other people share the same condition, or worse. “I see no divine person; I myself am more divine than any one I see. I think that is enough to say about them.” To a lower depth, that is, she can scarcely assign them than to say that they seem to be accomplishing even less than she does. The woman who wrote this was but twenty-seven, poor, a martyr to ill-health, and with a desperate hungering of the soul to do her appointed work in the world, and make full use of the talents confided to her. When we consider that she was writing to her father-confessor, in absolute freedom and in an almost fantastic mood of depression, — with her supposed profession of teaching crumbling beneath her feet, and nothing before her but an intellectual career, which in a worldly way was then no career; her plans uncertain, her aims thwarted, her destiny a conundrum, — what man of intellectual pursuits, looking back on the struggles of his own early years, can throw a stone at Margaret Fuller?
“My dear Friend,—Many a Zelterian[1] epistle have I mentally addressed to you, full of sprightly scraps about the books I have read, the spectacles I have seen, and the attempts at men and women with whom I have come in contact. But I have not been able to put them on paper; for, even when I have attempted it, you have seemed so busy and noble, and I
- ↑ A phrase suggested by the correspondence between Goethe and Zelter, which she had been reading.
