Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I | Page 2

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. The result was a character, in its social
aspect, of quite the common sort. A good son and brother, a kind
neighbor, an active man of business--in all these outward relations he
was but one of a class, which surrounding conditions have made the
majority among us. In the more delicate and individual relations, he
never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself.
'His love for my mother was the green spot on which he stood apart
from the common-places of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing

existence. She was one of those fair and flower-like natures, which
sometimes spring up even beside the most dusty highways of life--a
creature not to be shaped into a merely useful instrument, but bound by
one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. Of all persons
whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic,--of that
spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree,
which restores the golden age.'

DEATH IN THE HOUSE.
'My earliest recollection is of a death,--the death of a sister, two years
younger than myself. Probably there is a sense of childish endearments,
such as belong to this tie, mingled with that of loss, of wonder, and
mystery; but these last are prominent in memory. I remember coming
home and meeting our nursery-maid, her face streaming with tears.
That strange sight of tears made an indelible impression. I realize how
little I was of stature, in that I looked up to this weeping face;--and it
has often seemed since, that--full-grown for the life of this earth, I have
looked up just so, at times of threatening, of doubt, and distress, and
that just so has some being of the next higher order of existences
looked down, aware of a law unknown to me, and tenderly
commiserating the pain I muse endure in emerging from my ignorance.
'She took me by the hand and led me into a still and dark
chamber,--then drew aside the curtain and showed me my sister. I see
yet that beauty of death! The highest achievements of sculpture are
only the reminder of its severe sweetness. Then I remember the house
all still and dark,--the people in their black clothes and dreary
faces,--the scent of the newly-made coffin,--my being set up in a chair
and detained by a gentle hand to hear the clergyman,--the carriages
slowly going, the procession slowly doling out their steps to the grave.
But I have no remembrance of what I have since been told I
did,--insisting, with loud cries, that they should not put the body in the
ground. I suppose that my emotion was spent at the time, and so there
was nothing to fix that moment in my memory.
'I did not then, nor do I now, find any beauty in these ceremonies. What
had they to do with the sweet playful child? Her life and death were
alike beautiful, but all this sad parade was not. Thus my first experience
of life was one of death. She who would have been the companion of

my life was severed from me, and I was left alone. This has made a vast
difference in my lot. Her character, if that fair face promised right,
would have been soft, graceful and lively: it would have tempered mine
to a gentler and more gradual course.

OVERWORK.
'My father,--all whose feelings were now concentred on me,--instructed
me himself. The effect of this was so far good that, not passing through
the hands of many ignorant and weak persons as so many do at
preparatory schools, I was put at once under discipline of considerable
severity, and, at the same time, had a more than ordinarily high
standard presented to me. My father was a man of business, even in
literature; he had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly
attached to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had
derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated memories of
success and good repute. He was, beside, well read in French literature,
and in English, a Queen Anne's man. He hoped to make me the heir of
all he knew, and of as much