Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/142

Rh and the publisher, obliged to regard the transaction as a matter of business, demands of the author only what will find an immediate market, for he cannot afford to take anything else."

Margaret thinks that matters were better in this respect during the first half-century of our republican existence. The country was not then "so deluged with the dingy page reprinted from Europe." Nor did Americans fail to answer sharply the question, "Who reads an American book?' But the books of that period, to which she accords much merit, seem to her so reflected from England in their thought and inspiration, that she inclines to call them English rather than American.

Having expressed these general views, Margaret proceeds to pass in review the prominent American writers of the time, beginning with the department of history. In this she accords to Prescott industry, the choice of valuable material, and the power of clear and elegant arrangement. She finds his books, however, “wonderfully tame," and characterized by "the absence of thought." In Mr. Bancroft she recognises a writer of a higher order possessed of " loading thoughts, by whose aid he groups his facts.” Yet, by her own account, she has read him less diligently than his brother historian.

In ethics and philosophy she mentions, as "likely to live and be blessed and honoured in the later time," the names of Channing and Emerson. Of the first she says: “His leading idea the dignity of human nature is one of vast results, and the peculiar form in which he advocated it had a great work to do in this new world, On great questions he took middle ground, and sought a panoramic view. .. He was not well