The
last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio's
dream.
'In copying both together, I find the prose of the Englishman
worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see
such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary.
'How fine it is to see the terms "onesto," "gentile," used in
their original sense and force.
'Soft, solemn day!
Where earth and heaven together seem to meet,
I have been blest to greet
From human thought a kindred sway;
In thought these stood
So near the simple Good,
That what we nobleness and honor call,
They viewed as honesty, the common dower of all.'
Margaret was reading, in these weeks, the Four Books of Confucius,
the Desatir, some of Taylor's translations from the Greek, a work on
Scandinavian Mythology, Moehler's Symbolism, Fourier's Noveau Monde
Industriel, and Landor's Pentameron,--but she says, in her journal,
'No book is good enough to read in the open air, among these
mountains; even the best seem partial, civic, limiting,
instead of being, as man's voice should be, a tone higher than
nature's.
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