her conversations an impressiveness and influence which cannot be inferred from the records kept of them.
They were not always free from the ludicrous, and the daily papers made fun of her. Everybody had a mot as to what Emerson said and what Margaret said, and it is fair to observe that, although Emerson was the brain and Margaret the blood, the two spoke a great deal of nonsense. Certainly after the epoch of social reconstruction failed, and when Margaret left them. Transcendentalism broke to pieces, like a cosmical ring, each piece flying off to revolve in its own orbit.
I can only remember how much she was talked about all my youth, and sometimes laughed at. Zenobia, Hawthorne's beautiful dream, supposed to somewhat embody Margaret Fuller, has embalmed her and put her in the world's picture-gallery forever.
I ought to have seen Hawthorne at Brook Farm, but I did not. I have to accept George William Curtis's splendid description of him:
"A statue of Night and Silence, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sable made him in that society like the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories."
This, contrasted with the cheerful and human picture of Hawthorne written lately (1896) by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, makes Hawthorne two such different men that we can only solve the problem by quoting Goethe's mother: "When my son has a grief he makes a poem of it, and so gets rid of it."
When Hawthorne had a sombre mystery he made a story out of it, and so got rid of it, possibly. We are very grateful to him for confiding his mysteries to us —
