when Margaret Fuller afterwards tried to write out her imaginative and mystical side under the name of “Leila,” it belonged to that period also; a period when German romance was just beginning to be translated, and Oriental poetry to be read. These were her dreams, her idealities; but when it was a question how to provide schoolbooks and an overcoat for her little brother, no mother of ten children ever set about the business with less of haziness or indefiniteness of mind. If I have seemed in this book to bring my heroine down from the clouds a little; it is simply because I have used the materials at my command, and have tried to paint her as she was; a being not fed on nectar and ambrosia, after all, but on human nature’s daily food.
It may be asked why, with this daily and noble self-devotion she was not universally beloved. It can be very briefly told: she wanted tact. As some essentially selfish persons go through the world winning all hearts by merely possessing that quality, so others are always underrated for want of it. There is a story told of her, that at a party given expressly for her in Cambridge she took a piece of cake from a plate offered, and then impulsively replaced it with the remark, “I fear there will not be enough to go round,” thereby giving more offense than if she had personally appropriated the whole plateful. It was this simple and not always judicious honesty of purpose which accounted for her frequent failure to attract at
