Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/34

Rh that Margaret found in him the germ of what the later world has learned so greatly to respect and admire.

The acquaintance between these two began in 1829, and was furthered by a family connection which Margaret, in one of her carly letters, playfully characterised as cousinship in the thirty-seventh degree.

During the four years immediately following, the two young people either met or corresponded daily. In explaining the origin of this friendship, Mr. Clarke modestly says:–

"She needed a friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express the ideas which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted me for this friend; and to me it was a gift of the gods, an influence like no other."

This intercourse was at first on both sides an entertainment sought and found. In its early stages Margaret characterises her correspondent as "a socialist by vocation, a sentimentalist by nature, and a Channingite from force of circumstance and of fashion.” Further acquaintance opened beneath the superficial interest the deeper sources of sympathy, and a valued letter from Margaret is named by Mr. Clarke as having laid the foundation of a friendship to which he owed both intellectual enlightenment and spiritual enlargement. More than for these he thanks Margaret for having imparted to him an impulse which carried him bravely forward in what has proved to be the Purmal direction of his life. Although destined, after those early years of intimate communion, to live far apart and in widely different spheres of labour and of interest, the regard of the two friends never suffered change or diminution.