Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/293

Rh must have forced him to leave at last both palm and fountain. So on and on he went, saying to the palm, “Thou art for another;” and to the gentle waters, “I will return.”

‘Not far distant was he when the sirocco came, and choked with sand the fountain, and uprooted the fruit-trees. When years have passed, the waters will have forced themselves up again to light, and a new oasis will await a new wanderer. Thou, Sohrab, wilt, ere that time, have left thy bones at Mecca. Yet the remembrance of the fountain cheers thee as a blessing; that of the palm haunts thee as a pang.

‘So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Genuine Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not. Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly discontent?’

Already, too, at this time, each of the main problems of human life had been closely scanned and interrogated by her, and some of them had been much earlier settled. A worshipper of beauty, why could not she also have been beautiful?—of the most radiant sociality, why should not she have been so placed, and so decorated, as to have led the fairest and highest? In her journal is a bitter sentence, whose meaning I cannot mistake: ‘Of a disposition that requires the most refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire it: — poor Mignon! fear not the transition through death; no penal fires can have in store worse torments than thou art familiar with already.’

In the month of May, she writes: — ‘When all things