‘the possible’ in myself. You would, perhaps, have an impression of levity, of want of tenderness, from her superficial manner. The mean hindrances of life, the mistakes, the tedium, which eat into your soul, and will take no form to you but the tragic, she takes up with her defying wit and sets them down in comic groups and they cease to be ‘respectabilities.’ You feel at first as if this included ridicule or disregard of the sufferings they bring to you; but not so. Her heart is helpfully sympathizing with all striving souls. And she has overcome so much extreme physical and mental pain, and such disappointments of external fortune, that she has a right to play as she will with these arrows of fate. She is a high-minded and generous servant of Duty, and a Christian (not a traditional Christian, not made one by authority) in her idea of life. But this is all catalogue; you cannot write down Genius, and I write it more because I am thinking about her than from any hope of doing her justice. Only her presence can give you the meaning of the name Margaret Fuller, and this not once or twice, but as various occasions bring out the many sides. And her power of bringing out Mr. Emerson has doubled my enjoyment of that blessing to be in one house and room with him.”[1]
In a fragment of diary, without date, all too short, preserved among the Fuller papers, we have a glimpse at these Concord interviews; but not at the very outset; rather, after time had mellowed the companionship and made it less exciting, but more wholly unconscious. In describ-
- ↑ MS.
