Western character; this led her to New York, where the matter-of-fact influence of Horace Greeley simply confirmed what had been so long growing. Like the noble youth in her favorite Jean Paul’s “Titan,” she longed for an enterprise for her idle valor. She says in her fragment of autobiographical romance: —
“I steadily loved this [Roman] ideal in my childhood, and this is the cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know how to stand firm on the ground before he can fly. In vain for me are men more, if they are less, than Romans.”
Again and again she comes back in her correspondence to this theme, as when she writes to W. H. Channing (March 22, 1840): —
“I never in life have had the happy feeling of really doing anything. I can only console myself for these semblances of actions by seeing that others seem to be in some degree aided by them. But oh! really to feel the glow of action, without its weariness, what heaven it must be!”[1]
Again she writes to the same friend, contrasting the meditative life of Socrates and the active life of Jesus Christ: —
“In my quiet retreat I read Xenophon and became more acquainted with his Socrates. I had before known only the Socrates of Plato, one much more to my mind. Socrates took the ground that you approve; he conformed to the Greek Church, and it is evident with a
- ↑ MS.
