dangerous; and even Mrs. Farrar records in her “Recollections” the pious but extraordinary suspicion that Harriet Martineau’s final materialism was due to her early study of Kant. Margaret Fuller wrote at twenty-three, “I have with me those works of Goethe which I have not read and am now perusing, ‘Kunst und Alterthum’ and ‘Campagne in Frankreich.’ I still prefer reading Goethe to anybody, and, as I proceed, find more and more to learn.”[1]
She read also at this time Uhland, Novalis, Tieck, and some volumes of Richter. She dipped a good deal into theology and read Eichhorn and Jahn in the original. She was considering what were then called “the evidences of Christianity,” and wrote to Dr. Hedge that she had doubted the providence of God, but not the immortality of the soul. During the few years following she studied architecture, being moved to it by what she had read in Goethe; she also read Herschel’s “Astronomy,” recommended to her by Professor Farrar; read in Schiller, Heine, Alfieri, Bacon, Madame de Staël, Wordsworth, and Southey; with “Sartor Resartus” and some of Carlyle’s shorter essays; besides a good deal of European and American history, including all Jefferson’s letters. Mr. Emerson says justly that her reading at Groton was at a rate like Gibbon’s.
All this continuous study was not the easy amusement of a young lady of leisure; but it was
- ↑ MS. letter to Dr. Hedge, July 4, 1833.
