Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/235

Rh necessity of reviewing every book while fresh, no matter though the calm reflection of many days may be needed to do it justice. Horace Greeley, a born gladiator, whose words came swift and hard as blows, records his own impatience at her too cautious habits. If an author’s case was pressing, he thought she should sit up an hour later that night and give him the finishing stroke; and the papers that brought her most criticism were those in which she yielded to these importunities, against her own better judgment.

The editorial “we” brings its temptations alike to women and men; and sometimes her very utterances of deprecation were ill-expressed and taken for new assertion of herself. When she denied to Lowell the genuine poetic gift and said that she must assert this “although to the grief of many friends and the disgust of more,” it was unquestionably meant as a bit of sincere humility, and she must have been amazed to find it taken as a phrase of conceit. But she kept higher laws than she broke. In that epoch of strife which I so well remember, that storm-and-stress period, that Sturm-und-Drangzeit, she held the critical sway of the most powerful American journal with unimpaired dignity and courage. By comparing a single page of her collected works with any page, taken almost at random, of Edgar Poe’s, we see the difference more clearly than it can be expressed in words. On this we have the distinct testimony of the most mercilessly honest of all critics, Horace Greeley: —