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to be made partial, cold, or ignorant by this isolation. I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience, that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me. But now as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what slow and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother! The children of the muse come quicker, with less pain and disgust, rest more lightly on the bosom and have” … [here the fragment ends.]^[1]

It may naturally be asked why, with such a true woman’s longing for home and children, Margaret Fuller had never been married. Loved “with oriental adoration,” in Horace Greeley’s phrase, by many women, she had also been loved sincerely by many men, while some of each sex had no doubt disliked her. Her letters to the men with whom she was, in maturer years, most intimate are singularly free, I will not merely say from coquettishness or sentimentality, but from anything that could fail short of her high standard of friendship. There is, however, no question that she had in early life at least one deep experience of personal emotion, followed by a reaction of disappointment. It is a satisfaction to know that the same letters which prove this — letters which I am not authorized to publish, nor should I wish to do it — show her only in an unselfish and generous aspect, while they bring her nearer to us by proving that even she, with all her Roman ambition, was still “a very woman” at heart.

1. MS. (W. H. C.)