Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/307

Rh page. The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers — else would “Josh Billings” be at the head of literature; — but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds. Tried by this standard, Margaret Fuller ranks high, and, if I were to judge strictly by my own personal experience, I should say very high indeed. I shall always be grateful to the person who fixed in my memory, during early life, such sentences as these: —

“Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. This changes and that changes not.”

“Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.”

[In reading fiction] “We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.” [A better criticism never was made on the current villain of the drama and the novel.]

“For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.”

“Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning-knife.”

“A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.”

‘Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light