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304 very different. The complaint is constantly made that all her attainments and her self-culture did not bring her happiness. It is asking a great deal of any single woman to be positively happy in the presence of tormenting ill-health, poverty, and a self-sacrificing habit that keeps her always on the strain. It is even something to ask of a person, under such circumstances, that she should be habitually cheerful and hopeful. That this last was the predominant tone of Margaret Fuller’s daily life is proved by all her more familiar letters and by the general testimony of those who knew her best. No doubt, in her diaries, there are passages which record depression and sometimes almost morbid periods of self-inspection and self-reproach. That is what diaries are made for; they exist in order that imaginative and passionate natures may relieve themselves by expressing these moods, and may then forget them and proceed. The trouble comes when sympathetic biographers elevate these heights and depths into too great importance and find the table-lands of life uninteresting. There never was a year of Margaret Fuller’s life, after her precocious maturity, when the greater part of it was not given to daily, practical, commonsense labor, and this usually for other people.

All periods have their fashions. It does not mar our impression of the admirable capacity and self-devotion of Abigail Adams that she signed her early letters to her husband, John Adams, as “Portia.” It was the fashion of the time; and