ions of her that remain, and not
memories. As she survives in tradition, she seems to have been a
person of inordinate vanity, who gave lectures in drawing-rooms and
called them "conversations," uttered a commonplace with the authority
of an oracle, and sentimentalized over art, poetry, or religion, while
she seemed to herself, and apparently to others, to be talking
philosophy. She took herself in all seriousness as a genius, ran a
dazzling career of a dozen years or so in Cambridge and Boston, and
then her light seems to have gone out. She came to the surface, with
other newness, in the Transcendental era; she was the priestess of its
mysteries; when that movement ebbed away, her day was over. This is
the impression one would gather, if he had only current oral
traditions of Margaret Fuller.

If with this impression, wishing to get a first-hand knowledge of his
subject, a student were to read the "Works of Margaret Fuller":--"Life
Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth
Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"--he would be prepared to find
eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances,
attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however,
find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply
a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English
style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in the
simplest manner and generally an idea which approves itself to the
common-sense of the reader. There is no brilliancy, no ornament,
little imagination, and not a least glimmer of wit. The absence of wit
is remarkable, since in conversation, wit was a quality for which
Margaret was both admired and feared. But as a writer, Margaret was a
little prosaic,--even her poetry inclined to be prosaic,--but she is
earnest, noble, temperate, and reasonable. The reader will be
convinced that there was more in the woman than popular tradition
recognizes.

One is confirmed in the conviction that the legend does her less than
justice when he knows the names and the quality of her friends. No
woman ever had better or more loyal friends than Margaret Fuller.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing
were among them and compiled her "Memoirs," evidently as a labor of
love. George William Curtis knew her personally, and called her "a
scholar, a critic, a thinker, a queen of conversation, above all, a
person of d