flattering to herself than to anybody else. This may be called self-consciousness, but it certainly does not imply vanity; it quite as often takes the form of an almost excessive humility.
It would be easy to illustrate all this at great length from her unpublished papers. The most presumptuous passage about herself that I have been able to find is this, which bears no date. In speaking of Shelley’s “Defense of Poesie,” just read, she expresses her joy at finding that he had taken the matter up very much from the point of view she had been presenting in her conversations. “At least,” she says, “I have all the great thoughts, and whatever the world may say, I shall be well received in the Elysian fields.”[1] Yet this follows close upon a passage expressing her admiration of Shelley’s prose style and her utter despair of ever being able to write like him; she can only console herself by thinking that in conversation, at least, she had met him on his own ground. Soon after follow, again and again, passages like these, written at different times: —
“I feel within myself an immense power, but I cannot bring it out. I stand a barren vine-stalk; no grape will swell, though the richest wine is slumbering in its roots.”
“I have just about enough talent and knowledge to furnish a dwelling for friendship, but not enough to deck with golden gifts a Delphos for the world.”
“As I read Ellery [Channing] my past life seems a
- ↑ Fuller MSS. i. 588.
