many. Mystic and transcendental as she was,
her writings teem with proof of original power, and are the expression
of a thoughtful and energetic, if also a wayward and undisciplined,
mind. One of the two compilers of these Memoirs (Emerson and W. H.
Channing) observes, that his first impression of her was that of a
'Yankee Corinna;' and such is not unlikely to be the last impression
of ordinary readers, ourselves among the number. In a letter, dated
1841, we find her saying: 'I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon
crust'--an apt illustration of her mental structure and tone of
sentiment, compounded of New Worldedness, as represented by Margaret
Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the
Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary
position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to
draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and
extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her remarkable life-history.

Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, in May
1810. Her father was a shrewd, practical, hard-headed lawyer, whose
love for his wife 'was the green spot on which he stood apart from the
commonplaces of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence.' That
wife is described as a fair and flower-like nature, bound by one law
with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. 'Of all persons whom
I have known, she had in her most of the angelic--of that spontaneous
love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which
restores the Golden Age.'[2] Mr Fuller, in undertaking the education
of his daughter, committed the common error of excessive
stimulation--thinking to gain time by forwarding the intellect as
early as possible. He was himself a scholar, and hoped to make her the
heir of all he knew, and of as much more as might be elsewhere
attained. He was a severe and exacting disciplinarian, and permanently
marred the nervous system of his child by the system he adopted of
requiring her to recite her tasks on his return home at night, which
was frequently very late. Hence a premature development of the brain,
which, while it made her a youthful prodigy by day--one such youthful
prodigy, it has been justly said, is often the pest of a whole
neighbourhood--rendered her the nightly victim of spectral illusions,
somnambulism, &c.; checked her growth; and eventually brought on
continual headaches, weakness, and various nervous