archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely to stand.

Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by
Emerson, and painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, is now a fading figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt,
one of the first of American feminists, suggesting George Eliot
in her physical unattractiveness, her clear brain, her touch of
sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, over-crammed scholar in the
classics and in modern European languages. She did loyal, unpaid
work as the editor of the "Dial," which from 1840 to 1844 was the
organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at Brook
Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a
while she served as literary editor of the "New York Tribune"
under Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's
manuscripts at Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a
secret marriage in Italy with the young Marquis Ossoli, and
perished by shipwreck, with her husband and child, off Fire
Island in 1850.

Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek
scholar, an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's
biography, in Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the
memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous
sermons on the platform of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington
farmer's son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with
enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate lover of
all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out,
in Italy.

But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau,