Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/115

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“Beneath all pain inflicted by Nature, be not only serene, but more, let it avail thee in prayer. Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.

“My head is very sensitive, and as they described the Spina Christi I shuddered all over, and could have fainted only at the thought of its pressure on his head. Yet if he had experienced the sufferings of humanity and believed that by ‘thy will be done’ — a steady feeling in his breast during these hours of torture from an ungrateful race — he could free them from suffering and sin, I feel how he might have borne it. It seems to me I might be educated through suffering to the same purity.

“Does any man wound thee; not only forgive, but work into thy thought intelligence of the kind of pain, that thou mayst never inflict it on another spirit. When its work is done, it will never search thy whole nature again.

“Oh, love much, and be forgiven.”

It will be seen from another letter that she set an especial value on her flower sketches: —

“You often tell me what to do when you are gone; if you survive me, will you not collect my little flower-pieces, even the insignificant ones? I feel as if from mother I had received a connection with the flowers;