smoother individualities of the present day can best estimate what her task must have been.
Both the magazine and the literary club from which it sprang seem to have been a subject of correspondence among a circle of friends for several years before either took definite shape. Margaret Fuller writes to the Rev. F. H. Hedge, so early as July 4, 1833: —
“I should be very willing to join such a society as you speak of, and will ‘compose a piece,’ if you will give me a subject.”
This, however, was merely a social club, composed of ladies and gentlemen in Cambridge, and Dr. Hedge has no remembrance of any literary exercises connected with it. But during the winter of 1834-35 there was a good deal of discussion in respect to a possible magazine, and on March 5, 1835, — nearly two years after, — she writes to him, still from Groton: —
“Your periodical plan charms me; I think you will do good and, what is next best, gain favor. ‘Though I have been somewhat jostled in this working-day world, I have still a great partiality for the goddess who
‘vires [que] acquirit eundo;
Parva metu primo; mox sese attolit in auras
… et caput inter nubila condit.’[1]
I shall feel myself honored if I am deemed worthy of lending a hand, albeit I fear I am merely ‘Germanico,’ and not ‘transcendental.’ I go by fits and starts: there
- ↑
The description of “Fama,” in Virgil’s Æneid, iv. 175-177.
