LIFE WITHOUT AND LIFE WITHIN; OR, REVIEWS, NARRATIVES, ESSAYS, AND POEMS.

BY MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, AUTHOR OF "WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY," "AT HOME AND ABROAD," "ART, LITERATURE, AND THE DRAMA," ETC.

EDITED BY HER BROTHER, ARTHUR B. FULLER. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by ARTHUR B. FULLER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts

  

Cambridge: Presswork by John Wilson and Son.

PREFACE.

EVERY person, who can be said to really live at all, leads two lives during this period of mortal existence. The one life is outward; it is passed in reading the thoughts of others; in contemplating the struggles, the defeats, the victories, the virtues, the sins, in fine, all things which make the history of those who surround us; and in gazing upon the structures which Art has reared, or paintings which she hath inscribed on the canvas; or looking upon the grand temple of the material universe, and beholding scenes painted by a hand more skilled, more wondrous, in its creative power, than ever can be human hand. The life passed in examining what other minds have produced, or living other men's lives by looking at their deeds, or in any way discerning what addresses the bodily eye or the physical ear,—this is often wise and well; essential, indeed, to any inner life; but it is outward, not self-centred, not the product of our own individual natures.

But the thought of others suggests or develops thought of our own—the history of other men, as it is writing itself imperishably every day upon their souls, or already has written itself in letters of living light or lines of gloomy blackness—gives rise to internal sympathy or abhorrence on the part of us who look on and read what is thus writing and written. Our own spirits are stirred within us: our passions, which have been sleeping lions, our affections and aspirations, before angels with folded wings,—these are awakened by what others are doing, and then we struggle with the bad or yield to it; we obey or disobey the good, and our internal moral life begins; the outward universe or the Great Spirit in our hearts speaks to our souls, leading first to inward dissatisfaction, then to aspiration for and attainment of holiness, and now the inner spiritual life, which shall transfigure all outward life, and throw its own 

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