palsies the mind with fear.”
    While her husband was reading the newly published essays of Immanuel Kant on
Sinnlichkeit
and
Verstand
(and sending the philosopher’s works to America), Louisa was forming her own untutored thoughts and doubts about the dichotomy between reason and sensibility. What could “the cold and artificial presumption of what we term reason” do to explain “the mysterious realities of our actual being?”
    Her husband was interested in names, dates, countries. His diary teemed with information, carefully noted. Facts never meant that much to her. “As I write without attention to dates many errors will be found in my relation of events as to the exact time of their occurrences,” she said in “Record of a Life.” The territory that she was curious about, the one she mapped in her memoirs, was different. She was mapping a psychological and emotional landscape.
    It was a peculiar education that she was receiving. She saw the world and painted it in high color, but she was also learning to give it structure, shape, and shadows. She was drawn to stories. On evenings when they were at home, she and John Quincy read aloud: Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen,” Shakespeare, Milton. In his inimitable way, he hatched a plan to read to Louisa “the whole collection of British poets,” and began with Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
.
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    T HE READING was a habit they would keep throughout their life. Louisa and John Quincy grew closer as the months in Berlin passedinto years. They took walks in the Tiergarten together, sometimes twice a day. They needed each other more after John Quincy’s brother Thomas, who had been a friend to them both, left Berlin to return to the United States in the fall of 1798. “You cannot conceive Mr. Adams’s disappointment on opening your letter and finding it directed to me,” Louisa wrote to Thomas that October. “
I
was so agreeably surprized that I absolutely kissed it.”
    Louisa and John Quincy celebrated their first anniversary on July 26, 1798. It came at a difficult time. Louisa lay in bed, suffering through another miscarriage that devastated them both. John Quincy was anxious, worried about money and struggling to defuse the potentially explosive conflict between the United States and France, a conflict that threatened to sink his father’s presidency. He felt listless in Berlin. A week later he noted that he had quit studying German and had become “careless about every other study—of what good is it all?”
    â€œThe external occurrences of the year have not been fortunate,” he wrote in his diary on that first anniversary. For once, though, he acknowledged that there was a brightness in the dark. “But from the loveliness of temper and excellence of character of my wife, I account it the