Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Chapter 3: Girlhood at <a target="_blank" onclick="openPopupWindow(this); return false" href="entityvote?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0001&auth=tgn,7013527&n=1&type=place">Cambridge</a>. (1810-1833.), page 38

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Margaret Fuller's precocity and her taste for hard study naturally created for her the reputation, among those who did not know her, of a grave young pedant. Nothing could be wider of the mark; she was full of sentiment, began to write poetry at fifteen, and produced some verses at seventeen which her brother has preserved in print; verses mourning, as is the wont of early youth, over the flight of years and life's freshness already vanished.

Stanzas: written at the age of seventeen.

I.

Come, breath of dawn! and o'er my temples play;
Rouse to the draught of life the wearied sense;
Fly, sleep! with thy sad phantoms, far away;
Let the glad light scare those pale troublous shadows hence!

II.

I rise, and leaning from my casement high,
Feel from the morning twilight a delight;
Once more youth's portion, hope, lights up my eye,
And for a moment I forget the sorrows of the night.

III.

O glorious morn! how great is yet thy power!
Yet how unlike to that which once I knew,
When, plumed with glittering thoughts, my soul would soar,
And pleasures visited my heart like daily dew!

IV.

Gone is life's primal freshness all too soon;
For me the dream is vanished ere my time;
I feel the heat and weariness,of noon,
And long in night's cool shadows to recline. ¹

1 Life without and within, p. 370.

Hougton, Mifflin and Company, 1890.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

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Stanzas: written at the age of seventeen.

I.

II.

III.

IV.