Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[179]
His gestures all downright and same, if you will,
As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;
But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,
Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak;
You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet
With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,
And to hear, you're not over-particular whence,
Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense.

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Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

A more immediate ally of Emerson, as the first leading editor of the Dial, was the most remarkable American woman up to our time, in the literary path at least, Margaret Fuller, afterwards Madame Ossoli. She not only had to edit it for nothing and man it with good contributors for nothing, but to criticise even Emerson's contributions, sometimes greatly to his advantage, and to steer between the demands of the popular and matter-of-fact Theodore Parker, on the one side, and the dreamy Alcott, on the other. Of one number she was forced to write eighty-five out of its hundred and thirty-six pages herself, and after two years had to resign the task. Carlyle, who always criticised the American Transcendentalists severely, excepted only her, besides Emerson, among its writers. He called her writings “the undeniable utterances ”