Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I | Page 4

breaks
or hesitation,--for with these my father had absolutely no patience.
'Indeed, he demanded accuracy and clearness in everything: you must
not speak, unless you can make your meaning perfectly intelligible to
the person addressed; must not express a thought, unless you can give a
reason for it, if required; must not make a statement, unless sure of all
particulars--such were his rules. "But," "if," "unless," "I am mistaken,"
and "it may be so," were words and phrases excluded from the province
where he held sway. Trained to great dexterity in artificial methods,
accurate, ready, with entire command of his resources, he had no belief
in minds that listen, wait, and receive. He had no conception of the
subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling. His influence
on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character,
which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and
self-forgetfulness. He made the common prose world so present to me,
that my natural bias was controlled. I did not go mad, as many would
do, at being continually roused from my dreams. I had too much
strength to be crushed,--and since I must put on the fetters, could not
submit to let them impede my motions. My own world sank deep
within, away from the surface of my life; in what I did and said I
learned to have reference to other minds. But my true life was only the
dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of
available intellect, and that coarse, but wearable stuff woven by the
ages,--Common Sense.
'In accordance with this discipline in heroic common sense, was the
influence of those great Romans, whose thoughts and lives were my
daily food during those plastic years. The genius of Rome displayed

itself in Character, and scarcely needed an occasional wave of the torch
of thought to show its lineaments, so marble strong they gleamed in
every light. Who, that has lived with those men, but admires the plain
force of fact, of thought passed into action? They take up things with
their naked hands. There is just the man, and the block he casts before
you,--no divinity, no demon, no unfulfilled aim, but just the man and
Rome, and what he did for Rome. Everything turns your attention to
what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions,
not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought,
an earnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command,
and force of expression. Architecture was the art in which Rome
excelled, and this corresponds with the feeling these men of Rome
excite. They did not grow,--they built themselves up, or were built up
by the fate of Rome, as a temple for Jupiter Stator. The ruined Roman
sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to
heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he
lives no more. The names which end in "_us_," seem to speak with
lyric cadence. That measured cadence,--that tramp and march,--which
are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so
when compared with any other language,--make Latin a study in itself
of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would
give one the thought of Rome. Man present in nature, commanding
nature too sternly to be inspired by it, standing like the rock amid the
sea, or moving like the fire over the land, either impassive, or
irresistible; knowing not the soft mediums or fine flights of life, but by
the force which he expresses, piercing to the centre.
'We are never better understood than when we speak of a "Roman
virtue," a "Roman outline." There is somewhat indefinite, somewhat
yet unfulfilled in the thought of Greece, of Spain, of modern Italy; but
ROME! it stands by itself, a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity
of a fixed purpose is what it utters. Every Roman was an emperor. It is
well that the infallible church should have been founded on this rock,
that the presumptuous Peter should hold the keys, as the conquering
Jove did before his thunderbolts, to be seen of all the world. The
Apollo tends flocks with Admetus; Christ teaches by the lonely lake, or
plucks wheat as he wanders through the fields some Sabbath morning.
They never come to this stronghold; they could not have breathed

freely where all became stone as soon as spoken, where divine youth
found no horizon for its all-promising glance, but every thought put on,
before it dared issue to the day in action, its toga virilis.
'Suckled by this wolf, man gains a different complexion from that
which is fed by the Greek