Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

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Chapter 13: business life in New York. (1844-1846.)

The transfer of Margaret Fuller, at the beginning of December, 1844, to what she called her “business life” in New York, made a distinct epoch in her career. After this her mental maturity began; at any rate, her Wanderjahre, in the German sense, as distinct from mere apprenticeship. She had come to be the housemate and literary coadjutor of the man who, among all Americans, then stood closest to the popular heart. The name of his journal was no misnomer; he was a Tribune of the People in the old Roman sense. His newspaper office was just at that time the working centre of much of the practical radicalism in the country; but he was also a person of ideal aims and tastes, and was perhaps the first conspicuous man in America, out of Boston, who publicly recognized in Emerson the greatest of our poets. He brought Margaret Fuller to New York, not only that she might put the literary criticism of the “Tribune” on a higher plane than any American newspaper occupied, but that she might discuss in a similar spirit all philanthropic