visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists
themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the
soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at
Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to
flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging
themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on
the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored
children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and {450} broke
up his school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He
believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported
himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting
wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding
conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a
little community at the village of Harvard, which was rather less
successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic Sayings_ to the
_Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to understand than even
Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_.

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman
of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature
and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She
threw herself into many causes--temperance, antislavery, and the higher
education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston
attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary
editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with
reviews and book-notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook
Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to
it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book,
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at
Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge
of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the {451}
French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the
Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to
America, with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach
and all three were lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are
somewhat disappointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She lives
less through her books than through the memoirs of her friends,
Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, T. W. Higginson, a