Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.
Vol. I.
by Margaret Fuller Ossoli.
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 Glucklichen zu schwer!
Wie tanzte vor des Lebens Wagen Die luftige Begleitung her!
Die Liebe mit dem sussen Lohne, Das Gluck 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 pa.s.sion o"er their depths its fleeting light had wrought."
Sh.e.l.lE
"And I smiled, as one never smiles but once; Then first discovering my own aim"s extent, Which sought to comprehend the works of G.o.d.
And G.o.d himself, and all G.o.d"s intercourse With the human mind."
BROWNING.
I.
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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sociated 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 more as the income of his profession enabled him to give me means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit it to be with the next. He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible. Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my const.i.tution, and will bring me,--even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament,--to a premature grave.
"No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling to retire. My aunts cried out upon the "spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever was,--if brother could but open his eyes to see it,--who was never willing to go to bed."
They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away, she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. They did not know that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright; or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her "leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,"--never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often she dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother, as she had done that of her sister, and woke to find the pillow drenched in tears. These dreams softened her heart too much, and cast a deep shadow over her young days; for then, and later, the life of dreams,--probably because there was in it less to distract the mind from its own earnestness,--has often seemed to her more real, and been remembered with more interest, than that of waking hours.
"Poor child! Far remote in time, in thought, from that period, I look back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and perceive that I had no natural childhood."
BOOKS.