In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[50] d [Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1839, 1841, and 1850] Elizabeth Hoar Elizabeth Sherman Hoar (1814–1878), friend and neighbor of the Emerson family, had been engaged to Waldo’s brother Charles. When he died in 1836, only a year after their betrothal, the Emerson family all treated Elizabeth Hoar as their sister. Hoar and Henry David Thoreau were close friends, and she and Fuller also became close during the latter’s many visits to Concord and when Hoar attended Fuller’s Conversations. Fuller complimented her “justness of perception,” and called her a “rare being; she is one not only pure and of noble intent, but of real refinement both of character and intellect” ([8?] March, 1 July 1842, Letters, 3:48, 76). In 1849, she may have assisted Eliza Rotch Farrar in establishing a fund that would pay Fuller three hundred dollars a year after she returned to America. Here, Hoar echoes the comments of many that, upon first meeting Fuller, her wit appears to be “ridicule or disregard of the sufferings they bring to you,” but that is not, in fact, the case. Hoar’s comment that Fuller’s “friends were a necklace of diamonds about her neck” became a popular one for biographers to quote as a means of suggesting how Fuller collected rather than cherished friends. Elizabeth Hoar to Hannah L. Chappell, 3 April 1839 Both your letters found me at Mr. Emerson’s, but I waited until I came home, to answer them. Miss Fuller has been there for a week past, and I have not yet learned the art of self-regulation so far as to be able to do anything when she is near. I see so few people who are anything but pictures or furniture, to me, that the stimulus of such a person is great and overpowering for the time. And indeed, if I saw all the people whom I think of as desirable, and if I could help myself, I do not think I should abate any of my interest in her. Her wit, her insight into characters,—such that she seems to read them aloud to you as if they were printed books, her wide range of thought and cultivation,—the rapidity with which she appropri- Elizabeth Hoar [51] ates all knowledge, joined with habits of severe mental discipline (so rare in women, and in literary men not technically ‘men of science’); her passionate love of all beauty, her sympathy with all noble effort; then her energy of character and the regal manner in which she takes possession of society wherever she is, and creates her own circumstances; and—these things keep me full of admiration—not astonished,—but pleased admiration— and, as genius does always (vide R. W. E. on ‘Genius’), inspire me with new life, new confidence in my own power, new desires to fulfill ‘the possible ’ in myself. You would, perhaps, have an impression of levity, of want of tenderness, from her superficial manner. The mean hindrances of life, the mistakes, the tedium, which eat into your soul, and will take no form to you but the tragic, she takes up with her defying wit and sets them down in comic groups and they cease to be ‘respectabilities.’ You feel at first as if this included ridicule or disregard of the sufferings they bring to you: but not so. Her heart is helpfully sympathizing with all striving souls. And she has overcome so much extreme physical and mental pain, and such disappointments of external fortune, that she has a right to play as she will with these arrows of fate. She is a high-minded and generous servant of Duty, and a Christian (not a traditional Christian, not made one by authority) in her idea of life. But this is all catalogue; you cannot write down Genius, and I write it more because I am thinking about her than from any hope of doing her justice. Only her presence can give you the meaning of the name Margaret Fuller, and this not once or twice, but as various occasions bring out the many sides. And her power of bringing out Mr. Emerson has doubled my enjoyment of that blessing to be in one house and room with him.” . . . Elizabeth Hoar to Mary Moody Emerson, 23 April 1839 . . . Miss Fuller, whose visit [to Concord] was a great and very agreeable excitement to me—I staid at Waldo’s [R. W. Emerson’s] while she was...

Share