Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/136

Rh Miss Sedgwick. Among the writers of the other sex, whose theories point to the same end, she speaks of Swedenborg, Fourier, and Goethe. The first-named comes to this through his mystical appreciation of spiritual life; the second, by his systematic distribution of gifts and opportunities according to the principles of ideal justice. The world-wise Goethe everywhere recognises the presence and significance of the feminine principle; and, after treating with tenderness and reverence its frailest, as well as its finest impersonations, lays the seal of all attraction in the lap of the "eternal womanly."

Nearer at hand, and in the intimacy of personal intercourse, Margaret found a noble friend to her cause.

“The late Dr. Channing, whose enlarged and religious nature shared every onward impulse of his time, though his thoughts followed his wishes with a deliberative caution which belonged to his habits and temperament, was greatly interested in these expectations for women. He regarded them as souls, each of which had a destiny of its own, incalculable to other minds, and whose leading it must follow, guided by the light of a private conscience."

She tells us that the Doctor's delicate and fastidious taste was not shocked by Angelina Grimké's appear- ance in public, and that he fully endorsed Mrs. Jameson's defence of her sex "in a way from which women usually shrink, because, if they express themselves on such subjects with sufficient force and clearness to do any good they are exposed to assaults whose vulgarity makes them painful."

Margaret ends her treatise with a synopsis of her humanitarian creed, of which we can here give only