Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[126] sphere also. Her “Martyr age in the United States” will always remain the most dramatic picture of the whole period she depicted. The difficulty is that it is not only dramatic but slightly melodramatic; there is a theatrical tinge in it all; every man she describes is faultless, every woman a queen; and even those who, like myself, knew and reverenced these heroes and heroines, must admit this tone of excess. It was the same with her larger book. She saw the sin which was nearest, and painted it; but she saw little else. Now that slavery is abolished “Society in America” is obsolete; while De Tocqueville's work, written earlier, is still a classic, and is frequently cited in regard to the questions that are before us to-day.

All this prepares us for Miss Martineau's curious and — as the facts prove — utterly unfair criticisms upon Margaret Fuller's conversations. She thus describes them:--

The difference between us was that while she was living and moving in an ideal world, talking in private and discoursing in public about the most fanciful and shallow conceits which the Transcendentalists of Boston took for philosophy, she looked down upon persons who acted instead of talking finely, and devoted their fortunes, their peace, their repose, and their very lives to the preservation of the principles of the republic. While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils sat ‘gorgeously dressed,’ talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth