and the “Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence;” but the main reliance has necessarily been placed on material not hitherto made public; and to all the friends who have helped me to this I am profoundly grateful.
If my view of Margaret Fuller differs a little from that of previous biographers, it is due to the study of these original sources. With every disposition to defer to the authors of the “Memoirs,” all of whom have been in one way or another my friends and teachers, I am compelled in some cases to go with what seems the preponderance of written evidence against their view. Margaret Fuller was indeed, as one of them has lately said to me, many women in one, and there is room for a difference of opinion even in assigning a keynote to her life. In their analysis, these biographers seem to me to have given an inevitable prominence to her desire for self-culture, perhaps because it was on this side that she encountered them; but I think that any one who will patiently study her in her own unreserved moments will now admit that what she always most desired was not merely self-culture, but a career of mingled thought and action, such as she finally found. She who, at the age of thirteen, met young scholars returned from Europe with enthusiastic vindications of American society against their attacks; she who, a few years after, read with delight all Jefferson's correspondence, was not framed by nature for a mystic, a dreamer, or a book-worm. She longed,
