weakness. Longing for expression, she yet finds her thoughts, she says, too slight or inadequate to be written down; and therefore likes to speak them, though conscious that even this amount of expression may not always be an advantage. She is going through the experience, in short, which all thinkers have had, and which her favorite Goethe has best formulated “Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.”
It must be remembered that the feeling of desire to be among men and do her part, rather than linger in solitary self-culture, is still visible at this period. For instance, after spending some delicious days about this time with her friend Miss Sturgis on the Merrimack, she writes: —
“I should not like such a life constantly. There are few characters so vigorous and of such self-sustained self-impulse that they do not need frequent and unexpected difficulties to awaken and keep in exercise their powers.”[1]
Still longing for action, conscious of her fitness for it, she took this method of conversation as her best way of bringing to bear some influence upon her age and time. How much more than this she desired is to be seen in this fine piece of aspiration occurring in a letter to the Rev. W. H. Channing: —
“Like a desperate gamester I feel, at moments, as I cling to the belief that he [the Deity] cannot have lost
- ↑ Fuller MSS. ii. 645.
