I know not why I have not read
them thus before, except that the beauty was pointed out to me
at first by another, instead of my coming unexpectedly upon
it of myself. All the great writers, all the persons who have
been dear to me, I have found and chosen; they have not been
proposed to me. My intimacy with them came upon me as natural
eras, unexpected and thrice dear. Thus I have appreciated, but
not been able to feel, Michel Angelo as a poet.
'It is a singular fact in my mental history, that, while I
understand the principles and construction of language much
better than formerly, I cannot read so well _les langues
meridionales_. I suppose it is that I am less _meridionale_
myself. I understand the genius of the north better than I
did.'
Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old poets,--for to
Ariosto she assigned a far lower place,--Alfieri and Manzoni, among
the new. But what was of still more import to her education, she had
read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost
exclusively,--Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above
all, GOETHE. It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her,
though her rich and busy mind never reproduced undigested reading,
that the last writer,--food or poison,--the most powerful of all
mental reagents,--the pivotal mind in modern literature,--for all
before him are ancients, and all who have read him are moderns,--that
this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled,
nor was there room for any other.
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