“These books have made me for the first time think I might write into such shapes what I know of human nature. I have always thought that I would not, that I would keep all that behind the curtain, that I would not write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man, of the world of intellect and action. But now I am tempted, and if I can but do well my present work and show that I can write like a man, and if but the wild gnomes will keep from me with their shackles of care for bread in all its shapes of factitious life, I think I will try whether I have the hand to paint, as well as the eye to see. But I cannot but feel that I have seen, from the mouth of my damp cave, stars as fair, almost as many, as this person from the ‘Flèche of the Cathedral,’ where she has ascended at such peril. But I dare boast no more; only, please fate, be just and send me an angel out of this golden cloud that comes after the pelting showers I have borne so long.”[1]
The project of fiction went no farther, unless her fragment of an “Autobiographical Romance,” written in 1840, was the result of it; and her first two published books were, naturally enough, translations from the German. She had expected, as early as November 30, 1834, as appears by a letter to the Rev. F. H. Hedge, to print her translation of Goethe’s “Tasso.”[2] This had failed to find a publisher; but several years later George
