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[194] d [Reminiscences of Margaret Fuller] (1974) Caroline Healey Dall [7 August 1859] . . . I knew Margaret only three years and not intimately as she would have said. But I was a close observer, and beside being a positive clairvoyante at moments, I was a keener judge than those who knew her better, because I was wholly independent of her personal magnetism. This was from the time that I was fifteen until I was eighteen, when she was a woman of from 28 to 31. Margaret did not like me, indeed my presence at her conversations irritated her, and my “clairvoyance,” told me, at one time, that she was on the point of asking me to leave the class. Whether she ever spoke of this intention I do not know. Had I been her “guest,” I would have put her out of pain, but I had paid a certain number of hard dollars for my place in it, and valued it too much as a means of culture, to give it up. If this was ungenerous, it was the only ungenerous movement of mine towards her, and if magnanimity were in my case a personal and not a constitutional trait, I should take some credit to myself for the love and honor I bear to Margaret. It has little to do with me. I was born “fully armed” in this respect! I was disgusted and pained to see how men of ability bowed before her. Margaret and Theodore Parker alike required a sort of personal submission before new-comers could be admitted to a cordial understanding. I have always wondered that Theodore endured me in those early days. Margaret was true to the law of her being. She could not love that “upstart child.” Yet I was neither an “upstart” or a “child,” nor was it because I was When she was preparing Margaret and Her Friends (1895), Dall brought together a number of her journal entries on Fuller, to which she often added later reflections on their accuracy. In a sense, this is Dall’s only attempt at a “biography” of the woman who influenced her so much. Indeed, when Dall published her Transcendentalism in New England in 1897, she concluded by saying, “I do not think I am mistaken in saying that what is meant by New England Transcendentalism perished with Margaret Fuller” (38). Caroline Healey Dall [195] self-conceited, because I set any value, undue or otherwise, on my mental or moral characteristics, that I would not bow. In Shakspeare himself, I should have resented any assumption of superiority , but gladly would I have knelt to the humblest human creature in whom I perceived it. Many a pure-hearted child has bent the knee, that only stiffened before Margaret. And this, not because I was not willing to recognise her nobleness, but because I felt that the worthiest crown, we could either of us inherit, it depended on our own wills to wear. Before I could honor her above myself, she must have relinquished the love of power for its own sake, have stretched out generous sustaining tendrils to the feeble soul, have broken up her court, and entered into “society.” If there was any thing in my natural temper, which sympathised with her faults, I only felt on that account, how necessary it was, that she should put them “under her heel.” I honored her nobleness too much to yield to her folly. I kept a close record of the “Conversations”—as I read them over after the lapse of nearly twenty years, I can fully forgive Margaret’s irritation at the tone I kept. She saw nothing but my youth; would have believed nothing of my inner life, had I confessed it to her. Often in my “clairvoyance” the sad oppressive gift, which it was God’s will that I should have, I foresaw the words that she was about to utter, and might by taking them out of her mouth, have vexed her, and surprised others . I was never for a moment tempted to do this, and perhaps the fact that this sense of honor has never forsaken me, may explain how I have kept the secret of my “sensitiveness” and gone through life without suspicion. Once, I remember, just after Bode’s Book on the Orphic Hymns came out, I quoted it in one of our talks. There were but two copies in America, Theodore Parker’s and one which Everett had...

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