alities?
"I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Fuller affords
a marked exception--to this extent, that her personal character and
her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access
to her soul _as_ directly from the one as from the other--no _more_
readily from this than from that--easily from either. Her acts are
bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and
her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her
'Summer on the Lakes:'--
"'The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they
are so swift that they cease to _seem_ so--you can think
only of their _beauty_. The fountain beyond the Moss Islands
I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an
_accidental_ beauty which it would not do to _leave_, lest
I might never see it again. After I found it _permanent_, I
returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the
little waterfall, beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to
have made a _study_ for some larger design. She delights in
this--a sketch within a sketch--a dream within _a dream_.
Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the
fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall, copied in the
flowers that _star_ its bordering mosses, we are _delighted_;
for all the lineaments become _fluent_, and we mould the scene
in congenial thought with its _genius_.'
"Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would _speak_ it. She is
perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the
_conversational_ woman in the mind's eye, all that is needed is to
imagine her reciting the paragraph just quoted: but first let us have
the _personal_ woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable
about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish
gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose
indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love--when
moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity
of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action
of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the
impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description
looking at you one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming
to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously
every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, bu
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