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[132] d From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) James Freeman Clarke James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), Harvard College and Divinity School graduate, helped edit the Western Messenger (1836–1839), was a member of the Transcendental Club, and contributed to the Dial. He began his own congregation, the Church of the Disciples, in Boston in 1841, which caused controversy because its rules empowered the parishoners, not the clergy. He was, along with Emerson and William Henry Channing, a coeditor of Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Clarke was much attracted to German literature and philosophy, a passion he shared with Fuller, and the two often studied together. He was one of her closest friends in the 1830s, and the two maintained a frequent correspondence about contemporary events and their readings, especially when he was in the Ohio Valley during 1833–1840 preaching and editing the Messenger . He initially approached her as a mentor and guide (“I feel grateful for the high intellectual culture and excitement of which you have been to me the source”), and Fuller often looked at him as her pupil as well as fellow student, praising his mind, “wholly practical in its tendency,” quite “a strong mind, an aspiring mind, an active, and becoming a clear mind, but its cry is for ‘action, action, action’” (18 September 1834, Clarke, Letters to Fuller, 79; diary entry, 25 November 1838, Clarke, Autobiography, 313). By 1839, though, they had drifted apart as Clarke grew up and saw Fuller more clearly, saying she had “less theoretic respect for humanity” than did Emerson, her “complex and various nature draws her in many directions,” and her “beautiful and keen discriminating mind” causes her to be “exclusive in her tastes and aristocratic in her principles” (Capper, Private Years, 314). Clarke compared Fuller to himself as he would, respectively, grasshoppers to “father longlegs ,” for the former “collect themselves together and their whole body goes at once to a definite point, by a spring,” while the latter “thrust out a leg, then another, and then a third as far as they will go and let their body come after as it can.” For Clarke, grasshoppers are “apt to be special pleaders, one-sided arguers, but coherent and comprehensive”; father longlegs are “fair and candid in debate, caring for truth and not at all for consequences, James Freeman Clarke [133] . . . Inexhaustible in power of insight, and with a good-will “broad as ether,” she could enter into the needs, and sympathize with the various excellences, of the greatest variety of characters. One thing only she demanded of all her friends,—that they should have some “extraordinary generous seeking,”1 that they should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained. Where this element of aspiration existed, she demanded no originality of intellect, no greatness of soul. If these were found, well; but she could love, tenderly and truly, where they were not. But for a worldly character, however gifted, she felt and expressed something very like contempt. At this period, she had no patience with self-satisfied mediocrity . She afterwards learned patience and unlearned contempt; but at the time of which I write, she seemed, and was to the multitude, a haughty and supercilious person,—while to those whom she loved, she was all the more gentle, tender and true. Margaret possessed, in a greater degree than any person I ever knew, the power of so magnetizing others, when she wished, by the power of her mind, that they would lay open to her all the secrets of their nature. She had an infinite curiosity to know individuals,—not the vulgar curiosity which seeks to find out the circumstances of their outward lives, but that which longs to understand the inward springs of thought and action in their souls. This desire and power both rested on a profound conviction of her mind in the individuality of every human being. A human being, according to her faith, was not the result of the presence and stamp of outward circumstances , but an original monad, with a certain special faculty, capable of a certain fixed development, and having a profound personal unity, which the ages of eternity might develop, but could not exhaust. I know not if she would have stated her faith in these terms, but some such conviction appeared in her constant endeavor to see and understand the germinal principle , the special characteristic...

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