Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/159

Rh smoother individualities of the present day can best estimate what her task must have been.

Both the magazine and the literary club from which it sprang seem to have been a subject of correspondence among a circle of friends for several years before either took definite shape. Margaret Fuller writes to the Rev. F. H. Hedge, so early as July 4, 1833: —

“I should be very willing to join such a society as you speak of, and will ‘compose a piece,’ if you will give me a subject.”

This, however, was merely a social club, composed of ladies and gentlemen in Cambridge, and Dr. Hedge has no remembrance of any literary exercises connected with it. But during the winter of 1834-35 there was a good deal of discussion in respect to a possible magazine, and on March 5, 1835, — nearly two years after, — she writes to him, still from Groton: —

“Your periodical plan charms me; I think you will do good and, what is next best, gain favor. ‘Though I have been somewhat jostled in this working-day world, I have still a great partiality for the goddess who

I shall feel myself honored if I am deemed worthy of lending a hand, albeit I fear I am merely ‘Germanico,’ and not ‘transcendental.’ I go by fits and starts: there