Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[283] divines, but he was then thought to be more dangerous than any French novelist; and good Mrs. Farrar, as I have already indicated, traces the materialism of Miss Martineau's latter years partly to her early studies of this philosopher. “I have since thought,” Mrs. Farrar writes,

that her admiration of the philosophy of Kant may have been one of her first steps on that path which has conducted her to a disbelief in all revelation and the immortality of the soul — too melancholy a subject for me to dwell on here.

Recollections of Seventy years, p. 262.

If this feeling existed about Kant it was still stronger about Goethe. Even the genial Longfellow spoke of “that monstrous book, the ‘ Elective Affinities,’ ” although this story was written with a moral purpose, and would be far more leniently judged at the present day. Longfellow's friend Felton translated Menzel's “German Litature,” in which Goethe appears as a pretender and quite a secondary person. Yet Margaret Fuller, who has been lately censured by Professor Harris as not admiring the great German poet enough, was held up to censure in her day for admiring him too much. This ardent, slowly-tamed, and gradually-tempered feminine nature, yearning to be, to do, and to suffer, all at the same time, was supposed to model herself after the marble statue, Goethe. The charge was self-contradicting; and is worth naming only as being a part of that misconception which she, like all other would-be reformers, had to endure.