Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[206] questions. To investigate these subjects on the practical side she had two coadjutors besides Horace Greeley ;--her early fellow-student, Lydia Maria Child, then a resident of New York, and also a later and yet closer friend, William Henry Channing. This remarkable man, whose gifts and services have in some degree passed from the knowledge of the younger generation of Americans, through his long residence in England, was then the most ardent of social reformers, the loftiest among idealists, and — after Wendell Phillips — the most eloquent of orators upon the antislavery platform. But he was also the most devoted of city missionaries, in New York and elsewhere; and, under his guidance, Margaret Fuller could penetrate the very recesses of the Five Points, then the last refuge of poverty and crime. He had been one of her earliest colaborers on the “Dial;” he was the intimate friend of Horace Greeley; and his companionship thus bridged for her the interval between the old life and the new. He moreover preached on Sunday to a small congregation of cultivated reformers; and here she found the needed outlet for the religious element in her nature, always profound, sometimes mystical, but now taking a most healthful and active shape. It is a sign of her changed life when she keeps her New Year's vigils, not in poetic reveries, as at Boston and Brook Farm, but in writing such a note as the following to Mr. Channing: