express not merely loving, but living; they express the sweet southern ecstasy at the mere gift of existence." So wrote Margaret, and therein expressed what her biographers cannot too much emphasize, namely, her passion for life-life full, free, untrammelled; life of mind and heart; life for every faculty, every instinctive craving of her nature. Emerson and Carlyle both speak of her "mountain Me," but if she thought herself head and shoulders above the ordinary woman, at least it was because she found herself there, crowned queen in virtue of her innate "queenhood," and not from any vulgar selfconceit; still less on account of any lack of insight into or sympathy for her fellow-humans. We of to-day have much the same idea of her that was in the mind of the general public of her own time, viz., that of a "blue-stocking," a somewhat stern, sarcastic, and disagreeable be ing; who no doubt did good work as a pioneer in the great Woman-Cause (of the name of which we are getting very tired), but who, on the whole, was not one whom we should ever take to our hearts, or wish to know in the intimacy of daily life. That this personality is very vivid, many-sided, and lovable withal, must, however, become a conviction with us when we find that she was the valued friend of Emerson, Dr. Channing, Dr. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Martineau, etc., to say nothing of the crowd of people of all classes, ages, and professions who came to her and counted it the greatest privilege of their lives to call Margaret Fuller "friend." She once remarked, "I have more than one hundred correspondents." We who have access to her private letters, her journal, her autobiography, have no need to join outsiders in a hasty and uncomprehending condemnation. To most, if not all, of those who became her life-long friends the first impression was unpleasant. was just in proportion as they knew, that they admired and loved her. And It we may step with these inside the magic circle and feel, if but for a few minutes, the spell of her grand personality. In trying to do this we are met at the outset by a singular difficulty. Madame Récamier, Madame de Staël, Bettina von Arnheim, Rahel Levin, show their best selves to us in their books or their letters. It is not so with Margaret. She cried, "After all, this writing is mighty dead. Oh! for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything-not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to clear the mind!" Her writings, clear as they are, in style concise, playful, or poetic, rich in thought and containing many gems of expression and insight, are still to a certain extent disappointing. One feels in reading them that her best finds no medium in pens, ink, and paper. It is like looking at the portrait on the titlepage of one of her works. There is the strength-and the picture is true so far as it goes; but the rich, brown hair and light complexion of the living head are a more or less intense shade of grey; and under the heavy eyelids one catches scarce a glimpse of eyes that, in speaking, appeared swimming "with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joy and superabundant life." It was when you met Margaret face to face, when her eye flashed into yours, when her thought leapt warm from heart and lips, that her face and figure showed to advantage, and her speech rose to glorious eloquence. Then she was sibyl, prophetess; and reached the truest expression of herself. Hungry and thirsty for life, she was at war with everything that would deprive herself or others of it. At war. therefore, with all falsehoods and shams, with all mere conventions, with cramping circumstances, with pettiness in every shape. The ideal of her childhood-the will, the resolve of man as expressed in the Roman, and its conquering force-was the ideal of her womanhood; and this, equally in both periods, lived alongside an intense and passionate love of beauty which Greek. But it is necessary to say something of her studies before plunging with her into the full sea of American society. was nothing if not the time she was seventeen she was Mr. Fuller believed in forcing a child's intellect to its utmost possibility of tension. He taught Margaret himself, and we have a picture of her at the age of six waiting in a great state of nervousness for him to come home from his office that she might repeat her lessons to him, those being chiefly Latin, history, and English grammar. At seven years she has been reading Virgil, and has terrible nightmares of trees dripping with blood, of horses trampling over her, of vague, horrible figures approaching to seize her the moment she rests her tired little head on the pillow. She is kept up late at night, and works all day at tasks far beyond her years; and who but a very severe teacher could require of a young child attention to such rules as these?- | can You must not speak unless you make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought unless you can give a reason for it, if required; must not make a statement unless sure of all particulars. Such words as but, if, unless, it may be so, I am mistaken, were never allowed. In view of this early training, it is no wonder that the thoughts of the woman should frequently be expressed in a didactic manner! Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport, near Boston, in 1810, and lived there (with the exception of about two years spent at boarding-school) until 1833. Naturally the academical advantages of such a neighborhood were put to their full use, and here also she made many acquaintances, at least three of whom became life friends, viz., Dr. Hedge, Dr. Channing, and James Freeman Clarke. At sixteen she read with ease in Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish. Then she began, with Mr. Clarke, to study German, and "obtained," he said, "an easy command of the language in three months." By VOL. XI. 535 LIVING AGE. In truth lies life; therefore truth at all hazards, was her cry. Truth she would have even in the simplest anecdote or smallest assertion, and she was unsparing towards pretension and hypocrisy. The keenness of her sarcasm toned down as her sympathies widened and her affections were developed, but, unfortunately, the reputation for it was longer-lived, and contributed largely to the general misunderstanding of her character. The part of her life wherein she most fully delivered her message to her generation was that between the years 1838-1846. During the first six of these years she held Conversation Classes in Boston. They were for ladies of the socalled educated classes, whose intellectual life, Margaret felt, was in danger of declining, in spite of the fact that in those (to us) early days girls were taught at schools everything that boys learnt. To help such to make the best use of life; to make an opportunity for them and for herself to gain in vigor by interchange of thought; to teach them how to reproduce their knowledge and make use of it; to give them an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects; to speak out the thoughts that burned within her for utterance-here was earnest motive enough for inaugurating what was for Boston a new departure. She chose as her first subject an early favorite Greek mythology. "Every thought of which man is susceptible is intimated there," she said; and she found abundant material for lectures | and grand scope for her powers. It was a subject that necessitated dealing with the very principles of life and its conduct. In opening the eyes of her fellow-women to what was noblest in Greek life and Greek myths, she enabled them to see what is noblest in all national and individual life, and did not a little towards widening the boundaries fixed by prejudice and custom, and deepening the sense of what is essentially lovely. Those were enchanted evenings! Occasionally a meeting was thrown open to both sexes, and what her powers of conversation were we can have little idea, since it was asserted that "even Emerson served only to draw them out." The whole assembly would presently sit silent, drinking in her words "with glistening eyes and hearts melted into one love." Coming from these conversations she affirmed that "it is good to live!" Of the details of her life; of her long teaching in Mr. Alcott's school, and after in Rhode Island; of her summer on the lakes, her editorship of the Dial, her work for the New York Tribune; of her journey to Europe, residence in Italy, marriage with the Marchese d'Ossoli, and birth of their child; of the journey home in 1850, ending in the terrible tragedy of shipwreck within sight of land-of all this it is not the province of this paper to speak. The story of her life is accessible to all.1 There, in the midst of a select but large circle, "she seemed," Emerson said, "like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been referred." She saw at once when any one "belonged" to her, and "never rested until she came into possession of her property." She said, and truly, “great and fatal errors (so far as this life is concerned) could not destroy my friendship for one in whom I am sure of the kernel of nobleness." Her own intellectual needs were so wide, her own failings so humbly admitted, her own heart so true, her interests as varied as intense-she was, withal, so experienced in suffering, and had such a capacity for joy, that she drew to her and responded to the minds and hearts of men and women of totally opposite temperaments. She called all her friends by their Christian names - presumably from some feeling of want of individuality in the other-and had a rare power over them so that they suppressed in her presence all in them that was commonplace. Love and friendship were, with her, entirely independent of sex. “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” she wrote. To many her friendships seem exaggerated, extravagant, unnatural even. She gave and required so much that Dr. Channing, seeing her exactions-not only conscious, on their time, but unconscious, on their whole nature-confesses that he tried to hold aloof, not being willing to be caught up and carried along in the whirlwind. That he afterwards became, not only an admiring friend, but a peculiarly sympathetic one, says much for the innate nobleness by which she fought down such antipathetic feelings. Yet in all her friendships, intense as they were, she ever kept her own independence of thought and life. In spite of her exactions, sue said truly, "My affec But the briefest sketch of Margaret were incomplete without some mention of her capacity for friendship, which we take to be as much a natural gift as that of Michael Angelo for painting pictures-or of Robert Browning for writing poems. It were, perhaps, hardly too much to say that she fulfilled the whole of the conditions Emerson laid down in his essay 2 as necessary to the perfection of the rela tionship. This phase of her is best studied dur- tion is strong admiration, not the necesing her residence in New York. Margaret Fuller, by Julia Ward Howe. 2 "Friendship"-First series. sity of giving or receiving assistance or sympathy." And again, referring to Emerson: "It is his beautiful presence There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever that I prize far more than our inter- | Emerson's words form the best concourse." Often during her life she suf- clusion:fered from the necessary isolation this brought her. Dependence on others is a great sweetener of life. I can stand alone, she felt. Every strong soul must learn that lesson, no doubt, but not to all is it a primary necessity, and Margaret paid for it in a chill isolation of feeling which came over her at times, and caused her to write: There comes a consciousness that I have no real hold on life, no real permanent connection with any soul. I seem a wandering intelligence driven from spot to spot, that I may learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge. This thought envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. But it did not prevent her feeling a virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves or of life.' As for her more public work, her criticisms on art and literature, her contributions to the "Woman Question," we can here scarcely give a glimpse of their value and scope. Her enthusiasms were intense, but without idolatry. She saw the beauty of men and things so clearly that she could afford to take notice of their faults. great tenderness and deep responsive finest in the English language. Her essay on Goethe is one of the sympathy; did not hinder her appreciation of friendship, or incapacitate her for drawing thence most of the sweetness of her life. Of this special time of social intercourse, she said it gave her "an opportunity of knowing and serving many lovely characters, and I cannot see that there is anything else for me to do on earth." To get at the secret of her wonderful influence, we turn to her own farewell address to her class of girls in the Rhode Island school: I thanked them for the moral beauty of their conduct,, bore witness that an appeal to conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the faith thus confirmed that young persons can be best guided by addressing their highest nature. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my never having cajoled or caressed them into good. All my influence over them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their faults. I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength. I had offered to them always the loftiest motives, and had made every other end subservient to that of spiritual growth.' To the account of this side of her life, 1 These italics are not in the original. She introduces a book of Robert Browning's, and says:— ... Byron could only paint women as they were to him. Browning can show what they are in themselves. . . Of Browning's delicate sheaths of meaning within meaning, which must be opened slowly, petal by petal, as we seek the heart of a flower, and the spirit-like distant breathings of his lute, familiar with the secrets of shores distant and enchanted-a sense can only be gained by reading him a great deal; and we wish "Bells and Pomegranates" might be brought within the reach of all who have time and soul to wait and listen for such! Few questions that came before the American public were left without notice from her, and the book by which she is best known is "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." To show Margaret Fuller's attitude to this question, four short quotations must suffice: I have aimed to show that no age was left entirely without a witness of the equality of the sexes in function, duty, and hope. If you ask me what offices women may fill, I reply-any. I do not care what "Uses of Great Men." case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will. I do not doubt there are some women well-fitted for such office, and, if so, I should be as glad to see them in it as to welcome the Maid of Saragossa, or the Maid of Missolonghi, or the Suliote heroine, or Emily Plater. That (a woman's) hand may be given with dignity, she must be able to stand alone. and, as usually happens to a stranger, noted a hundred things about the town which had never struck me as a resident. The last time I was in the Law Courts was in the Parnell Commission days. A number of Irish members had been brought over from Ireland as prisoners to give evidence. We spent our nights in Holloway Gaol, and our days in or about the precincts of the New Law Courts-a building which always reminds me of M. Jules Lemaître's Express your views, men, of what you seek in women; thus best do you give witty description of the late M. Renan's them laws. Learn, women, what you should demand of men; thus only can they become themselves. Fellow-pilgrims and help-meets are ye, Apollo and Diana, twins of heavenly birth, both beneficent and both armed. Man, fear not to yield to woman's hand both the quiver and the lyre; for if her urn be filled with light, she will use both to the glory of God. There is but one doctrine for ye both, and that is the doctrine of the Soul. Be your highest self, follow your star, and humanity will have no quarrel with you. One is painfully struck by the inadequacy of language to paint this regal Margaret. Of her unselfishness, of the beauty of all her personal relations, of her patience in suffering, of her un conquerable hopefulness, nothing has been said. How convey what she was to those who knew her? Let Browning say what we cannot:One who never turned his back, but marched breast-forward; Never doubted clouds would break; Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph; Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight ELSIE RHODES. From The Contemporary Review. SOME REMINISCENCES BY WILLIAM O'BRIEN. I was obliged to spend three weeks lately about the London Law Courts, brain as "une cathédrale désaffectée" -a cathedral turned to the wrong uses; with its vast empty nave where you miss an altar, and those cloistral depths which might well be echoing with a mediæval chant instead of the unholy tales which are poured into the ears of the divorce judges in their dingy confessionals. Thanks to a hint from the three judges, we were allowed to roam where we pleased around the courts on parole until the rising of the court. It was probably the happiest time of their lives for the Irish warders who came over in charge of us. Their gold-banded caps were as familiar in the Strand as the helmets of Dr. Jim's Matabele police became later. If the court rose early, it was not an unusual thing to see a prisoner coming up to a policeman to inquire affectionately where he could find his warder. My own pleasantest recollection of the Parnell Commission is of a delightful old lady-whether she reigns still I know not-who was housekeeper, or one of the housekeepers, of the courts. She was a Tory of the quaintest old pattern, but, whatever the New Woman will think of her, hers was one of those minds in which politics has no chance against human nature. One of our privileges at the courts was to get in a daily dinner from a restaurant, and it was discussed-with what gusto only an old prisoner may know-in the housekeeper's room. I will never forget the beaming face with which the old lady introduced the daily chop and claret, or the delight-worthy of a mother at the bedside of a starving child-with which she saw us feasting |