Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/118

100 and asters, — but that is contrary to the nature of love; though it be true in one sense, as Schiller says, that he only loves who loves without hope, yet in another it is true that love cannot exist without desire, though it be the desire of the moth for the star.”

Sometimes she records rambles with others, and we have here a visit to Mount Auburn, at the period when it still retained its rural beauty: —

&emsp; “Ellery [Channing] and I had a good afternoon at Mount Auburn. He was wondering why men had expressed so little of any worth about death. I said I thought they attached too much importance to it. On this subject I always feel that I can speak with some certainty, having been on the verge of bodily dissolution. I felt at that time disengaged from the body, hovering and calm. And in moments of profound thought or feeling, or when, after violent pain in the head, my exhausted body loses power to hem me in, I have felt changes more important than then. I believe that the mere death of the body has no great importance except when it is in no sense accidental, that is, when the mind, by operations native to it, has gradually cast aside its covering, and is ready for a new one. But this is very seldom the case. Persons die generally, not as a natural thing, but from extraneous causes; then it must be a change only one degree more important than going to sleep; for what the mind wants to develop it, it must have, here or elsewhere. A death from love would be perfectly natural.

“Reasons why there are no good monuments? I must write upon this subject. March, 1840.”