A Vision

A Vision is a composition read at the St. Petersburg school's Examination evening, a gothic-romantic prose poem that won the first prize and was hailed by the mayor as the most "eloquent" piece he had ever heard, surpassing even Daniel Webster. The work exemplifies the sentimental, sermonizing style of the era's schoolgirl writing, and its performance marked the climax of the evening's literary exercises before the master's humiliation by the sign-painter's boy's prank.

Content and Style

The composition, written by a dark-complexioned, black-eyed, black-haired young lady, opens with a highly stylized description of a stormy night: "Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the throne on high not a single star quivered; but the deep intonations of the heavy thunder constantly vibrated upon the ear; whilst the terrific lightning revelled in angry mood through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming to scorn the power exerted over its terror by the illustrious Franklin!" The narrator then describes a visit from a "dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter and guide," who appears as a queen of beauty, and points to the contending elements, bidding the narrator contemplate "the two beings presented." The piece occupies some ten pages of manuscript and concludes with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it secured the first prize.

Reception and Significance

The mayor of the village, in delivering the prize, made a warm speech declaring it the most "eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and said that Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it. The composition was considered the very finest effort of the evening. The narrator notes that the number of compositions in which the word "beauteous" was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as "life's page," was up to the usual average. The piece is a representative example of the schoolgirl compositions of the period, which were characterized by a nursed and petted melancholy, a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language," a tendency to overuse prized words and phrases, and an inveterate and intolerable sermon at the end of each one. The narrator observes that the glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to banish the fashion from the schools, and that there is no school in the land where young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon, with the most frivolous and least religious girl always producing the longest and most relentlessly pious one.