Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/306

304 asunder my life, to leave it a poor black chrysalid behind. And yet this last is too true of me.’

She describes a visit made in May, 1844, at the house of some valued friends in West Roxbury, and adds: ‘We had a long and deep conversation, happy in its candor. Truth, truth, thou art the great preservative! Let free air into the mind, and the pestilence cannot lurk in any corner.’

And she uses the following language in an earnest letter to another friend: —

‘My own entire sincerity, in every passage of life, gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions.’

‘Reading to-day a few lines of ——, I thought with refreshment of such lives as T.’s, and V.’s, and W.’s, so private and so true, where each line written is really the record of a thought or a feeling. I hate poems which are a melancholy monument of culture for the sake of being cultivated, not of growing,’

Even in trifles, one might find with her the advantage and the electricity of a little honesty. I have had from an eye-witness a note of a little scene that passed in Boston, at the Academy of Music. A party had gone early, and taken an excellent place to hear one of Beethoven’s symphonies. Just behind them were soon seated a young lady and two gentlemen, who made an incessant buzzing, in spite of bitter looks cast on them by the whole neighborhood, and destroyed all the musical comfort. After all was over, Margaret leaned across