under the
middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair
hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her
appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme
plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her
eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice,--all repelled; and I
said to myself, 'We shall never get far.' It is to be said
that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most
persons, including those who became afterwards her best
friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in
the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her
manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and
slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her
fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."

In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston,
continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she
published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fraeulein Guenerode and Bettine
von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling
of the spirit in each soul,--an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.

Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment
which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
found [there]