permitted him to examine her manuscripts so that she might obtain his
assistance in regard to their publication. Whatever may be said of her,
she was not a fool, and was better acquainted with both English and
American publishers than all the sculptors in Italy.

Miss Fuller's marriage was rather a peculiar one, but nothing is more
common than for a highly intellectual woman to select a mate who is a
decided contrast to her. Hawthorne has given us an example of this in
the romance of Monte Beni--the brilliant Miriam falling in love with
that Italian child of nature Donatello. Margaret Fuller was always
attracted strongly by personal beauty, and when she was a girl at school
she chose her favorites rather for that than for their mental
endowments. The handsome D'Ossoli was no doubt all the more interesting
to her because he belonged to a noble family which had come to
misfortune. Is it not better for us to look at the matter in this way?
Margaret Fuller's marriage, voyage, and final destruction against the
rocks of her native land, would form the subject for a magnificent poem.

How could it happen that Hawthorne deceived himself? Is it possible that
he was in the right, and men like Emerson, Ripley, and James Freeman
Clarke in the wrong? Why does he consider Miss Fuller to have had a
strong, coarse nature, and to have been morally unsound? Here we enter
into the deepest recesses of the author's nature.

Hawthorne was not wholly a fatalist, or he never could have conceived
the character of Donatello, but he was very largely so. A man for whom a
life of action is impossible, and who is thus unable to escape wholly
from his own shadow, naturally comes to look on any series of events as
an inevitable chain of cause and effect. He speaks somewhere of Byron's
virtues and vices as being so closely interwoven that he could not have