Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/44

Rh no place, to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer."

The aspect of the outer world was in correspondence with these depressing thoughts.

“It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull and grey and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there. Sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path-there was no life else." Driven from place to place by the conflict within her, she sat down at last to rest " where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. All was dark, and cold, and still.” Suddenly the sun broke though the clouds, “with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it wilt use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day." And with this unlooked-for brightness passed into her soul "a beam from its true sun," whose radiance, she says, never departed more. This sudden illumination was not, however, an unreasoning, unaccountable one. In that moment flashed upon her the solution of the problem of self, whose perplexities bad followed her from her childish days. She comprehended at once the struggle in which she had been well-nigh overcome, and the illusion which had till then made victory impossible. "I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space and human nature; but I saw also that it must do it. I saw there was no self, that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered, that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine. This truth came to me,