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[139] d From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had a vexed relationship with Fuller, so much so that it is one of the most discussed in American literature, even though its most intense period lasted only eight years, from about 1836 to 1844. After all, at her death he wrote, “I have lost in her my audience,” a clear indication of the importance she had to him (July 1850, Journals, 11:258). They were supposedly brought together by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; however, when she requested the meeting, Emerson declined, asking, “What is there in her, anyway?” Peabody answered: “Why, Mr. Emerson, when first I called upon Margaret Fuller I felt, on leaving her, as if I had seen the universe !”, at which Emerson turned to Lidian Emerson “in despair,” saying, “we must have the young woman here if she can show us the universe!” (Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 156). At the beginning, Emerson thought, “we shall never get far” because her “extreme plainness,—a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,—the nasal tone of her voice,—all repelled.” Soon, though, they were discussing German literature (she helped him improve his pronunciation), philosophy, continental writers, and all the events eventuating in Transcendentalism. Emerson praised her to his friends, even telling Hawthorne that she was “the greatest woman” of “ancient or modern times, and the one figure in the world worth considering” (8 April 1843, Hawthorne , American Notebooks, 371). As Fuller was drawn closer to Emerson, though, she expected more from him. Their correspondence progressed from pleasant exchanges to discussions of how to edit the Dial to commenting on mutual friends to exchanging confidences; and as Fuller visited the Emersons in Concord more and more, they became close in ways that encouraged Fuller but concerned Emerson. Part of the problem was that Fuller seemed so opposite to him in many ways. According to Fuller, they agreed that “my god was love, his truth,” or, as she put it in a letter to him, “You are intellect, I am life” (Myerson, “Fuller’s 1842 Journal,” 324; 13 July 1844, Letters, 3:209). For his part, he wrote in his journal that “A difference between you and me is that I like to hear of my faults and you do not like to hear of yours” (October 1841, Emerson, Journals, fuller in her own time [140] 8:108). He also described their conversations as “strange, cold-warm, attractive -repelling,” and Fuller as one “whom I always admire, most severe when I nearest see, and sometimes love, yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to promise to come nearest” (October 1841, Emerson , Journals, 8:109). Matters came to a head during the summer and fall of 1840, when Emerson engaged in a three-way correspondence with Fuller and their mutual friend Caroline Sturgis about friendship (some of which was incorporated into Emerson’s essay on “Friendship”). Fuller wanted a closer emotional tie than Emerson was willing to grant. In Memoirs, he probably referred to this period when he wrote, “I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises.” Fuller eventually pulled back, summing up the events in this fashion: “After the first excitement of intimacy with him,—when I was made so happy by his high tendency, absolute purity, the freedom and infinite graces of an intellect cultivated much beyond any I had known,—came with me the questioning season. I was greatly disappointed in my relation to him.” To Fuller, Emerson seemed to lack “the living faith which enables one to discharge this holiest office of a friend,” for he had “faith in the Universal, but not in the Individual Man; he met men, not as a brother, but as a critic.” She had come to terms with this, though: “But I already see so well how these limitations have fitted him for his peculiar work, that I can no longer quarrel with them; while from his eyes looks out the angel that must sooner or later break every chain. Leave him in his cell affirming absolute truth; protesting against humanity, if so he appears to do; the calm observer of the courses of things” (25 August 1842, Letters, 3:91, where Emerson is identified as the subject of this letter). Or, as she wrote...

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