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Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harry R. Warfel
Harry R. Warfel*
Affiliation:
Bucknell University
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Extract

Yesterday Margaret Fuller returned home after making us a visit of three weeks,“ Emerson noted in his Journal on August 12, 1836. To this brief statement of fact he added these few words of characterization: ”A very accomplished and very intelligent person.“ She had sought for two years to make Emerson's acquaintance. On October 6, 1834, she had written that the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge

spoke with due admiration of the Rev. W. Emerson, that only clergyman of all possible clergymen, who eludes my acquaintance. Mais n'imparte. I keep his image bright before my mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1935 , pp. 576 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (eds.), Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York, 1908–1914), iv, 79–80.

2 MS. Works of S. M. F. Ossoli, 5 vols., i, 17, preserved in the Harvard College Library.—Permission to quote from these MS. volumes has been given graciously by Mrs. Gertrude Fuller Nichols.

3 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884), p. 64.

4 Ibid., p. 53.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1852), i, 201.

6 Ibid., i, 201.

7 Ibid., i, 1291.

8 Journals, iv, 333 (October 20, 1837).

9 Memoirs, i, 112.

10 Ibid., i, 153.

11 Higginson, p. 90.

12 Mrs. Caroline H. Dall, Margaret and Her Friends (Boston, 1895), p. 13.

13 Memoirs, i, 202.

14 Ibid., i, 202–203.

15 Journals, iv, 405.

16 Emerson's Works (Centenary edition), iv, 260–270.

17 Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm (New York, 1900), pp. 7–8.

18 MS. letter, dated Boston, September 21, 1836, preserved in the Boston Public Library.

19 MS. Works of S. M. F. Ossoli, i, 403–405; the date of the entry is December 5, 1836.

20 Higginson, pp. 68–69, letter of April 11, 1837.

21 Journals, iv, 225.

22 Arthur B. Fuller (ed.), Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1874), p. 351.

23 Journals, iv, 225 (May 4, 1837).

24 Woman, p. 351.

25 MS. letter, dated Groton, May 30, 1837, preserved in the Boston Public Library. Emerson regularly endorsed every letter he received.

26 Memoirs, i, 194–195.

27 Brook Farm, p. 9.

28 Higginson, p. 80.

29 MS. letter, dated June 27, 1837, preserved in the Boston Public Library.

30 Journals, iv, 256–257.

31 Memoirs, i, 237.

32 MS. letter, dated Providence, August 14, 1837, preserved in the Boston Public Library.

33 Ibid.

34 MS. Works of S. M. F. Ossoli, i, 89; the letter is dated September 21, 1838.

35 Higginson, pp. 89–91.

36 Journals, iv, 465 (June 8, 1838). Emerson at this time was attempting to determine his own critical standards in the judgment of works of art. Margaret's excessively romantic interpretations taught him the need for “perfect equilibrium of mind.”

37 Memoirs, i, 267–268.

38 Ibid., i, 268.

39 Ibid., i, 268.

40 Journals, v, 292 (October 21, 1839).

41 Ibid., v, 325.

42 Memoirs, i, 230. Cf. MS. letter to Caroline Sturgis, dated November 25, 1839, preserved in the Boston Public Library, in which Margaret sent a poem and some leaves from her Journal: “I hesitated about sending you any papers now because you are busy writing, but then I reflected that you would not wish your mind strained up to your subject all day, but might like some grove of private life into which you might step aside to refresh yourself from the broad highway of philosophy.”

43 Higginson, p. 147.

44 Ibid., pp. 130 ff.

45 Ibid., pp. 155–156.

46 Ibid., 157.

47 James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887), i, 276. Cf. MS. letter dated Groton, January 7, 1839, preserved in the Boston Public Library, in which she rebuked Emerson in humorous terms for adjourning a lecture because he had lost a night's rest as a result of a slight indisposition: “Imagine my indignation: lost a night's rest! as if an intellectual person ever had a night's rest.” See, also, in the same place an undated letter in which she comments upon a criticism offered upon his Essays: “There is something obviously wrong in this attempt to measure one another, or one another's act.”—Cf. also Memoirs, i, 240–241, in a letter to Emerson, dated December, 1842, anent her unwillingness to send Dante's Vita Nuova in the original Italian to him: “It has never seemed to me you entered enough into the genius of the Italian to apprehend the mind, which has seemed so great to me, and a star unlike, if not higher than all others in our sky.”

48 Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Art Literature, and the Drama (Boston, 1874), p. 304.

49 Ibid., pp. 195–196.

50 Higginson, p. 165.

51 MS. Works of S. M. F. Ossoli, ii, 257, 551, 643, 657, and 663–665. For example, “During the two months that Mr. E. will lecture here I can always send by him” (pp. 663–665).

52 Higginson, pp. 166–167.

53 Ibid., p. 171.

54 Memoirs, i, 291. The letter is dated February 23, 1840.

55 Cabot, i, 367–369.

56 The letter is preserved in the Boston Public Library. The endorsement, as usual, is in Emerson's hand.

57 Journals, vi, 87.

58 Ibid., vi, 97.

59 Emerson's Works (Centenary edition), ii, 208, in “Friendship.”

60 Cabot, ii, 67.

61 Ibid., ii, 65.

62 Ibid., ii, 67.

63 Ibid., ii, 82–83.

64 Ibid., ii, 95–97.

65 Ibid., ii, 27–28.

66 MS. letter, dated Feb.? July? 5, 1840, preserved in the Boston Public Library. This letter is of interest because it reveals the fact that another young lady sought out Emerson for counsel in a private matter somewhat similar in nature to Margaret's problem.—Cf. Memoirs, i, 214: “She never confounded relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling any.”

67 Brook Farm, p. 9.

68 Hawthorne's Works (Riverside edition), ix, 252, 308.

69 Cf. Ibid., ix, 334: Mr. Emerson “spoke of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last meeting.” Cf. also Memoirs, i, 215, where Emerson wrote: “The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years … never saw her without surprise at her new powers.”

70 Journals, vi, 369 (March, 1843).

71 Ibid., vi, 134 (November, 1841).

72 MS. Works of S. M. F. Ossoli, iii, 165.

73 Ibid., iii, 169.

74 Ibid., iii, 175–177.

75 Ibid., i, 459.

76 Denton J. Snider, A Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (St. Louis, 1921), p. 333.