Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I | Page 9

which
they collected on every side. Thus their influence upon me was not to
prompt me to follow out thought in myself so much as to detect it
everywhere, for each of these men is not only a nature, but a happy
interpreter of many natures. They taught me to distrust all invention
which is not based on a wide experience. Perhaps, too, they taught me
to overvalue an outward experience at the expense of inward growth;
but all this I did not appreciate till later.
'It will be seen that my youth was not unfriended, since those great
minds came to me in kindness. A moment of action in one's self,
however, is worth an age of apprehension through others; not that our
deeds are better, but that they produce a renewal of our being. I have
had more productive moments and of deeper joy, but never hours of
more tranquil pleasure than those in which these demi-gods visited
me,--and with a smile so familiar, that I imagined the world to be full
of such. They did me good, for by them a standard was early given of
sight and thought, from which I could never go back, and beneath
which I cannot suffer patiently my own life or that of any friend to fall.
They did me harm, too, for the child fed with meat instead of milk
becomes too soon mature. Expectations and desires were thus early
raised, after which I must long toil before they can be realized. How
poor the scene around, how tame one's own existence, how meagre and
faint every power, with these beings in my mind! Often I must cast
them quite aside in order to grow in my small way, and not sink into
despair. Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read
baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dulness
that they blunt the senses and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic

human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till
later,--that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children
should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand
in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through
books antedate their actual experiences, but should take them gradually,
as sympathy and interpretation are needed. With me, much of life was
devoured in the bud.

FIRST FRIEND.
'For a few months, this bookish and solitary life was invaded by interest
in a living, breathing figure. At church, I used to look around with a
feeling of coldness and disdain, which, though I now well understand
its causes, seems to my wiser mind as odious as it was unnatural. The
puny child sought everywhere for the Roman or Shakspeare figures,
and she was met by the shrewd, honest eye, the homely decency, or the
smartness of a New England village on Sunday. There was beauty, but
I could not see it then; it was not of the kind I longed for. In the next
pew sat a family who were my especial aversion. There were five
daughters, the eldest not above four-and-twenty,--yet they had the old
fairy, knowing look, hard, dry, dwarfed, strangers to the All-Fair,--were
working-day residents in this beautiful planet. They looked as if their
thoughts had never strayed beyond the jobs of the day, and they were
glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of
woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and
dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness,
and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose
existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear looking at
them.
'As my eye one day was ranging about with its accustomed coldness,
and the proudly foolish sense of being in a shroud of thoughts that were
not their thoughts, it was arrested by a face most fair, and well-known
as it seemed at first glance,--for surely I had met her before and waited
for her long. But soon I saw that she was a new apparition foreign to
that scene, if not to me. Her dress,--the arrangement of her hair, which
had the graceful pliancy of races highly cultivated for long,--the
intelligent and full picture of her eye, whose reserve was in its
self-possession, not in timidity,--all combined to make up a whole

impression, which, though too young to understand, I was well
prepared to feel.
'How wearisome now appears that thorough-bred millefleur beauty, the
distilled result of ages of European culture! Give me rather the wild
heath on the lonely hill-side, than such a rose-tree from the daintily
clipped garden. But, then, I had but tasted