Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/78

Rh stroyed; there your father died, but not till the cares of a narrowed income, and collision with his elder sons, which would not have ended there, had so embittered his life and made him so over anxious, that I have never regretted that he did not stay longer to watch the turning of the tide: for his life up to 1830 had been one of well-earned prosperity, which, after that time, was rapidly ebbing from him, and I do not think adversity would have done him good; he could not reconcile himself to it; his feeling was that after thirty years’ labor and self-denial he was entitled to peace, and he would not have had it.

“You were too young to feel how trying are the disorders of a house which has lost its head, the miserable perplexities which were in our affairs, the wounds your mother underwent in that time of deep dejection from the unfeeling and insolent conduct of many who had been kept in check by respect for your father, her loneliness and sense of unfitness for the new and heavy burden of care. It will be many years yet before you can appreciate the conflicts of my mind, as I doubted whether to give up all which my heart desired for a path for which I had no skill, and no call, except that some one must tread it, and none else was ready. The Peterborough hills and the Wachusetts are associated in my mind with many hours of anguish, as great, I think, as I am capable of feeling. I used to look at them, towering to the sky, and feel that I, too, from my birth had longed to rise, but I felt crushed to earth; yet again a nobler spirit said that could never be; the good knight may come forth scarred and maimed from the unequal contest, shorn of his strength and unsightly to the careless eye, but the same fire burns within and