Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/114

96 pils from Providence; she was within easy reach of friends, and could at the same time renew that love of nature which Groton had first taught her, and which city-life had only suspended. From this time, many charming outdoor sketches appear among her papers. Inheriting a love of flowers from her mother, she gave to them meanings and mysticisms of her own. Of her later “Dial” sketches, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” grew, as she writes in one of her unpublished letters, out of the suggestion by some one that its odor was so exquisite at that spot as to be unlike any other magnolia; and the “Yucca Filamentosa” came wholly from a description given her by Dr. Eustis, in his garden at Brookline, of its flowering at full-moon. “If you like it” (the sketch of the magnolia), — she says to one of her correspondents, — “I will draw the soul also from the Yucca and put it into words.”

Among her unpublished papers there are several similar flower-pieces; one upon the Passion Flower, whose petals had just fallen from her girdle, she says, while all her other flowers remained intact; and with which she connects a striking delineation of human character, as embodied in some person not now to be identified. Again she has been hearing in some conversation a description of the thorn called Spina Christi, which still grows on the plains of Judæa, and this leads her to a noble winter reverie: —