for I see how the purest ideal natures need it to temper them and keep them large and sure. I will never do as Waldo [Emerson] does, though I marvel not at him.”[1]
The tone of this passage is saddened, no doubt, by some ungenerous criticisms upon herself and one of her favorite pupils, which she goes on to refute in detail, ending in the following high tone of aspiration: —
“How, when I hear such things, I bless God for awakening my inward life. In me, my Father, thou wouldst not, I feel, permit such blindness. Free them also, help me to free them, from this conventional standard, by means of which their eyes are holden that they see not. Let me, by purity and freedom, teach them justice, not only to my individual self, — of that small part of myself I am utterly careless, — but to this everflowing Spirit. Oh, must its pure breath pass them by?”[2]
The criticisms which her conversations brought upon themselves, in their day, were mostly so trivial that they are not now worth recalling; but there has been one curious effort to pervert these occasions from their true character, and this occurs in the posthumous autobiography of a woman of great prominence, who had, at one time, a distinct influence over Margaret Fuller. Posthumous attacks are always the hardest to meet, because in them the accuser still lives and testifies without cross-examination, while it often happens that the accused and his witnesses are alike dead.
