Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/23

Rh as she herself said, to be a Pericles rather than an Anaxagoras; and she occupied her time with omnivorous study, with writing, with talking, with mysticism, while waiting for her career. In view of all this, I cannot resist the opinion that the prevalent tone of the “Memoirs” leaves her a little too much in the clouds, and gives us too little of that vigorous executive side which was always prominent in her aspirations for herself, and which was visible to all after she reached Italy.

I am the more led to say this because it is essential to the plan of the present series that I should dwell chiefly on her literary life, while knowing that this life was only preliminary, and that she would not have wished to be judged by it after she had once entered on the life of action. The following pages will, I hope, be a more adequate record than has before been given of what she did for our dawning literature; but they yet leave room for a book by some other hand that shall fully delineate the Margaret Fuller Ossoli who stood by the side of Mazzini in Italy, and whose hands the young patriots clasped in the hospital crying, “Viva l'Italia” as they died. At the very moment when Lowell was satirizing her in his “Fable for Critics,” she was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century before. During our own civil war many women afterwards led it, and found out for themselves what it was; but by that time Margaret Fuller Ossoli had passed away. Still, as I said,