Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[288] one of the very best critical essays yet written in America. Sir James was a peculiarly good subject to test her powers, because his temperament was wholly alien from hers. He stood to her in a clear light, as the man who by the consent of all contemporaries was best equipped for great deeds, yet never accomplished them; who must be judged by his results as against his promise; omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset. This has often since been pointed out, but no one stated it so early, or at least so clearly as Margaret Fuller. I know nobody else in American literature who could have handled the theme so well; Lowell would not have done the work so simply, or Whipple so profoundly, while Emerson would not have done it at all. If any reader of this book wishes to be satisfied that Margaret Fuller had her own place and a very high place among American prose-writers, they may turn to that essay.

There were two points in which no one exceeded her at the time and place in which she lived. First, she excelled in “lyric glimpses,” or the power of putting a high thought into a sentence. If few of her sentences have passed into the common repertory of quotation, that is not a final test. The greatest poet is not necessarily the most quoted or quotable poet. Pope fills twenty-four pages in Bartlett's “Dictionary of Quotations,” Moore eight, Burns but six, Keats but two, and the Brownings taken together less than half a