Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare02fullrich).pdf/26

18 soberly, and without disturbance, have been led to a better course.

Ohildren of this generation!” — ye Festuses and Agrippas! — ye are wiser, we grant, than “the children of light;” yet we advise you to commend to a higher tribunal those whom much learning, or much love, has made “mad.” For if they stay here, almost will they persuade even you!’

Amidst these meetings of the Transcendentalists it was, that, after years of separation, I again found Margaret. Of this body she was member by grace of nature. Her romantic freshness of heart, her craving for the truth, her self-trust, had prepared her from childhood to be a pioneer in prairie-land; and her discipline in German schools had given definite form and tendency to her idealism. Her critical yet aspiring intellect filled her with longing for germs of positive affirmation in place of the chaff of thrice-sifted negation; while her æsthetic instinct responded in accord to the praise of Beauty as the beloved heir of Good and Truth, whose right it is to reign. On the other hand, strong common-sense saved her from becoming visionary, while she was too well-read as a scholar to be caught by conceits, and had been too sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful effeminacy. It was a pleasing surprise to see how this friend of earlier days was acknowledged as a peer of the realm, in this new world of thought. Men, — her superiors in years, fame and social position, — treated her more with the frankness due from equal to equal, than the half-condescending deference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves to women. They did not talk down to her standard, nor translate their dialect into popular