is something distressing about
their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries.
They worry and contort and introspect. They rave and dream. They peep
and theorize. They cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind
comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Emerson, and Emerson Margaret
Fuller. It is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a nightmare,
in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are all
unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside.
It is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering
should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable.
All that intelligence could do toward solving problems for his friends
Emerson did. But there are situations in life in which the intelligence
is helpless, and in which something else, something perhaps possessed by
a ploughboy, is more divine than Plato.

If it were not pathetic, there would be something cruel--indeed there is
something cruel--in Emerson's incapacity to deal with Margaret Fuller.
He wrote to her on October 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your
frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it
unwritten. I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any
conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all
persons my Genius warns me away."

The letter proceeds with unimpeachable emptiness and integrity in the
same strain. In 1841 he writes in his diary: "Strange, cold-warm,
attractive-repelling conversation with Margaret, whom I always admire,
most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom I freeze
and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest."

Human sentiment was known to Emerson mainly in the form of pain. His
nature shunned it; he cast it off as quickly as possible. There is a
word or two in the essay on Love which seems to show that the inner and
diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but not for long, been shot
with blood: he recalls only the pain of it. His relations with Margaret
Fuller seem never normal, though they lasted for years. This brilliant
woman was in distress. She was asking for bread, and he was giving her a
stone, and neither of them was conscious of what was passing. This is
pitiful. It makes us clutch about us to catch hold, if we somehow may,
of the hand of a man.

There was manliness in Horace Greeley, under whom Miss Fuller worked on
the New York