Margaret Fuller: Until My Wings Be Grown (1839)

"I love the stern Titanic part, I love the crag, even the Drachenfels of life - I love its roaring sea that dashes against the crag - I love its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers generating the lotus and the crocodile, its hot sands with their white bones, patient camels, and majestic columns toppling to the sky in all the might of dust. I love its dens and silvery gleaming caverns, its gnomes, its serpents, and the tigers sudden spring. Nay! I would not be without what I know better, its ghostly northern firs, haggard with ice, its solitary tarns, tearful eyes of the lone forest, its trembling lizards and its wounded snakes dragging to secretest recesses their slow length along.

Who can know these and, other myriad children of Chaos and old night, who can know the awe the horror and the majesty of earth, yet be content with the blue sky alone. Not I for one. I love the love lit dome above, I cannot live without mine own particular star; but my foot is on the earth and I wish to walk over it until my wings be grown. I will use my microscope as well as my telescope. And oh ye flowers, ye fruits, and, nearer kindred yet, stones with your veins so worn by fire and water, and here and there disclosing streaks of golden awe, let us know one another before we part. Tell me your secret, tell me mine. To be human is also something?"

From a letter to Caroline Sturgis, Jan 27th 1839. 
Highland, Chris (Ed) (2007). Meditations of Margaret Fuller: The Inner Stream. Self Published.

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