Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/82

64 more eminent brother, to whom she was as a younger sister. Being a constant visitor at his house, she was at times brought closely in contact with Margaret Fuller, of whom she thus records her judgment in a letter addressed to her friend, Miss H. L. Chappell, of Southington, Conn.

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“, — Both your letters found me at Mr. Emerson’s, but I waited until I came home, to answer them. Miss Fuller has been there for a week past, and I have not yet learned the art of self-regulation so far as to be able to do anything when she is near. I see so few people who are anything but pictures or furniture, to me, that the stimulus of such a person is great and overpowering for the time. And indeed, if I saw all the people whom I think of as desirable, and if I could help myself, I do not think I should abate any of my interest in her. Her wit, her insight into characters, — such that she seems to read them aloud to you as if they were printed books, her wide range of thought and cultivation, — the rapidity with which she appropriates all knowledge, joined with habits of severe mental discipline (so rare in women, and in literary men not technically ‘men of science’); her passionate love of all beauty, her sympathy with all noble effort; then her energy of character and the regal manner in which she takes possession of society wherever she is, and creates her own circumstances; all these things keep me full of admiration — not astonished, but pleased admiration—and, as genius does always (vide R. W. E. on ‘ Genius’), inspire me with new life, new confidence in. my, own power, new desires to fulfill