March 22d, 1841.-The question of the day was, What is Life? Let us define, each in turn, our idea of living. Margaret did not believe we had, any of us, a distinct idea of life.

lems which engaged them her all-revealing | first fruit of the "transcendental moveeye shot like lightning, and for each she ment" in New England: read the mystic characters of his destiny; and I know several distinguished men who have declared that they have ever since been living and toiling under standards erected for them by Margaret on such occasions. Of course, with this power and magnetism there was much that was strange and much that was morbid. She was a victim of pain nearly all her lifetime; read and wrote in bed, and fancied that she could understand any thing better when suffering, and that " pain acted like a gir dle to give tension to her powers." "During a terrible attack of headache," writes one of her friends, "which made her totally helpless, Margaret was yet in her finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange painful excitement between laughing and crying by perpetual brilliant sallies."

A. S. thought so great a question ought to be given for a written definition. "No," said Margaret, "that is of no use. When we go away to think of any thing, we never do think. We all talk of life. We all have some thought now. Let us tell it. -C, what is life?" C- replied: "It is to laugh or cry according to our organization." "Good," said Margaret, "but not grave enough. Come, what is life? I know what I think. I want you to find out what you think."

Miss P. replied: "Life is division from one's principle of life in order to a conscious reörganization. We are cut up by time There was a singular mixture of facul- and circumstance in order to feel our reties and tendencies in this extraordinary production of the eternal law." Mrs. E.: woman, calculated to remind one of Mrs."We live by the will of God, and the obBrowning's address to George Sand: "Thou great-souled woman and largehearted man!" Margaret was fully conscious of the male intellect in which was incarnate her sensitively feminine heart. In some unpublished verses "To the Moon," she wrote:

"But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face, A human secret like my own I trace,

ject of life is to submit," and went on into Calvinism. Then came up all the antagonism of Fate and Freedom.

Mrs. H. said: "God created us in order to have a perfect sympathy from us as free beings." Mrs. A. B. thought the object of life was to attain absolute freedom. At this Margaret immediately and visibly kindled. C. S. said: "God creates from the fullness of life and can not but create;

For through the woman's smile looks the male he created us to overflow without being eye."

She had a fancy, too, for wearing carbuncles, because carbuncles are male and female; the latter casts out light, the male has his within himself; for she was not without a tendency to dally with the stories of spells and charms; and, it seems, really believed that, when she turned her head on one side, she had second sight. It is certain that her eyes were, at times, visible in the dark.

Her "conversations" given in Boston, were attended by Emerson, Parker, Phillips, Lowell, and indeed all the leading persons of that region. Her wonderful eloquence and electric spirit gave to these conversations an impressiveness and influ ence which can not be inferred from the scanty reports which have been preserved of them. However, I will give a specimen, if only for its drollery, and to show the kind of intellectual activity which was the

exhausted, because what he created necessitated new creation. It is not to make us happy, but creation is his happiness and ours.'

Margaret was then pressed to say what she considered life to be. Her answer was full, clear, and concise, and so inspiring that the reporter apologizes for not giving it: he was magnetized. He says: "She began with God as Spirit-life so full as to create and love eternally, yet capable of pause. Love and creativeness are dynamic forces, out of which we, individually, as creatures, go forth bearing his image, that is, having within our being the same dynamic forces, by which we also add constantly to the total sum of existence, and shaking off ignorance and its effects, and by becoming more ourselves, that is, more divine, destroying sin in its principle, we attain absolute freedom, we return to God, conscious like himself, and as his friends, giving as well as receiving felicity ever

more. In short, we become gods, and able to give the life which we now feel ourselves able only to receive."

With Margaret Fuller began the demand of women in America for social and legal existence; and what is known as the "Woman's Rights Movement" is the organization of her spirit, which, like that of John Brown, is still "marching on." Her claim for an independent development for women knew no bounds: "let them be sea-captains if they will!" The modifications of many hard laws in the States, relating to women, must be credited to the interest which she awakened.

In after years she went to Rome, and remained there during the revolutions of 1848, doing valuable service in the hospitals. Here also she married Count Ossoli.

her husband and child, only as the waves washed them to the shore, within hailing distance of which they perished.

So long as Margaret Fuller lived at Concord, that "airy nothing," called Transcendentalism, had a local habitation and a name: those interested in it joined with each other to form a sort of body, of which Emerson was the brain and Margaret the blood. When Margaret left, it broke to pieces like a cosmical ring, each piece flying off to revolve on its own axis and orbit. Some, whose views had been in the direction of social reconstruction, went off to become the center of the socialistic movement on Brook Farm, others to form religious societies, others to become anti-slavery leaders, whilst Hawthorne took office and fell into the mire of the Democratic party, and Emerson, Thoreau, and others, remained to follow as individuals their congenial pursuits.

There were, it is known, many ill-natured rumors concerning this marriage, the peculiarities of which were justified by circumstances. Many of her friends, and Somewhere about the year 1845, George amongst them the Brownings, wished W. Curtis, since then celebrated as a brilMargaret to make public explanations of liant traveler and humorist, found his these circumstances; but she stoutly re- way to Concord. Curtis was fresh from fused, saying, "That no one for whose Cambridge University, of high family, and opinion she cared would be likely to be- with fair fortune; but thinking he had not lieve that she had done any thing wrong in had sufficient contact with the rough side such a matter." In this she certainly did of life, he, with his brother, hired himself not underrate the confidence with which as a farm laborer near Concord. The her friends in America regarded her. It whimsical youths worked well for fair was at Florence that Margaret enjoyed the wages, and reserved enough leisure to friendship and acquaintance of Mr. and enjoy the society of the village notabilMrs. Browning, who appreciated her rare ities. He gives some amusing pictures of powers fully as much as her friends in the Concord circle as it was then. America did, during the last six months of her life. It was with them that she, with her husband and child, spent the last evening that she ever spent on land. As Margaret went to the ill-starred ship, Mrs. Browning pressed upon her finger a ring with a carbuncle in it, entirely unaware of her superstition already alluded to concerning that stone. Later they received from her a latter written-or scratched rather at Gibraltar, telling them of the ravages of the small-pox, which had deprived them of a captain, and of the rigors by which they were forbidden to land, and compelled to go on towards America with only the mate for captain, and with the disease still lurking in the ship. This was the last letter she ever wrote. I need not here renew the grief of recording the tragic end of this strange and noble life; nor the sorrow of the long-expectant relatives and friends who received her and

"Toward the end of the autumn," he writes, "Emerson suggested that they should meet every Monday evening through the winter at his library. I went the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, 'Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said?' It was quite involuntary and unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners on the other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the desert of silence with a solemn saying, to which, after due pause, the Hon. Member for Blackberry Pastures " (Thoreau, the naturalist), "responded by

But as she got older, the hard duties of life, and poverty, wore upon her delicate organization; and she was not yet twenty years of age when she disappeared. Through the night she was sought in every direction. At length one of the neighbors found some article of her clothing upon the river side; and, as Mr. Hawthorne's was the nearest house, he went there to get a boat and some assistance. It was after midnight, and Hawthorne went in his boat with the other; together they sat in the moonlight, a mile from the city, and silently dragged for the corpse. At last it was drawn up. Silently Hawthorne went home to spend the rest of the night in writing that chapter, which for tragic power is perhaps unsurpassed in the literature of the horrible.

had little credit. Upon entering a room where any company had assembled, Hawthorne was very sure to make for the darkest corner, and it would have taken more than a forty-dowager power to draw him out of it. At an evening company in Boston last year, at which I was present, and where he was the chief guest, he was found to have disappeared at about nine, and being sought for by the host, was discovered in a remote room of the house reading Defoe's Ghost Stories.

Though personally acquainted with the transcendentalists, Hawthorne was looked upon as having little or no real interest in the principles which they discussed or represented. He was more a keen-eyed intellectual huntsman, who knew where the finest game was to be found; and, as the forester must be unespied,

"He took the color of his vest

From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast."

Mr. James Russell Lowell, in his cele

ment to recognize Emerson's commonsense as well as his genius, and regarded his head as a well-balanced sphere, with

แ

President Polk took Hawthorne, who was very "impecunious," to use a new American coinage, away from Concord, and gave him the care of the Customs in Salem, Massachusetts; with the antiquities, particularly the witches, of which Mr. Hawthorne was the only literary man ancient city he made immediate acquaint- in America who has not given his voice ance. His strange and reserved habits against slavery. At the same time it gave him the reputation in Salem of a should be said that, in his personal rela man who was haunted by an evil con- tions, this ablest of American story-tellscience and by several unusually pertina-ers was without reproach, and that they cious ghosts whom he had, perhaps, helped mourn most his early death who knew him to make ghosts in early life. After this he best. lived in other towns, but finally returned to Concord, declaring that it was, he sus-brated Fable for Critics, had the discernpected, the only place on the planet where a man could live as he liked without interference from his neighbors. Had he known how many spinsters his odd habits had tortured with curiosity, and how much tea he had spoiled, he would not have given so much credit even to Concord. Unhappily, Hawthorne had been a college classmate of Franklin Pierce; and when the latter was nominated by the Democrats, so-called (lucus a non lucendo), for the Presidency, the novelist wrote, a biography of Pierce. For this, his most remarkable work of fiction, he was, on the election of Mr. Pierce, made consul at Liverpool. To say any more about him here would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Nevertheless, I may add, that amongst those in America who knew Hawthorne best, his criticisms upon so much of English life and character as may be only seen in parlors, and especially his judgments concerning English or other women, are regarded as the breaking out of a comic genius in him, for which he has hitherto

One pole on Olympus and t' other on 'Change." Nevertheless, the majority of his neighbors could not consent that the transcendental philosopher was any thing but a dreamer. Yet they all agreed that he was a very charming dreamer, and his plain speech and simple manners with the rough farmers around him, won their hearts. Moreover, it was certainly true that the presence of this dreamer in Concord had largely raised the value of real estate. This "simple child, and wildly wise," must be taken care of; and so delicate services were rendered him without his knowledge, and by some persons, doubtless, with whom he had never met. Some nurseryman in the gray of the morning had entered his garden and carefully pruned his vines and trees for the season. One put up a bird house near him, and