Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/61

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AN EPISTLE TO POSTERITY

at times visible in the dark. Their devotion to her was akin to fanaticism, and they would talk of the magic play of her voice as the singing of a fountain. She had a very kind way to the colored stage-driver, who was the Mr. Weller of Concord, and he distinguished her by his respect. The "chambermaid would confide to her her homely romance." The better class of young Cambridge students believed in her as though she had been a learned professor. Her all-seeing eye could shoot through the problems which engaged them. Many distinguished men kept this opinion of her to their deaths. With such wonderful imagination and a genius like that of George Eliot, there was much that was morbid and unhealthy and strange in Margaret Fuller. She was a victim of dreadful headaches all her life, but she said that "pain acted like a girdle to her powers," and between laughing and crying she would utter her most witty words.

There was a singular mixture of faculties in this gifted woman. She was fully conscious of the male intellect in which was incarnate her truly sensitive feminine heart. She had a tendency to dally with stories of spells and charms, and really thought she had (if she turned her head one side) the power of second-sight.

This is not my own description. I have compiled it from the words of others, for I did not see much of her or know her well enough to have written so powerful an elucidation. She wrote these lines on herself, but addressed to the moon:

"But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For through the woman's smile looks the male eye."

Her wonderful eloquence and electric spirit gave to