Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[135] eagerly read in the United States; and Carlyle found here his first responsive audience. There was a similar welcome afforded in America to Cousin and his eclectics, then so powerful in France; the same to Goethe, Herder, Jean Paul, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Jacobi, and Hegel. All these were read eagerly by the most cultivated classes in the United States, and helped, here as in Europe, to form the epoch. Margaret Fuller, so early as October 6, 1834, wrote in one of her unpublished letters,¹ “our master, Goethe;” and Emerson writes to Carlyle (April 21, 1840), “I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five.” Carlyle-Emerson correspondence, i. 285. To have read fifty-five volumes of Goethe was a liberal education.

Add to this, that Margaret Fuller, like Emerson, had what is still the basis of all literary training in the literature of Greece and Rome — a literature whose merit it is that it puts all its possessors on a level; so that if a child were reared in Alaska and had Aeschylus and Horace at his fingers' ends, he would have a better preparation for literary work, so far as the mere form goes, than if he had lived in Paris and read only Balzac. Still again, the vast stores of oriental literature were just being thrown open; and the “Dial” was, perhaps, the first literary journal to place what it called the “Ethnical Scriptures” in the light now