I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women - at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Godess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (July 18, 1818). - Letters (1817-1820)