International Weekly Miscellany - Volume 1, No. 6, August 5, 1850 by Various
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page 8 of 116 (06%)
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sufficiently considered. Miss Fuller has erred, too, through her own
excessive objectiveness. She judges _woman_ by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth. Holding these opinions in regard to 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century,' I still feel myself called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism of the work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of "_The Broadway Journal_." That article was _not_ written by myself, and _was_ written by my associate, Mr. Briggs. "The most favorable estimate of Miss Fuller's genius (for high genius she unquestionably possesses) is to be obtained, perhaps, from her contributions to 'The Dial,' and from her 'Summer on the Lakes.' Many of the _descriptions_ in this volume are unrivaled for _graphicality_, (why is there not such a word?) for the force with which they convey the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which leads her to paint a scene less by its features than by its effects. "Here, for example, is a portion of her account of Niagara:-- "'Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got at last a proper foreground for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I really saw the full wonder of the scene. After a while it _so drew me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never knew before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new existence_. The perpetual trampling of the waters seized my senses. _I felt that no other sound, however |
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