Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/58

40 showed my penetration in discovering the beauties of Nature through a thick and never-lifted shroud of rain; I have turned two new leaves in the book of human nature; I have got a new pink bag (beautiful!). I have imposed on the world, time and again, by describing your Lynn life as the perfection of human felicity, and adorning my visit there with all sorts of impossible adventures, — thus at once exhibiting my own rich invention and the credulous ignorance of my auditors (light and dark, you know, dear, give life to a picture); I have had tears for others' woes, and patience for my own, — in short, to climax this journal of many-colored deeds and chances, so well have I played my part, that in the self-same night I was styled by two several persons, ‘a sprightly young lady,’ and ‘a Syren!!’ Oh rapturous sound! I have reached the goal of my ambition. Earth has nothing fairer or brighter to offer. ‘Intelligency’ was nothing to it. A ‘supercilious,’ ‘satirical,’ ‘affected,’ ‘pedantic,’ ‘Syren’!!!! Can the olla podrida of human nature present a compound of more varied ingredients, or higher gusto?” …

At the beginning of 1833 she wrote as follows in her diary, looking forward to an uneventful year. She was at this time living in what was then a picturesque old house, now shorn of part of its amplitude and of its superb row of great linden trees, — the Brattle House on Brattle Street, Cambridge. The great buildings of the University Press now cover the ground once laid out in formal old-fashioned gardens, with fish ponds, bridges, and spring-houses, every inch of which