ating war, sometimes rises on
the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the
prescriptions of society. But what these want in personality
they possess in number, in recurrency, in invulnerability. The
spirit of man, an agent indeed of curious power and boundless
resource, but trembling with sensibilities, tender and
irritable, goes out against the inexorable conditions of
destiny, the lifeless forces of nature, or the ferocious
cruelty of the multitude, and long before the hands are weary
or the invention exhausted, the heart may be broken in the
warfare."

N.A. REVIEW, Jan., 1817, article "_Dichtung und Wahrheit_."

II.

CAMBRIDGE

* * * * *

The difficulty which we all feel in describing our past intercourse
and friendship with Margaret Fuller, is, that the intercourse was so
intimate, and the friendship so personal, that it is like making a
confession to the public of our most interior selves. For this noble
person, by her keen insight and her generous interest, entered into
the depth of every soul with which she stood in any real relation.
To print one of her letters, is like giving an extract from our own
private journal. To relate what she was to us, is to tell how she
discerned elements of worth and beauty where others could only have
seen what was common-place and poor; it is to say what high hopes,
what generous assurance, what a pure ambition, she entertained on our
behalf,--a hope and confidence which may well be felt as a rebuke to
our low attainments and poor accomplishments.

Nevertheless, it seems due to this great soul that those of us who
have been blessed and benefited by her friendship should be willing
to say what she has done for us,--undeterred by the thought that to
reveal her is to expose ourselves.

My acquaintance with Sarah Margaret Fuller began in 1829. We both
lived in Cambridge, and from that time until she went to Groton to
reside, in 1833, I saw her, or heard from her, almost every day. There
was a family connection, and we called each other cousin.[A] During
this period, her intellect was intensely active. With what eagerness
did she seek for knowledge! What fire, what exuberance, what reach,
grasp, overflow of thought, shone in her conversation! She needed a
friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express the ideas
which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted me for
this friend, a