'The boldness, sweetness, and variety here, are just what
I like. I could pass the autumn in watching the exquisite
changes of light and shade on the heights across the river.
How idle to pretend that one could live and write as well amid
fallow flat fields! This majesty, this calm splendor, could
not but exhilarate the mind, and make it nobly free and
plastic.'
These few weeks among the Highlands,--spent mostly in the open air,
under October's golden sunshine, the slumberous softness of the Indian
summer, or the brilliant, breezy skies of November,--were an important
era for Margaret. She had--
"lost the dream of Doing
And the other dream of Done;
The first spring in the pursuing,
The first pride in the Begun,
First recoil from incompleteness in the face of what is won."
But she was striving, also, to use her own words, 'to be patient to
the very depths of the heart, to expect no hasty realizations, not to
make her own plan her law of life, but to learn the law and plan of
God.' She adds, however:--
'What heaven it must be to have the happy sense of
accomplishing something, and to feel the glow of action
without exhausted weariness! Surely the race would have worn
itself out by corrosion, if men in all ages had suffered, as
we now do, from the consciousness of an unattained Ideal.'
Extracts from journals will best reveal her state of mind.
'I have a dim consciousness of what the terrible experiences
must be by which the free poetic element is harmonized with
the spirit of religion. In their essence and their end these
are one, but rarely in actual existence. I would keep what
was pure and noble in my old native freedom, with that
consciousness of falling below the best convictions which now
binds me to the basest of mankind, and find some new truth
that shall reconcile and unite them. Once it seemed to
me, that my heart was so capable of goodness, my mind of
clearness, that all should acknowledge and claim me as a
friend. But now I see that these impulses were prophetic of a
yet distant period. The "intensity" of passion, which so often
unfits me for life, or, rather, for _life here_, is to
be moderated, not into dulness or languor, but a gentler,
steadier energy.'
'The stateliest, strongest vessel must sometimes be brought
into port to rent. If she will not submit to be fastened to
the dock, stripped of her rigging, and scrutinized by unwashed
artificers, she may spring a leak when riding most proudly
on the subject wave. Norway fir nor English oak can resist
forever the insidious assaults of the seemingly conquered
ocean. The man who clears the barnacles from the keel is more
essential than he who hoists the pennant on the lofty mast.'
* * * * *
'A week of more suffering than I have had for a long
time,--from Sunday to Sunday,--headache night and day! And not
only there has been no respite, but it has been fixed in one
spot--between the eyebrows!--what does that promise?--till it
grew real torture. Then it has been depressing to be able to
do so little, when there was so much I had at heart to do.
It seems that the black and white guardians, depicted on the
Etrurian monuments, and in many a legend, are always fighting
for my life. Whenever I have any cherished purpose, either
outward obstacles swarm around, which the hand that would be
drawing beautiful lines must be always busy in brushing away,
or comes this great vulture, and fastens his iron talons on
the brain.
'But at such times the soul rises up, like some fair child in
whom sleep has been mistaken for death, a living flower in
the dark tomb. He casts aside his shrouds and bands, rosy and
fresh from the long trance, undismayed, not seeing how to get
out, yet sure there is a way.
'I think the black jailer laughs now, hoping that while I
want to show that Woman can have the free, full action of
intellect, he will prove in my own self that she has not
physical force to bear it. Indeed, I am too poor an example,
and do wish I was bodily strong and fair. Yet, I will not be
turned from the deeper convictions.'
'Driven from home to home, as a Renouncer, I gain the poetry
of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron, lead, are in my casket.
Though no one loves me as I would be loved, I yet love many
well enough to see into their eventual beauty. Meanwhile, I
have no fetters, and when one perceives how others are bound
in false relations, this surely should be regarded as a
privilege. And so varied have been my sympathies, that this
isolation will not, I trust, make me cold, ignorant, nor
partial. My history presents much superficial, temporary
tragedy. The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture;
the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled. Yet the
time will come, when, from the union of this tragic king and
queen, shall be born a radiant sovereign self.'
* * * * *
'I have quite a desire to try my powers in a narrative poem;
but my head teems with plans, of which there will be time
for very few only to take form. Milton, it is said, made
for himself a list of a hundred subjects for dramas, and the
recorder of the fact seems to think this many. I think it very
few, so filled is life with innumerable themes.'
* * * * *
'_Sunday Evening._--I have employed some hours of the day,
with great satisfaction, in copying the Poet's Dreams from the
Pentameron of Landor. I do not often have time for such slow,
pleasing labor. I have thus imprinted the words in my mind, so
that they will often recur in their original beauty.
'I have added three sonnets of Petrarca, all written after the
death of Laura. They are among his noblest, all pertinent to
the subject, and giving three aspects of that one mood. The
last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio's
dream.
'In copying both together, I find the prose of the Englishman
worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see
such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary.
'How fine it is to see the terms "onesto," "gentile," used in
their original sense and force.
'Soft, solemn day!
Where earth and heaven together seem to meet,
I have been blest to greet
From human thought a kindred sway;
In thought these stood
So near the simple Good,
That what we nobleness and honor call,
They viewed as honesty, the common dower of all.'
Margaret was reading, in these weeks, the Four Books of Confucius,
the Desatir, some of Taylor's translations from the Greek, a work on
Scandinavian Mythology, Moehler's Symbolism, Fourier's Noveau Monde
Industriel, and Landor's Pentameron,--but she says, in her journal,
'No book is good enough to read in the open air, among these
mountains; even the best seem partial, civic, limiting,
instead of being, as man's voice should be, a tone higher than
nature's.'