learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great
talent at explanation.... But in truth I have not much to
say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find
that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet
learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have
done in life has been to form my character to a certain
consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth
with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look
at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was
worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on
talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact
and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in
conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts.
They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they
tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart
hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak
points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
when we come to write, and without suggestion from another
mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in
us.... Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better,
because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship
to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but
never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel
inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow within me, I
am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought
into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible
for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force
to be either a genius or a character. One should be either
private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood
is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At
hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle."

All these naive confessions were made, it must be remembered,
either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
fear of misinterpretation.

This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport,
Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
lover of flower-bulbs