ntellect
only. This conversation of many hours revealed her to him in a new
light. It unfolded to him her manifold gifts and her deep experience,
her great capacity for joy, and the suffering through which she had
passed. She should have been an acknowledged queen among the magnates of
European culture: she was hedged about by the narrow intolerance of
provincial New England.

In a more generous soil her genius would have borne fruit of the highest
order. She felt this, felt that she failed of this highest result, and
was yet so patient, so faithful to duty, so considerate of all who had
claims upon her! Perceiving now the ardor of her nature and the strength
of her self-sacrifice, Margaret's new friend could not but bow in
reverence before her; and from that time the two always met as
intimates.

Mr. Channing's reminiscences preserve for us a valuable _apercu_ of the
Transcendental movement in New England, and of Margaret's relation to
it.

The circle of the Transcendentalists was, for the moment, a new church,
with the joy and pain of a new evangel in its midst. In the very heart
of New England Puritanism, at that day hard, dry, and thorny, had sprung
up a new growth, like the blossoming of a century-plant, beautiful and
inconvenient. Boundaries had to be enlarged for it; for if society would
not give it room, it was determined to go outside of society, and to
assert, at all hazards, the freedom of inspiration.

While this movement was in a good degree one of simple protest and
reaction, it yet drew much of its inspiration from foreign countries and
periods of time remote from our own. From the standpoint of the present
it looked deeply into the past and into the future. Its leaders studied
Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, among the classic authors, and De
Wette, Hegel, Kant, and Fichte, among the prophets of modern thought.
The _welt-geist_ of the Germans was its ideal. Method, it could not
boast. Free discussion, abstinence from participation in ordinary social
life and religious worship, a restless seeking for sympathy, and a
constant formulation of sentiments which, exalted in themselves, seemed
to lose something of their character by the frequency with which they
were presented,--these are some of the traits which Transcendentalism
showed to the uninitiated.

To its Greek and Germanic elements was presently added an influence
borrowed from the systematic genius of France. The works of Fourier
became a g