Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/276

246 his literary critic, was Margaret Fuller. "While editor of The Dial, she examined,—and rejected,—some of his poems and essays. Appreciating that their author was "healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope," she also saw in him "a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of spring have not visited." Her censure was keen, and well emphasized the startling beauties, combined with the sternness and ruggedness of much of Thoreau's early writing. Though Margaret Fuller was in Concord often for many years, and met Thoreau constantly at the homes of his friends, their relations were never very cordial on the part of Thoreau. Like Emerson, he appreciated the mental gifts of this woman, the "new woman" type of her day, but her efforts to win intimate friendship failed to gain response from either author. The "repulsions," which Emerson records with regret against her personality, were shared by many acquaintances in both Concord and Boston. Some of the sentences in "A Week" are often explained as personal references to Margaret Fuller;—"a restless and intelligent mind, interested in her own culture, who not a little provokes me, and, I suppose, is stimulated in turn by myself." After the tragic shipwreck and drowning of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, with her husband and son, Thoreau was one of the first