Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/343

Rh opment, to advance from objects to law, from the circumferenee of being, where we found ourselves at our birth, to the centre.

“This advance was enacted poesy. We could not, in our individual lives, amid the disturbing influences of other wills, which had as much right to their own action as we to ours, enact poetry entirely; the discordant, the inferior, the prose, would intrude, but we should always keep in mind that poetry of life was not something aside, — a path that might or might not be trod, — it was the only path of the true soul; and prose you may call the deviation. We might not always be poetic in life, but we might and should be poetic in our thought and intention. The fine arts were one compensation for the necessary prose of life. The man who could not write his thought of beauty in his life, — the materials of whose life would not work up into poetry, — wrote it in stone, drew it on canvas, breathed if in music, or built it in lofty rhyme. In this statement, however, she guarded her meaning, and said that to seek beauty was to miss it often. We should only seek to live as harmoniously with the great laws as our social and other duties permitted, and solace ourselves with poetry and the fine arts.”

I find a further record by the same friendly scribe, which seems a second and enlarged account of the introductory conversation, or else a sketch of the course of thought which ran through several meetings, and which very naturally repeated occasionally the same thoughts. I give it as I find it: —

“She then recurred to the last year’s conversations;