Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/45

30 and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. . My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow, and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since."

The progress of this work already brings us to that portion of Margaret's life in which her character was most likely to be judged of by the world around her as already determined in its features and aspect. That this judgment was often a misjudgment is known to all who remember Margaret's position in Boston society in the days of her lessons and conversations. A really vulgar injustice was often done her by those who knew of her only her appearance and supposed pretensions. Those to whom she never was a living presence may naturally ask of those who profess to have known her, whether this injustice did not originate with herself, whether she did not do herself injustice by habitually presenting herself in an attitude which was calculated to heighten the idea, already conceived, of her arrogance and overweening self-esteem.

Independently of other sources of information, the statements of one so catholic and charitable as Emerson meet us here, and oblige us to believe that the great services which Margaret was able to render to those with whom she came into relation were somewhat impaired by a self-esteem which it would have been unfortunate for her disciples to imitate. The satirists of the time saw this, and Margaret, besides encountering the small-shot of society ridicule, received now and then such a broadside as James Russell Lovell gave her in his "Fable for Critics." Of this