her through the language of love; "Romeo and Juliet was the first play which she read, and so absorbed and entranced was she by its pages that her father was unable to make her perceive or grasp the fact that she was disobeying him in reading the book on Sunday. She says of herself, "I can remember little except the state of feeling in which I lived.".

At an early age all this capacity for loving showed itself in a sudden passion for an English lady who came-delicate, different, a something strange-among Margaret's Puritan surroundings. When this friend, who had been worshipped with a child's frenzy of new feeling, left her, Margaret fell out of health. Her father concluded that she was dull, that she needed the society of other girls. She was sent to school, and of her school life she gives some account in the fanciful history of "Mariana." Here she appears Here she appears as one of those strange children who distress their teacher and disturb their companions, simply because they have not found the way to their own affections or those of others.

Returning home, she seems to leave behind her these agonies of a sensitive nature in its immaturity. She writes to her teacher from amid her books; she has found ambition, and the charm of that passion has power to bring with it a greater industry.

"I am de

termined on distinction," she says. "If I fail my consolation shall be found in active employment." The keynote of her life is struck; and from out the strange, half-joyous, half-melancholy childhood, begins to rise the woman, and, with her, the distinction obtained and the power of aiding others have surely been a rich reward for any early trials of development.

She now began to be what she is so well remembered as-a friend.

"But it was curious to see with what care and conscience she kept her friendships distinct. Her fine practical understanding, teaching her always the value of limits, enabled her to hold apart all her intimacies, nor did one ever encroach on the province of the other. Like a moral Paganini, she played always on a single string, drawing from each its peculiar musicbringing wild beauty from the slender wire no less than from the deep-sounding harp-string. Some of her friends had little to give her when compared with others; but I never noticed that she sacrificed in any respect the smaller faculty to the greater."

"The insight which Margaret displayed in finding her friends, the magnetism by which she drew them towards herself, the catholic range of her intimacies, the influence which she exercised to develop the latent germ of every character, the constancy with which she clung to each when she had once given and received confidence, the delicate justice which kept every intimacy separate, and the process of transfiguration which took place when she met anyone on the mountain of friendship, giving a dazzling lustre to the details of common life, all these should be at least touched upon and illustrated, to

give any adequate view of her in these relations."

It must be remembered in connection with these accounts of her singular friendships that she was not naturally prepossessing in appearance, and that she had faults of manner which prejudiced people against her; so that in some cases she was positively avoided by persons whom she desired to know. An English poet who met her in society we found to have had all other memories of her crowded out of his mind by a picture of her with uplifted and dictatorial forefinger, accompanying the gesture with a too-often recurring phrase, "My opinion is

"But," she says of herself, "I know the obstacles in my way. . . . All such hindrances may be overcome by an ardent spirit."

And certainly the record of her friends is enough to prove that she did rise triumphant over want of tact and an unfortunate manner.

Emerson says of her: "I still remember the first half hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness, a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,

the nasal tone of her voice-all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far. It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her

manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them. She had an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to give an absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes which were so plain at first soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of superabundant life."

That many persons should shrink from her society is little to be wondered at; her self-esteem was so overbearing as frequently to border on the absurd, and must have been somewhat oppressive to those who did not choose to worship at her footstool, yet could not assert themselves, intellectually, as a match

for her.

"It is certain," says Emerson, "that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, 'He appreciates me!""

If Margaret were full of wit and sarcasm at the expense of others, she unconsciously did not spare herself. When Emerson recorded those words of hers, "He appreciates me," he made immortal in that single sentence the measure of Margaret's self-conceit. Yet those who learned to love her forgave this arrogance; she claimed to be a queen-" without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen,"-and they granted her that position. "It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reck

oned intolerable in any other." But still this arrogant tone of conversation was sometimes commented on to her; and she would defend herself with "such broad good-nature, and on such grounds of simple truth as were not easy to set aside."

But she liked to be a teacher, a guide, a queen in her circle. She held conversation classes in Boston, where, although she drew around her clever women, she was, of course, the absolute head; and wherever her conversation, private or general, is recorded, either by herself or others, there is a tinge of the conversation-class in the colour of it.

"I have inquired diligently," says Emerson, "of those who saw her often, and in different companies, concerning her habitual tone; and something like this is the report: In conversation Margaret seldom, except as a special grace, admitted others upon an equal ground with herself. She was exceedingly tender when she pleased to be, and most cherishing in her influence; but to elicit this tenderness it was necessary to submit first to her personally. When a person was overwhelmed by her and answered not a word except, 'Margaret, be merciful to me, a sinner,' then her love and tenderness would come out like a seraph's, and often an acknowledgment that she had been too harsh... But her instinct was not humility-that was always an afterthought."

In her own home Margaret had diligently prepared herself for a life of literature, living in her books, translating, reading Italian and German, "devouring book after book." She thought of writing for magazines-" selling some part of her mind for lucre, to get the command of time;" but her dearest project then was interpret the German authors," of

"to

whom she was so fond, "to such Americans as are ready to receive." In the autumn of 1836 she left her country home and went to Boston to teach Latin and French in the very remarkable school of Mr. Bronson Alcott, and also with the intention of forming classes of young ladies in French, German, and Italian. She endeavoured to understand Mr. Alcott's mental position in his peculiar system of education. This is a fragment of dialogue from a journal :

“Mr. A. . . . . This story (the life of Jesus) has given me the key to all mysteries, and showed me what path should be taken in returning to the fountain of spirit. Seeing that other redeemers have imperfectly fulfilled their tasks, I have sought a new way. They all, it seemed to me, had tried to influence the human being at too late a day, and had laid their plans too wide. They began with men; I will begin with babes. They began with the world; I will begin with the family. So I preach the gospel of the nineteenth century.

Margaret. But, preacher, you make three mistakes.

"You do not understand the nature of genius or creative power.

"You do not understand the reaction of matter on spirit.

"You are too impatient of the complex, and, not enjoying variety in unity, you become lost in abstractions, and cannot illustrate your principles."

This, though probably not intended as an exact record of any particular conversation, is rather a good example of Margaret's wholesale method of opposing a speaker. Her rapid mind passes over the subject, and developes new points which have not yet been reached by the quieter thinker.

In the spring of 1837 she was asked to become a principal teacher in the Greene-street school, at

Providence, R. I. It was considered a favourable offer, and so perhaps it was, for she was allowed to teach her favourite subjects, to choose her own hours, and to arrange the course; and was to be paid a thousand dollars a year. This to her was independence; and, as she wished to help her family, she felt the immediate income to be invaluable. She therefore set aside an offer from a publisher to prepare a Life of Goethe "-a work which would have been a real delight to her-and set herself to the less precarious, if less enjoy: able, occupation.

"The gulf is vast," she says, "wider than I could have conceived possible, between me and my pupils;" but, at the same time, teaching was a congenial work. Perhaps her mind was of too rapid and variable a character for a teacher of school children; but, as leader of conversational classes, where practically her position was that of teacher, she was afterwards eminently successful. She had a great influence over young men, and had a theory that she herself should have been a man; but, at the same time, she took a deep and real interest in the position and concerns of her own sex. Naturally, she spoke and wrote a good deal upon the subject of marriage; it is a subject which has a tendency to become prominent with any who look closely into the circumstances which surround women. Her views on this matter may be called sensible, though full of enthusiasm. Her great difficulty, in life and in theorising, was that she desired a world of heroes.

"If women are to be bondmaids," she says, "let it be to men superior to women in fortitude, in aspiration, in moral power, in refined sense of beauty! You who give yourselves to be supported,' or because one must love

"And will that hurt them?

Certainly; how can you ask? They will find none, and so they will never be married.'"

"Get married" (adds Margaret in horrified italics) "is the usual phrase, and one that correctly indicates the thought; but the speakers on this occasion were persons too outwardly refined to use it."

Her ideal of the marriage relation was so exalted that she at one time entertained the notion of keeping it altogether separate from domestic life, in order to preserve its romance. But her own after experience showed her that, where the romance is sufficiently deep and real, domestic jars and worries will not wear it away.

Although so earnestly believing in woman as a redeemer, and as a being whose education and character are of vital importance, she was of too practical a mind to encourage women in slurring over domestic life. She was too full of her idea that living is an art for any contempt of the minor beauties of household sweetness and order. She gives a high place to the virtue of household nobleness, to an essay upon which she places these words as a heading, "Mistress of herself, though china fall."

In speaking of the mode in which this virtue, considered so especially a feminine one, may be shown, she says: We all know that there is substantial reason for the offence we feel at defects in any of these ways. A woman who

wants purity, modesty, and harmony in her dress and manners is insufferable; one who wants them in the arrangement of her house disagreeable to everybody. She neglects the most obvious ways of expressing what we desire to see in her; and the inference is ready, that the inward sense is wanting. It is with no merely gross or selfish feeling that all men commend the good housekeeper, the good nurse; neither is it slight praise to say of a woman that she does well the honours of her house in the way of hospitality."

Although Margaret Fuller had. so high an opinion of her sex-or rather perhaps of what her sex should be-women were often afraid of her, of her caustic humour, of her scholarly mind; and, with her great capacity for arrogance, it is very easy to understand that she could not but feel a contempt for the average uneducated and thoughtless woman. But that she was able to give to a noble woman that deep and almost passionate appreciation which can only be felt when jealousy and the smaller passions. are left behind, is shown in her own account of her meeting with Georges Sand. It is impossible to avoid quoting it; it is so full of simple charm.

"... I went to see her at her house, Place d'Orléans. I found it a handsome modern residence. She had not answered my letter, written about a week before, and I felt a little anxious lest she should not receive me, for she is too much the mark of impertinent curiosity, as well as too busy, to be easily accessible to strangers. I am by no means timid, but I have suffered for the first time in France some of the torments of mauvaise honte, enough to see what they must be to many. "It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters, and push yourself upon

their notice; thus you must go ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French. Only lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to utter my thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.

"The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a peasant, and, as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her goddaughter, whom she had brought from her province. She announced me as 'Madame Salere,' and returned into the ante-room to tell me, 'Madame says she does not know you.' I began to think I was doomed to a rebuff, among the crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, 'Ask if she has not received a letter from me.' As I spoke Madame S. opened the door and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her figure. She is large, but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest taste, her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and ladylike dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of Georges Sand. Her face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on one side