first sight, while there have been few women — I at least have never known any woman — who left behind an affection so deep and strong. It is now thirty years since her death, and there is scarcely a friend of hers who does not speak of her with as warm a devotion as if she had died yesterday.
If Margaret Fuller was strict and unflinching in her judgments of other people, it was because she was so, above all, in dealing with herself. This is seen on every page of her diaries, which record the very heights and depths of a nature as yet uncontrolled and passionately aspiring. Feeling her own powers and capacities, she also recognized her limitations; but her statements of these two sides of the question might be wholly detached, and so gave the appearance of more moodiness than really existed. At any rate, moody or not, they were sincere. A lady once said to me of the Fuller family: “Their only peculiarity was that they said openly about themselves the good and bad things which we commonly suppress about ourselves and express only about other people.” This was true, as has been said, about the elder Fullers, even in public; it was true of Margaret Fuller in her diaries. She was an acute analyst of character, and again and again in her various diaries we come upon sketches delineating the traits of each person in the room. Some of these are printed in the “Dial.”[1] She always includes herself, and is usually more un-
- ↑ Dial, i. 136, etc.
