Margaret Fuller Quotes

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller

If you have knowledge , let others light their candles in it.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.

What a difference it makes to come home to a child!

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.

Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *

All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

...above all things; to remember that hypocrisy is the most hopeless as well as the meanest of crimes...

But her eye, that torch or the soul, is untamed, and in the intensity of her reading, we see a soul invincibly young in faith and hope.

Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.

Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit---doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.

We have waited here long in the dust; we are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow

But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.

Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) “My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . .

Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.

Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep—set eyes— Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby’s things, And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader اليوم قارئ وغدًا قائد

Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.

Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.

At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man ? It is what she needs — no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground and his hands are strong and dextrous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous and — sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed.

At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.

He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world. And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.

Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" -- a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for -- a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature -- the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life -- the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.

Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.

And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.

It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy.

CAST: Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Bernard Fitz of the Vincent County District Court. Bill Green as Sheriff McGrath, “Vincent County’s own little Hitler,” a frequent antagonist of the kind-hearted judge. Barbara Fuller as Susan, the judge’s lovely young niece. Leo Cleary as the bailiff. Dawn Bender as little Mary Margaret McAllister. WRITER-PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Carlton E. Morse. ANNOUNCER: Frank Martin. ORCHESTRA: Opie Cates. This show bore many of the trademarks that writer Carlton E. Morse had established on One Man’s Family: stories containing-the breath of life, realistic conflicts, and a character who, as Time put it, was “surefire for cornfed philosophizing.” Before his election to the bench, Judge Fitz had been the barber of a small (pop. 3,543) community in the county. At times, when his legal career tried his patience, he longed again for that simpler life. He was staunchly Irish (what else, with Barry Fitzgerald in the lead?) and could be painfully sentimental. One reviewer noted that “he criticizes the law as much as he enforces it, and slyly finds a loophole when he thinks a culprit needs a helping of simple kindness.” The sheriff, on the other hand, had a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality.

Unfortunately, though, even in our own time, the stigma that can attach to the cleverest person in the room sometimes intensifies if that person happens to be a woman. To imagine that Fuller could conduct herself as she did and never run afoul of gender prejudice is fanciful. To suppose that such biases were alone responsible for her troubles is equally so.

The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves.

Genius will live and thrive without training. —MARGARET FULLER

In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own,” Eliza Farrar wrote, “where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners.” America’s

Playboy: ¿Está realmente en nuestras manos? O, como parece que aboga por la utilización de los ordenadores para manipular el futuro de culturas enteras, ¿no está realmente alentando al hombre a que renuncie al control de su destino? McLuhan: Antes que todo —y me sabe mal tener que insistir en este descargo de responsabilidad—, yo no abogo por nada; sólo sondeo y preveo tendencias. Aunque me opusiera a ellas o pensara que son catastróficas, no podría pararlas; así pues, ¿por qué tendría que perder mi tiempo lamentándome? Cuando la escritora Margaret Fuller comentó «acepto el universo», Carlyle dijo de ella: «más le vale». No veo ninguna posibilidad de una rebelión ludita global que destruya la maquinaria, así que podemos sentarnos cómodamente, ver qué pasa y contemplar lo que nos pasará en un mundo cibernético. Estar resentidos con una nueva tecnología no detendrá el proceso de ésta. Lo importante que debemos recordar es que en cualquier momento que utilizamos o percibimos una ampliación tecnológica de nosotros mismos, inevitablemente la acogemos. Siempre que vemos una pantalla de televisión o leemos un libro, estamos asimilando esas ampliaciones de nosotros mismos dentro de nuestro sistema individual y experimentando un «cierre» automático o desplazamiento de la percepción; no podemos huir de esta acogida perpetua de nuestra tecnología cotidiana a no ser que escapemos de la tecnología misma y huyamos a la cueva de un ermitaño. Al acoger de forma consistente todas estas tecnologías, inevitablemente nos relacionamos con ellas como servomecanismos. Así, para poder utilizarlas todas, primero debemos servirles como si fueran dioses. El esquimal es un servomecanismo de su kayak, el vaquero de su caballo, el hombre de negocios de su reloj, el cibernético —y pronto el mundo entero— de su ordenador. Por decirlo de otra forma, a los despojos pertenece el ganador. Esta modificación continua del hombre por parte de su propia tecnología lo alienta a encontrar medios constantes para modificarla; el hombre se convierte, pues, en los órganos sexuales del mundo de las máquinas, como lo es la abeja en relación al mundo botánico, permitiéndole reproducirse y evolucionar hacia formas más elevadas. El mundo de las maquinas corresponde la devoción del hombre premiándole con bienes, servicios y recompensa. La relación entre el hombre y su maquinaría es, pues, intrínsecamente simbiótica. Siempre ha sido así; el hombre cuenta con la oportunidad de reconocer su unión con su propia tecnología sólo en la era eléctrica. La tecnología eléctrica es una extensión cualitativa de la relación hombre/máquina; la relación del hombre del siglo xx con el ordenador no es, por naturaleza muy distinta a la relación que mantenía el hombre prehistórico con su barco o su rueda —con la importante diferencia que todas las tecnologías o extensiones del hombre previas eran parciales y fragmentarias, mientras que la eléctrica es total e inclusiva—. Ahora el hombre está empezando a llevar puesto su cerebro fuera del cráneo y sus nervios fuera de su piel; la nueva tecnología cría un nuevo hombre. Una viñeta reciente mostraba un niño que le decía a su madre desconcertada: «De mayor seré un ordenador». El humor es a menudo profético.

Power comes not from knowledge kept,’ said Gates, ‘but from knowledge shared.’ But don’t sit around waiting for your boss – if your company isn’t doing this already, don’t wait, start it up for them. Sharing your knowledge creates synergy: you’ll get more out than you put in. ‘If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.’ Margaret Fuller   Feeling competitive rather than collaborative?  Meet some of history’s great creative rivals here.

Vous ne pouvez pas le croire, vous les hommes, mais la seule raison pour laquelle les femmes assument ce qui vous convient le plus, c'est que vous les empêchez de découvrir ce qui leur convient à elles. Si elles avaient la liberté, si elles avaient la sagesse de pleinement développer leur force et leur beauté de femmes, elles ne souhaiteraient jamais être des hommes ou semblables à des hommes.

Silence is the cruelest means of rejection, even if it only masks confusion or regret. The

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body,” Margaret Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845.

One of the great gifts of our later years is the possibility of authenticity, or what Margaret Fuller called the “radiant sovereign self,” which comes from growing out of fears into wholeness. We may lose our false selves, acquired in childhood and carried with us through much of our long journey. We have the potential to discover our true selves deep inside and, at last, be able to tell the truth.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader

Marriage is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth: it requires strength to do this without such an opening, very many have failed to this, and their imperfections have been in every one's way.

As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem "my America," an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown "stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war," the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

The man who leveled jealous accusations at his wife on the basis of one dream brushed aside his daughter’s recurring nightmares as nonsense—“never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night” by keeping her up long past any normal child’s bedtime for late-night recitations, by forcing her through Virgil’s lurid battle scenes, by inciting a rivalry between his “pair of Ms.” Finally, to everyone’s relief, Timothy sent Margaret to school.

A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.

in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.

The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined on & rained on by these influences of being steeped in this light & so ripened to power whereof I yet dreamed not,” Waldo rhapsodized, “suddenly uplifted” by the notion, foreign to him since Ellen’s death, that “nobleness is loving, & delights in sharing itself.” He “dared” to entertain “unlimited hopes” of “the four persons who seemed to offer me love at the same time and draw to me & draw me to them.” Of the intimate conclave at Concord, Waldo wrote to Margaret, “I have lived one day.” She had won him to her side.

She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,

Marriage should be a temporary relation,” he wrote in his journal during the summer of his chaste tryst with Cary. “When each of two souls ha[ve] exhausted the other of that good which each held for the other, they should part in the same peace in which they met, not parting from each other, but drawn to new society. The new love is the balm to prevent a wound from forming where the old love was detached.

It was Waldo Emerson who would stay, bound to his “imperfect” marriage “because he dont believe in any thing better,” and unable to forget Margaret, who, he would realize with increasing gratitude in later years, with her “radiant genius & fiery heart was perhaps the real centre that drew so many & so various individuals to a seeming union.

Observation is a great joy.” To write one’s observations, record such wonderings, the greatest joy of all.

Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman makes marriage “her whole existence”—or, as Sophia Hawthorne had phrased it, her “true destiny”—Margaret argued, has “cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.” Woman “must be able to stand alone.” Marriage should be to woman, as it is to man, “only an experience.” While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, “men never,” Margaret observed, “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.

long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written portentously to Sophia, “woman must wait until the lion shall lie down with the lamb, before she can hope to be the friend and companion of man.

But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these “show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements” the ill effects of having been “treated by wholesale”; they were not accorded the respect that engenders “self-respect.

Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.

am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.

Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations on classical myth, Margaret was best compared to “Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the Foreworld.” He had not told her this, but perhaps somehow she knew.

I see in Sarah M. much to be proud of and much to correct, but I wish above all things to preserve her confidence & affection & not appear to be a severe judge,” she wrote, in an effort to rein in her husband’s criticisms.

Margaret expected her friends to “be capable of seeking something.” She cared little what that something was, only that her friends “should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained.

from a very early age . . . that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn.” In time she would become convinced that she was not meant to experience “more extended personal relations” and that “self-dependence,” as she called it, would have to suffice, making her a lone “pilgrim and sojourner on earth.” Her questing would never end, and she must learn to “be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.” But for now, she felt only anxiety about the future.

She wanted to leave her noisy questing “self” behind in that pool—not by tumbling in, like Narcissus, but by rising up. The answer came to her: “I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly . . . that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine.

hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?

It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers.

there are . . . in every age a few in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated”? “I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex,” she told him. “I feel chosen among women.” Margaret would preserve her right to fill an apostolic station, if called.

once a woman is “able to stand alone”—as certainly the Tribune’s star, healed by Dr. Leger, could boast—“then she will not make an imperfect man her god . . . Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.

indeed there are soul realities,” with “mein liebster” at a safe distance. “I have never had one at all like it, and I do not read things in the poets or anywhere that more than glance at it.” She could feel James Nathan’s thoughts “growing in my mind . . . your stronger organization has at times almost transfused mine.” There had been “moments when our minds were blended in one,” and this “unison” beat “like a heart within me.” She had given him Shelley to read, but there is “no poem like the poem we can make for ourselves”: “is it not by living such relations that we bring a new religion, establishing nobler freedom for all?” How hard Margaret worked to persuade herself—and James Nathan—of their disembodied “unison.” As she wrote in a Tribune essay that July, titled “Clairvoyance,” on the “wonderful powers” of the mind, “time and space” may yet be “annihilated” so that “lovers may be happy.” In late

Six years earlier, as she commenced her Conversation classes, Margaret had written in her journal about the discomfort that her verbal superiority sometimes brought her, when “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.” Men “are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we get our knowledge, &, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, & fly, & dart hither & thither, & seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin”—the legendary swordsman—“in the desert.” Back then in Boston, Margaret had failed to rouse her women students to spar with men in mixed conversation, and the men, tramping on in their pedantry, had held the group to an impasse.

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body,” Margaret Fuller

The union of two natures for a time is so great

he also recruited another of Emerson’s intimates, Margaret Fuller (no relation to the headmaster), to the teaching staff. It

All truth is comprised in music and mathematics.

Margaret Fuller, America’s first female public intellectual and a contemporary of Beecher, was her antithesis. In 1840, Fuller became editor of the era’s premier highbrow magazine, The Dial. She was then thirty years old.

The life of woman must be outwardly a well-intentioned, cheerful dissimulation of her real life. —MARGARET FULLER

Where I make an impression it must be by being most myself.

IF W.I.T.C.H. IS an example of feminist politics borrowing from the realm of mythos, then it should come as no surprise that feminist spirituality began to get more civic-minded in turn. Though there is evidence that some American Pagan covens existed as early as the 1930s, and Gardnerian Wicca had reached the States by the 1960s, the 1970s brought about a new style of witchcraft that was intent on “combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river,” as Margot Adler put it. It took the framework of Wicca but gave it a much fuller emphasis on worshipping goddesses and honoring the female body. It also more blatantly reclaimed the witch as an icon of resistance against the patriarchy, following the sentiments of earlier pro-witch thinkers like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray, and the writings of radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.

... beings, likely to be left alone, need to be fortified and furnished within themselves, and educationand thought have tended more and more to regard these beings as related to absolute being ...

Today’s Children, The Woman in White, and The Guiding Light crossed over and interchanged in respective storylines.) June 2, 1947–June 29, 1956, CBS. 15m weekdays at 1:45. Procter & Gamble’s Duz Detergent. CAST: 1937 to mid-1940s: Arthur Peterson as the Rev. John Ruthledge of Five Points, the serial’s first protagonist. Mercedes McCambridge as Mary Ruthledge, his daughter; Sarajane Wells later as Mary. Ed Prentiss as Ned Holden, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and taken in by the Ruthledges; Ned LeFevre and John Hodiak also as Ned. Ruth Bailey as Rose Kransky; Charlotte Manson also as Rose. Mignon Schrieber as Mrs. Kransky. Seymour Young as Jacob Kransky, Rose’s brother. Sam Wanamaker as Ellis Smith, the enigmatic “Nobody from Nowhere”; Phil Dakin and Raymond Edward Johnson also as Ellis. Henrietta Tedro as Ellen, the housekeeper. Margaret Fuller and Muriel Bremner as Fredrika Lang. Gladys Heen as Torchy Reynolds. Bill Bouchey as Charles Cunningham. Lesley Woods and Carolyn McKay as Celeste, his wife. Laurette Fillbrandt as Nancy Stewart. Frank Behrens as the Rev. Tom Bannion, Ruthledge’s assistant. The Greenman family, early characters: Eloise Kummer as Norma; Reese Taylor and Ken Griffin as Ed; Norma Jean Ross as Ronnie, their daughter. Transition from clergy to medical background, mid-1940s: John Barclay as Dr. Richard Gaylord. Jane Webb as Peggy Gaylord. Hugh Studebaker as Dr. Charles Matthews. Willard Waterman as Roger Barton (alias Ray Brandon). Betty Lou Gerson as Charlotte Wilson. Ned LeFevre as Ned Holden. Tom Holland as Eddie Bingham. Mary Lansing as Julie Collins. 1950s: Jone Allison as Meta Bauer. Lyle Sudrow as Bill Bauer. Charita Bauer as Bert, Bill’s wife, a role she would carry into television and play for three decades. Laurette Fillbrandt as Trudy Bauer. Glenn Walken as little Michael. Theo Goetz as Papa Bauer. James Lipton as Dr. Dick Grant. Lynn Rogers as Marie Wallace, the artist.

One of the great gifts of our later years is the possibility of authenticity, or what Margaret Fuller called the “radiant sovereign self,” which comes from growing out of fears into wholeness.

Margaret Fuller, and Henry Longfellow all were impelled by the book to the study of German language and literature. The book is attractive, lucid, and accessible. Its four parts cover Germany and the Germans, literature and the arts, philosophy, and religion. There is practically nothing in the book about biblical criticism aside from a paragraph that mentions Michaelis. But there is an excellent and still valuable introduction to Kant and his followers, and there is a great deal about the religious spirit as it flourished in Germany.

Margaret feeling empty. Both lonely and overmanaged, Margaret understood that her father’s plurality of loves in fact was focused on just two females: “In the more delicate and individual relations, he never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself.” She was one of “my pair of Ms,” along with her mother, her father’s possession, his prize. In Timothy’s letters home, read by both wife and daughter,

Although he’d taken a stand in Congress against the Missouri Compromise, an early fugitive slave law, and the Seminole War, he was not making a mark in Washington, and the fault was his own. He confided to his wife, “I am rather too indolent or unenterprising for the slight skirmishes . . . & the great questions require too much trouble and thought.” At night, instead of troubling himself over the “great questions,” he dreamed of Margaret practicing the piano—that lesson “she could never play in true time.” Timothy’s attention to his star pupil was intense, even disturbing, in a man who had once so blithely ignored the boundary between romance and pedagogy.

Inevitably they favored the “brilliant” de Staël, who in Margaret’s words operated “on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles.” They were captivated as much by the author’s role as intellectual diva in Revolutionary France as they were by her writing. De Staël—whose De l’Allemagne brought the fervid idealism of German Romantic philosophy to the rest of Europe, and whose Paris salon attracted political refugees and international luminaries alike—was the model both young women needed, even as her example must have seemed impossible to match in parochial New England of the 1820s.

inspiration, free self-expression, and freely expressed emotion—impulses that had already begun to stir a new century of democratic revolution in Europe.