The Daguerreotypist

This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him.

But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.