Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/236

234 creations are successive; thy fiat comprehends them all.

‘Last summer, I met thy mood in nature, on those wide impassioned plains flower and crag-bestrown. There, the tide of emotion had rolled over, and left the vision of its smiles and sobs, as I saw to-night from thee.

‘If thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself——! I am lost in this world, where I sometimes meet angels, but of a different star from mine. Even so does thy spirit plead with all spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in.

‘Master, I have this summer envied the oriole which had even a swinging nest in the high bough. I have envied the least flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the wind. But I envy none when I am with thee.’

Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In the coolest way, she said to her friends, ‘I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’ In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth of genius, and my curiosity in his future, — ‘O no, she was intimate with his mind,’ and I ‘spoiled him, by overrating him.’ Meantime, we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle superiorities.