ples.” Miss Fuller herself wrote the more mystical sketches — “Klopstock and Meta,” “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” “Yucca Filamentosa,” and “Leila;” as well as the more elaborate critical papers — “Goethe,” “Lives of the Great Composers,” and “Festus.” Poetry was supplied by Clarke, Cranch, Dwight, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, and, latterly, Lowell; while Parker furnished solid, vigorous, readable, commonsense articles, which, as Mr. Emerson once told me, “sold the numbers.” It is a curious fact that the only early “Dial” to which Parker contributed nothing was that which called down this malediction from Carlyle: —
“The ‘Dial,’ too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealislike. Will no Angel body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee man with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back?”[1]
Yet Theodore Parker was a good deal more stalwart than Carlyle, had more color in his cheeks, and wore a more presentable coat on his back; and he had written an exceedingly straightforward paper for every number before that of October, 1841. This, as it happened, was prepared under difficulties, and Margaret Fuller herself had to write eighty-five of its one hundred and thirty-six pages. It is plain, from the reluctance to write which she so often expresses, that she occupied this occasional prominence against her will. Instead of being a monopolist, she appears as the scapegoat
- ↑ Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i. 352
