Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/318

300 Many men, including some of the most gifted in our American community, have since tried their hands on Margaret Fuller’s head; and they have given such varying results as their point of observation might justify. With ready recognition of my own inferiority to them as respects personal knowledge, I find myself, after long and patient study of her writings, forming conclusions sometimes different from theirs. I do not think that Mr. Emerson, with his cool and tranquil temperament, always did quite justice to the ardent nature that flung itself against him; and it seems to me that her other biographers have sometimes been too much influenced by their own point of contact with her to see that the self-culture which brought her to them was by no means the whole of her aim. Let me, therefore, consider her character rather more minutely.

It is to be remembered, in the first place, that her life was always saddened by the feeling that she had been defrauded of her childhood by too forced a precocity and deprived of her rightful health through mismanagement. Under this disadvantage she led thenceforward a life of constant checking and restriction, not as to pleasures, for which she rarely sighs in her diaries, but as to doing her appointed work in the world and employing the talents given her. Rising in the morning, as Emerson says of all of us, “with an appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake,” she soon finds herself restricted as to food