Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

WorkWalter Savage Landor

Pericles and Aspasia

Pericles and Aspasia (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836)

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) · London: Saunders and Otley, 1836

AnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned

Documented 1838–1845

Letters • Books • Essays • Journals • Notebooks • Manuscripts

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

AttestedConfirmed reading1838–1844Evidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • Dated
  • 1838Pericles and AspasiaDemonstrated

    “of Landor "There is a gloom in deep love as in deep water; there is a silence in it which surrounds the foot...”

    Manuscripts (Houghton Library, Margaret Fuller Family Papers) · From a journal kept during a short visit to Groton, August 1838

    Manuscript journal entry copying a substantial multi-clause passage from Landor's Pericles and Aspasia.

  • 1844Pericles and AspasiaAttested

    “H[ow]ever I have him much by heart and own the Pericles and Aspasia.”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · 23d Novr 1844

    'I have him much by heart and own the Pericles and Aspasia' is an explicit personal statement of sustained engagement with the book.

  • 1844Pericles and AspasiaAttested

    “Just now, looking in Pericles and Aspasia for something else...I came upon the poem, "You build your nest Aspasia”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Friday evening, May 3d [1844]

    'Just now, looking in Pericles and Aspasia for something else... I came upon the poem' is a present-tense, in-the-moment reading statement.

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist3records
V. New York4records
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850
1838—

Journal Entry August 1838

p4
quoted · readSearch Digital Fuller (page unverified)
“the other the Amor Greco, may be fitly described in these words of Landor / "There is a gloom in deep love as in deep water; / there is a silence in it which surrounds the foot, and the / folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Journal Entry August 1838." Houghton Library, Harvard University; MS Am 1086; Box 5.

Fuller explicitly attributes the passage to Landor ('in these words of Landor').

1840—

Journal 1840

p21, p28, p78
analyzed · readManuscript page
“Also_Landor text Percles and Aspasia / In Pericles and Aspasia nothing strikes one than the beauty with which the relations are kept up.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1840." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (85); Box 5 (85).

1841—

Reading Notes, 1841

p40
analyzed
“The dialogue between Tiberius and Vipsania has the same melancholy beauty as the last letter of Alcibiades in Pericles and Aspasia.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Reading Notes, 1841." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1221 (Caroline Sturgis Tappan papers, 1838–1921).

1844—

Letter to Caroline Sturgis

p193
analyzed · quoted · read
“Just now, looking in Pericles and Aspasia for something else (which I could not find) I came upon the poem, "You build your nest Aspasia" &c I had forgotten how beautiful it is; look and see if it be not the right kind of nest.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

1844—

Letter to Richard F. Fuller

p247
read
“I do own most other book[s] of my contemporaries that I prize. H[ow]ever I have him much by heart and own the Pericles and Aspasia.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

p161
analyzed · read
“I wish to see men and women capable of such relations as are depicted by Landor in his Pericles and Aspasia, where grace is the natural garb of strength, and the affections are calm, because deep.”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

1845—

Writers Little Known Among Us.

“Writers Little Known Among Us.”
analyzed · quoted · read11 selected passages
“Pericles and Aspasia” has been republished here. There is no finer modern vase, in imitation of the antique. Its beauty is a Grecian beauty.”
“He is the golden lamp that shines upon the image I adore”
“BEAUTY! thou art a wanderer on the earth, And hast no temple in the fairest isle Or city over-sea, where Wealth and Mirth, And all the Graces—all the Muses, smile.”
“Come sprinkle me soft music o’er the breast, Bring me the varied colors into light That now obscurely on its tablet rest, Show me its flowers and figures fresh and bright”
“History wants them (metaphors) occasionally: in oratory they are nearly as requisite as poetry; they come opportunely wherever the object is persuasion or intimidation”
“You are prudent, and your prudence is of the best quality; instinctive delicacy.”
“Imagination is little less strong in our later years then in our earlier. True, it alights on fewer objects, but it rests longer on them, and sees them better.”
“O, men of Athens! said he, calmly, I wish it had pleased the gods that the vengeance of Diapithes had taken its first aim against me, whom you have heard so often”
“He has not the fine manners of Sophocles; nor the open and unreserved air, which Pericles tells me he admired so much in the soldierly and somewhat proud Eschylus”
“You build your nest, Aspasia, like the swallow, Bringing a little on the bill at once, And fixing it attentively and proudly, And trying it, and then from your soft breast Warming it with the inmost of the plumage.”
“Where are the blooms of many dyes That used in every path to rise? Whither are gone the lighter hours?”

Fuller, Margaret. "Writers Little Known Among Us." New-York Daily Tribune, 28 March 1845.

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Letter to Unknown

p143
read
“Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Cleone, is circle wide enough for me.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Hudspeth identified this as a reference to Walter Savage Landor's Pericles and Aspasia (1836), a favorite work of Fuller's featuring epistolary-dialogue conversations among Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and other Athenian figures.

n.d.—

Notebook 1840

p36, p37, p38, p39
analyzed · readManuscript page
“Pericles and Arpasia.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook 1840." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086; Box 3.