life
thrust them aside, persistently, as foreign, alien to me. These others
were to me home,--the thoughts that had held me nearest the divine life:
I went back to them, my eyes wet, and my heart sick under my weak lungs.
The little village of Concord, away up yonder, where I was born,--I was
glad to have been born there: thinking how man not only had learned
there to stand self-poised and found himself God, but Nature herself
seemed there to stop and reflect on her own beauty, and so root deeper
in the inner centre. The slow-dropping river, the thoughtful hills, the
very dust-colored fern that covers its fields, which might grow in
Hades, so breathless and crisp it is, came back to me with a glamour of
quiet that night. The soul had space to grow there! remembering how its
doors of thought stood wider open to welcome truth than anywhere
else on earth. "The only object in life is to grow." It was my
father's,--Margaret Fuller's motto. I had been nursed on it, I might
say. There had been a time when I had dreamed of attaining Margaret's
stature; and as I thought of that, some old subtile flame stirred in me
with a keen delight. New to me, almost; for, since my baby was born, my
soul as well as my body had been weak and nauseated. It had been so
sharp a disappointment! I had intended my child should be reared in New
England: what I had lacked in gifts and opportunities he should possess:
there was not a step of his progress which I had not mapped out. But the
child was a girl, a weazen-faced little mortal, crying night and day
like any other animal. It was an animal, wearing out in me the strength
needed by-and-by for its mental training. I sent it to a nurse in the
country. Her father had met the woman carrying it out to the wagon, and
took it in his arms. "Eh? eh? is it so, little lass?" I heard him say.
For days after that he looked paler, and his face had a quiet, settled
look, as if he had tested the world and was done with it. The days of
Tinder and the paddock and the drives were long gone then. I do not
remember that after this he ever called me Hetty. But he was cheerful as
ever with the boys, and, the week after, Jacky came.

Why did I think of all this now? Some latent, unconscious jar of thought
brought suddenly before me a scene of many years before, a damp spring
morning in Paris, when I had gone to Rosa Bonheur's studio, just out of
the city, to see her "Horse-Fair": the moist smell of jonquils; the
drifti