Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/21

6 Under the controlling influence of her father, she says that her own world sank deep within, away from the surface of her life: In what I did and said I learned to have reference to other minds, but my true life was only the dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect and that coarse but wearable stuff woven by the ages, common sense."

The Latin language openefd for Margaret the door to many delights. The Roman ideal, definite and resolute, commended itself to her childish judgment; and even in later life she recognised Virgil as worthy to lead the great Pante "through hell and to heaven."

In Horace she enjoyed the serene and courtly appreciation of life; in Ovid, the first glimpse of a mythology which carried her to the Greek Olympus. Her study "soon ceased to be a burden, and reading became a habit and a passion," Her first real friends she found in her fathers book- closet, to which, her leisure moments, she was allowed free access. Here, from a somewhat miscellaneous collection, she singled out the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere,—"three great authors, all, though of unequal, yet of congenial powers; all of rich, and wide, rather than aspiring genius; all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took in; all fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to be lost Sights of or superseded."

Of these three Shakespeare was the first in her acquaintance, as in her esteem. She was but eight years old when the interest of Romeo and Juliet led her to rebel against the discipline whose force she so well knew, and to persevere in reading before her fathers very eyes a book forbidden for the Sabbath, For this offence she was summarily dismissed to bed, where her father,