her. Her faults were the faults of youth, as she was occasionally vain,
saucy or overbearing, and always self-conscious. It was this last trait
that Lowell referred to when he represented her as saying that since her
earliest years she had "lived cheek by jowl with the Infinite Soul."
Much youthful vanity, however, can be forgiven to those who are generous
and faithful. Besides, Margaret Fuller was splendidly domestic. She
advocated women's rights to a certain extent; but she was no forerunner
to the modern brood of platform women who fumble their night-keys while
they discourse on the duties of wives and mothers. She carried a helping
hand into the families that she entered, as well as stirring all the
inmates to an unwonted mental activity. She would knit socks while she
talked Plato: but the best testimony to her character is the character
of her friends. People are known by the company they keep.

The one quality which Hawthorne had in common with the
transcendentalists, except such qualities as are common to all good
people, was ideality. Next to the grand structure of his head, this is
the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. He seems to
have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a
transcendentalist by Edgar A. Poe, and was attacked by that fiery
Virginian in a most belligerent manner.

At Brook Farm, however, he soon began to differentiate from them, and
finally acquired for them something like an aversion. Neither is this to
be wondered at. Hawthorne was an artist pure and simple. He looked for
ideality in human life; not in the ideas that control and direct it. He
was not like Raphael and Shakspeare, men who could enjoy philosophy and
make their art so much the richer and deeper for it. He saw everything
in a pictorial form; facts and conditions which did not make a picture
had no value for him, and reasoning was a weariness and a disagreeable