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Fuller in Providence in 1837–1838
- University of Iowa Press
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[9] d [Fuller in Providence in 1837–1838] Charles T. Congdon Charles T. Congdon (1821–1891) attended (but did not graduate from) Brown University. He served as a journalist and newspaper editor in his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts, for many years, until Horace Greeley personally persuaded him to become an editorial writer on the New-York Tribune in 1857. He also contributed to the Knickerbocker Magazine, North American Review, and Vanity Fair and served as the New York correspondent to the Boston Courier. He met Fuller while working as a newspaperman in Providence , Rhode Island. It is easy to see what happened when a young person of no special natural ability and of small and fragmentary culture talked according to his own notion, as Novalis wrote. Margaret Fuller (not yet a marchioness, but a school-mistress) lived then and pursued her noble calling nobly in Providence . I saw her sometimes in company and heard her talk,—it would be hardly proper to say converse, for nobody else said much when she was in the Delphic mood. The centre of a circle of rapt and devoted admirers, she improvised not merely pamphlets, but thick octavos and quartos. Such an astonishing stream of language never came from any other woman’s mouth. “She brought with her,” said Mr. Emerson, “wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles.” She did not argue. I think she had a way of treating dissentients with a crisp contempt which was distinctly feminine. She had no taste for dialectics, as she took care to inform those who did not agree with her. She considered her own opinion to be conclusive, and a little resented any attempt to change it. Yet there was something eminently elevated in her demeanor, for it was that of a woman swaying all around her, not by fascinating manner, nor yet by personal beauty, of which she had none, but through the sheer force of a royal intellect. There were peculiarities in her ways and carriage which were not agreeable,—a fashion of moving her neck, and of looking at her shoulders as if she admired them; and her voice was not euphonious. Mr. Emerson says that personally she repelled him fuller in her own time [10] upon first acquaintance; but I was so astonished and spell-bound by her eloquence, by such discourse as I had never before heard from a woman, and have never heard from a woman since, that I sat in silence, and, if my ears had been fifty instead of two, I should have found an excellent use for them. I do not mean to say that I comprehended all that she said; I had not read the philosophers and poets of Germany as she had: but simply to listen was enough, without cheap understanding. Something like this fascination must have been exercised by Coleridge over the listeners who gathered about him at Highgate, and went away charmed but puzzled,—delighted they knew not why. Was it a pleasure analogous to that of music,—a suggestion too delicate for analysis? . . . Charles T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880), 118–19. ...