NEW YORK.
JOURNALS, LETTERS, &c.
* * * * *
“How much, preventing God, how much.
I owe
To the defences thou hast
round me set!
Example, Custom, Fear, Occasion slow,—
These scorned bondsmen were
my parapet.
I dare not peep over this
parapet,
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf
below,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.”
“Di te, finor, chiesto non hai severa
Ragione a te; di sua virtu non cade
Sospetto in cor conscio a se stesso.”
ALFIERI.
“He that lacks time to mourn, lacks
time to mend;
Eternity mourns that. ’Tis
an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no
time to feel them.
Where sorrow’s held intrusive, and
turned out,
There wisdom, will not enter, nor true
power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.”
TAYLOR.
“That time of year thou may’st
in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none,
or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against
the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where
late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such
day,
As after sunset fadeth in
the west;
Which by and by black night doth take
away,—
Death’s second self,
that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth
doth lie;
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it
was nourished by.”
SHAKSPEARE. [Sonnet lxxiii.]
“Aber zufrieden mit stillerem Ruhme,
Brechen die Frauen des Augenblick’s
Blume,
Naehren sie sorgsam mit liebendem Fleiss,
Freier in ihrem gebundenen Wirken,
Reicher als er in des Wissens Bezirken
Und in der Dichtung unendlichem Kreiz.”
SCHILLER.
“Not like to like, but like in difference;
Yet in the long years liker must they
grow,—
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw
the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward
care;
More as the double-natured poet each;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.”
TENNYSON.
VII.
NEW YORK
* * * * *
LEAVING HOME.
Incessant exertion in teaching and writing, added to pecuniary anxieties and domestic cares, had so exhausted Margaret’s energy, in 1844, that she felt a craving for fresh interests, and resolved to seek an entire change of scene amid freer fields of action.
‘The tax on my mind is such,’ she writes,