Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/116

114 the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance, — and all in pure light and shade, all in perfect perspective.

Margaret began to study German early in 1832. Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards in the Foreign Quarterly.

I believe that in about three months from the time that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of its literature. Within the year, she had read Goethe’s Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck’s William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Körner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller’s principal dramas, and his lyric poetry. Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies. Her mind opened under this influence, as the apple-blossom at the end of a warm week in May. The thought and the beauty of this rich literature equally filled her mind and fascinated her imagination.

But if she studied books thus earnestly, still more frequently did she turn to the study of men. Authors and their personages were not ideal beings merely, but full of human blood and life. So living men and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid fancy, — every trait intensified, developed, ennobled. Lessing says that “The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him as art ought to flatter, — painting the face not as it actually is, but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the resistance of the