expects it, the child believes it is already here. It is the beloved Son in whom both God and man will be well pleased. …
“Faith and hope are gradually transmuted into knowledge, but very slowly is this mass of matter leavened by the divine wisdom. Yet the third thought is gradually taking possession of us; when we have at last become thoroughly possessed by, we may in turn possess it.”[1]
This statement belongs upon the same plane with that made by Emerson in his essay on the “Over-Soul,” that “In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made to a third party, to a common nature;” but Margaret Fuller’s proposition is a somewhat different thing, and is even more suggestive. Scattered through her letters and journals everywhere there are passages of which this is an example; and it is such as these to which Emerson refers when he speaks of her “lyric glimpses.” But in her published writings she rarely attempted more than she felt herself able to state clearly; though her standard of clearness was not just that which now prevails.
Even in her printed essays, however, she suffered from an exuberance of mental activity, which she had not yet learned to control. Trained early to be methodical in her use of time, she had neither the leisure nor the health nor perhaps the impulse to be methodical in thought. In that teeming period when she lived, method was not
- ↑ MS. (W. H. C.)
