VIII.
CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON.
It was in the suburban quiet of Jamaica Plain that the project of holding literary conversations first shaped itself. When Madame de Staël asked the Comte de Ségur which he liked best, her conversation or her writings, he is reported to have replied, “Your conversation, madame, for then you have not the leisure to become obscure.” It was really in the effort to avoid obscurity and clarify her own thoughts that Margaret Fuller began by talking instead of writing. Conversations on literary and philosophical themes have since become such common things, that we can hardly appreciate the sort of surprise produced when she first attempted them. It fell in with the convenient theory of her vanity and presumption, while it is evident from her own diaries that the enterprise was undertaken in a very modest way. She felt a desire to do her part in the world, but knew herself not yet mature enough in intellect to write, even if there were any periodical to welcome her. Mere talking, which seemed to other people such an audacious enterprise, seemed to her the very easiest form of intel-
