INTRODUCTION.

THE MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, lately published, have inspired many readers with a profound regret that they had not, during her life, made or improved the acquaintance of one whom impartial judgment must pronounce the most capable and noteworthy American woman the world has yet known. Criticism has not spared the writers of that Memoir; yet no critic, so far as I am aware, has hinted a doubt that it portrays, truly and vividly, its heroine, though she had previously been more widely misapprehended-perhaps I should say uncomprehended-than any of her cotemporaries. Especially is that portion of the Memoirs contributed by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled to the praise of being the frankest, fairest, most effective biography of our day, exhibiting its subject exactly as she lived and moved among us some few years ago, with her lofty virtues and her conspicuous faults, her conversation which charmed and her manner that repelled; so that she was at the same moment idolized and shunned, reverenced and ridiculed, by different sets of cultivated and considerate persons whom she met in society; and neither without obvious reasons.

She, being dead, yet speaketh." One of the most fluent, forcible, and brilliant of talkers, she nevertheless wrote slowly and with remarkable labor; so that, but for the eminence of her conversational powers, it might have been supposed that her years of devotion to foreign languages and literature had impaired her mastery of her mother

tongue. Yet this hesitancy in writing, sometimes resulting in obscurity, or even awkwardness of style, affected the manner only, and not the matter, of her essays. I doubt that any woman whose life was mainly devoted to literature has written less for the public eye than Margaret Fuller did; I believe the writings of no other woman were ever so uniformly worthy of study and preservation. Surcharged with thought, their manner may sometimes repel, but their matter can rarely or never fail to instruct. Very little that has been written by American women could be so ill spared from our literature.

These essays were, in 1846, selected by herself from all her occasional or fugitive productions, for publication in this form. She wrote very little afterward of any moment but that child of her heart, "Italy in 1848-9," which was irrecoverably lost, with herself, her husband, and child, in the shipwreck of the brig Elizabeth, off Fire Island, on the 19th of July, 1850. By these, therefore, with her Memoirs, and her "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," she is to be judged by those who did not know her personally; and these will amply justify her fame, though they may not seem to warrant the lofty eulogiums of her personal friends, based rather on what she said and was, than on what she did and wrote. Her "Summer on the Lakes" is an admirable book of its kind, embodying the fairest and most vivid pencilings of our noble Western prairies as they were left by the receding Indian, and as they began to be dotted by cottages, fields, and gardens, with widely-scattered flocks and herds, replacing the vanishing deer and the vanished buffalo; but its pictures of pioneer life and peculiarities are not so full, minute, and attractive as those of Mrs. Kirkland; and, while the book will continue to be read with pleasure by the judicious few, I presume it will never be reprinted.

Her “Italy” cannot so easily be spared. Knowing intimately and sympathizing thoroughly with Mazzini and the other Republican leaders in the great movement of 1848, her work would have presented that band of heroes more justly and worthily than any thing that has been printed. It would have been the completest refutation ever given to the motley crew of sham republicans, priestly calumniators,

and pimps of despotism, who have striven most unscrupulously, and, alas! not unsuccessfully, to cover the last army of martyrs to the cause of Liberty and Progress with ignominy and reproach, as victims of their own boundless incapacity or criminal ambition. Of Italy's lost struggle for liberty and light, she might not merely say, with the Grattan of Ireland's kindred effort, half a century earlier, “I stood by its cradle; I followed its hearse❞—she might fairly claim to have been a portion of its incitement, its animation, its informing soul. She bore more than a woman's part in its conflicts and its perils; and the bombs of that ruthless army which a false and traitorous Government impelled against the ramparts of Republican Rome, could have stilled no voice more eloquent in its exposures, no heart more lofty in its defiance, of the villainy which so wantonly drowned in blood the hopes, while crushing the dearest rights, of a people, than those of Margaret Fuller. Her last and greatest work perished irrecoverably in the wreck which closed her earthly career; but some idea of its fire and force may be gathered from passages of her letters from Italy, in 1848–9, preserved and presented in her Memoirs.

Her "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" will cease to be read only when it shall have been outgrown; and that, I apprehend, will not be very soon. Others may have perceived as clearly the injustice to Woman so firmly imbedded in our present social polity and ideas, and so slowly and with difficulty dislodged piecemeal from our laws; but rarely has there appeared a woman so qualified by thought, by culture, by position, by fearlessness, to discuss the subject thoroughly, and present the truth in its amplest and justest proportions. That some of her ideas are exposed to criticism, may be freely conceded without detracting from the merit and value of the work. Frank, original, earnest, and suggestive, this book gave an initial impulse to very much of the thought and action in this direction which have since been elicited, and its influence is even now beginning to be felt in the education of women as lecturers, physicians, etc., and in the earnest and increasing demand that they shall be admitted to equal opportunities with men in colleges and other kindred schools of prepara

tion for efficiency and honor in the most coveted walks of professional life. And when the time shall have come, as come it must, wherein Woman shall be called calmly and authoritatively to decide for herself the proper limits of her own sphere, and to judge whether the ballot is too rude and perilous a weapon to be intrusted to her delicate hands, the expositions and the counsels of Margaret Fuller will be consulted and considered, not more deferentially, but far more widely, than they have hitherto been.

The volume herewith presented will attract a larger number of readers, and perhaps be less cherished by the few, than any other of her published works. We find in it less of the writer's heart and genius, but more of her study and culture, than in the others. In this she appears less as the creator than the critic, the former being the loftier, the latter the more readily appreciable vocation. Few of us are creators; all are more or less critics, and so qualified, in some degree, to appreciate and enjoy criticism. And while there are papers in this volume into the spirit of which the large number will not enter ("The Two Herberts" conspicuous among them), yet a majority of these essays, including "Modern British Poets,” “The Modern Drama," ""American Literature," etc., will fall not strangely on the general ear.

The Lives of the Great Composers" is the paper into which the writer has infused most of herself, and it will probably command a heartier approval than any thing else in the volume, though the essays on Longfellow's Poems, "Swedenborgianism,” and “Methodism at the Fountain," cannot be slighted. And in an age when so many are learning to observe, to think, and to judge-when many feel the want of a wider knowledge of what is best in our current literature, and of more reliable standards for measuring the new works constantly appearing-I cannot believe that the world will soon be ready to dismiss to oblivion these Papers of MARGARET FULLER.

H. G.

NEW YORK, May 1st, 1852,

PREFACE.

IN the original plan for publishing a selection from my essays in different kinds which have appeared in periodicals, I had aimed at more completeness of arrangement than has been attained in these two volumes. Selections had been made from essays on English literature, on Continental and American literature, and on Art. I had wished, beside, for a department'in which to insert sketches of a miscellaneous character, in prose and verse.

It was proposed, in the critical pieces, to retain the extracts 'with which they were originally adorned, as this would give them far more harmony and interest for the general reader.

The translation, however, of the matter from a more crowded page to its present form has made such a difference, that I have been obliged to drop most of the extracts from several of the pieces. Moreover, in approaching the end of the first number, I found myself obliged to omit more than half the essays I had proposed on the subject of English literature, the greater part of those on Art, and those on Continental literature and of a miscellaneous kind entirely. I find, indeed, that the matter which I had