with me. It was the last time, and they were pleasant. They love me and fancy I am good and wise. Oh that it gave me more pleasure to do a little good, and give a little happiness. But there is no modesty or moderation in me.”[1]
These extracts are quite inconsistent, I think, with the charge most commonly made against Margaret Fuller, — that of vanity and undue self-absorption. It must always be remembered that some previous descriptions of her have been in a manner warped by the fact that they proceeded from the most gifted and intellectual persons whom she knew; all these persons being almost always men whom she met under a certain amount of intellectual excitement, to whom she showed her brightest aspirations, her deepest solicitudes. It was in the very nature of such a description that the every-day aspects should be left out; that we should see chiefly the seeress, the dreamer, the student. She writes reproachfully to a cultivated friend after an interview, “You seemed to consider me as some tête exaltée, at the hour when I was making bitter sacrifices to duty.” Could a memoir have been made up out of her letters to her mother, full of suggestions about flower bulbs, plans as to the larder, and visions of a renovated silk dress; or could we have before us a long series of the sensible, warm-hearted, motherly letters she wrote every week to her absent younger brothers, the whole effect produced would have been
- ↑ MS. Diary, 1844.
