1–7 May 1837

Margaret Fuller left us yesterday morning. Among many things that make her visit valu- able and memorable, this is not the least, that she gave me five or six lessons in German pro- nunciation, never by my offer and rather against my will each time, so that now, spite of myself, I shall always have to thank her for a great con- venience— which she foresaw.

It is curious to observe how strangely ex- perience becomes thought ; or life, truth. The conversion is hourly going on. Will and ne- cessity, or if you please, character and condition beget an act. It is a part of life and remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life." . . .

I see with joy the visits of heat and moisture to my trees, and please myself with this new property. I strangely mix myself with nature, and the Universal God works, buds, and blooms in my grove and parterre. I seem to myself an enchanter who by some rune or dumb-gesture compels the service of superior beings. But the instant I separate my own from the tree and the potato field, it loses this piquancy. I presently see that I also am but an instrument like the tree, a reagent. The tree was to grow ; I was to transplant and water it, not for me, not for it, but for all.

The Sabbath reminds me of an advantage which education may give, namely, a normal piety, a certain levitical education which only rarely devout genius could countervail. I can- not hear the young men whose theological in- struction is exclusively owed to Cambridge and to public institution, without feeling how much happier was my star, which rained on me influ- ences of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly deaths of sainted kindred at Concord, Maiden, York, was itself a culture, an education, I heard with awe her tales of the pale stranger who, at the time her grandfather lay on his death-bed, tapped at the window and asked to come in. The dying man said, "Open the door"; but the timid family did not; immediately he breathed his last, and they said one to another, " It was the Angel of Death." Another of her ancestors, when near his end, had lost the power of speech, and his minister came to him and said, " If the Lord Christ is with you, hold up your hand " ; and he stretched up both hands and died. With these I heard the anecdotes of the charities of Father Moody ' and his commanding adminis- tration of his holy office. When the offended parishioners would rise to go out of the church he cried, " Come back, you graceless sinner, come back ! " And when his parishioners ven- tured into the ale-house on a Saturday night, the valiant pastor went in, collared them, and dragged them forth and sent them home.