intellectual life, while she yet felt its charms. Her residence in Providence had made her “a citizen of the world,” and the “best thing she had done” there was to defy the disapproval of her employer and attend a caucus, — in those days a rare exploit for a woman. We see the same half-conscious impulse toward action manifested in one of her letters to her younger brothers, in which she describes with great fullness a visit to a French man-of-war, the Hercules, which had anchored in Narragansett Bay. She says, incidentally, “I thought I much should like to command such a vessel, despite all the hardships and privations of such a situation.”[1] When she wrote, years after, the oft-quoted passage in “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” “Let them be sea-captains, if they will,” it may have been with this reminiscence in her mind.
On March 1, 1838, she wrote to Mr. Emerson one of her most characteristic letters. I reproduce it from the manuscript, because it shows what Mr. Emerson was to her, — a saint in her oratory, — and because it puts what was often called, in her case, self-consciousness and vanity, in their clearest light. She was sometimes said to despise her fellow-creatures, and all that passed for contempt in her is frankly uttered here. Yet behind it, if I understand it rightly, is a profound and even self-torturing humility. Always dissatisfied with herself, she finds to her dismay that
- ↑ Fuller MSS. i. 635.
