elicate insight and sympathy, of the most feminine
refinement of feeling and of dauntless courage." Col. Higginson, a
fellow-townsman, who from youth to manhood, knew Margaret personally,
whose sisters were her intimates, whose family, as he tells us, was
"afterwards closely connected" with hers by marriage, and who has
studied all the documents and written her biography, says she was a
"person whose career is more interesting, as it seems to me, than that
of any other American of her sex; a woman whose aims were high and
whose services great; one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activity
was incessant, whose life, varied, and whose death, dramatic."

There still remains the current legend, and a legend, presumably, has
some foundation. If we attempt to unite the Margaret Fuller of common
tradition with Margaret Fuller as estimated by her friends, we shall
assume that she was not a wholly balanced character,--that she must
have been a great and noble woman to have had such friends, but that
there may have been in her some element of foolishness which her
friends excused and at which the public smiled.

Margaret was the fifth in descent from Lieut. Thomas Fuller, who came
from England in 1638, and who celebrated the event in a poem of which
the first stanza is as follows:

"In thirty-eight I set my foot
On this New England shore;
My thoughts were then to stay one year,
And then remain no more."

The poetry is on a level with other colonial poetry of the period.

Timothy Fuller, the grandfather of Margaret, graduated at Harvard
College in 1760, became a clergyman, and was a delegate to the
Massachusetts State Convention which adopted the Federal Constitution.
He had five sons, all of whom became lawyers. "They were in general,"
says Col. Higginson, "men of great energy, pushing, successful, of
immense and varied information, of great self-esteem, and without a
particle of tact." The evidence is that Margaret reproduced, in a
somewhat exaggerated form, all these Fuller characteristics, good and
bad. The saying is quoted from Horace Mann that if Margaret
was unpopular, "it was because she probably inherited the
disagreeableness of forty Fullers."

Timothy Fuller, Margaret's father, was the oldest of these brothers
and, Col. Higginson says, "the most successful and the most assured."
He graduated at Harvard, second in his class, in 1801, lived in
Cambridge, and represented the Middlesex distric