Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Volume I

Excerpt

YOUTH.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

* * * * *

  "Aus Morgenduft gewebt und Sonnenklarheit
  Der Dichtung Schleir aus der Hand der Wahrheit."

GOETHE.

            "The million stars which tremble
  O'er the deep mind of dauntless infancy."

TENNYSON.

  "Wie leicht ward er dahin gefragen,
     Was war dem Glücklichen zu schwer!
  Wie tanzte vor des Lebens Wagen
     Die luftige Begleitung her!
  Die Liebe mit dem süssen Lohne,
     Das Glück mit seinem gold'nen Kranz,
  Der Ruhm mit seiner Sternenkrone,
     Die Wahrheit in der Sonne Glanz."

SCHILLER

  What wert thou then? A child most infantine,
  Yet wandering far beyond that innocent age,
  In all but its sweet looks and mien divine;
  Even then, methought, with the world's tyrant rage
  A patient warfare thy young heart did wage,
  When those soft eyes of scarcely conscious thought
  Some tale, or thine own fancies, would engage
  To overflow with tears, or converse fraught
  With passion o'er their depths its fleeting light had wrought.'

SHELLE

  "And I smiled, as one never smiles but once;
  Then first discovering my own aim's extent,
  Which sought to comprehend the works of God.
  And God himself, and all God's intercourse
  With the human mind."

BROWNING.

YOUTH.

* * * * *

'Tieck, who has embodied so many Runic secrets, explained to me what I have often felt toward myself, when he tells of the poor changeling, who, turned from the door of her adopted home, sat down on a stone and so pitied herself that she wept. Yet me also, the wonderful bird, singing in the wild forest, has tempted on, and not in vain.'

Thus wrote Margaret in the noon of life, when looking back through
youth to the "dewy dawn of memory." She was the eldest child of
Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, and was born in Cambridge-Port,
Massachusetts, on the 23d of May, 1810.

Among her papers fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth, prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance.

PARENTS.

'My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely endowed with that sagacious energy, which the state of New England society, for the last half century, has been so well fitted to develop. His father was a clergyman, settled as pastor in Princeton, Massachusetts, within the bounds of whose parish-farm was Wachuset. His means were small, and the great object of his ambition was to send his sons to college. As a boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing himself for Harvard University, and when there of preparing himself for the profession of Law. As a Lawyer, again, the ends constantly presented were to work for distinction in the community, and for the means of supporting a family. To be an honored citizen, and to have a home on earth, were made the great aims of existence. To open the deeper fountains of the soul, to regard life here as the prophetic entrance to immortality, to develop his spirit to perfection,—motives like these had never been suggested to him, either by fellow-beings or by outward circumstances....