James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[186] certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man? It is what she needs; no thin idealist, no coarse realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens, while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements.

What was that power in Margaret Fuller which made her words barbed arrows, to remain in the hearts of young people forever? For one I know that for twenty years that sentence has haunted me, as being, more than any other, the true formula for the American man, the standard by which each should train himself in self-education. I fancy that the secret of my allegiance to this woman lies in the shaping influence of that one sentence. Others have acknowledged the same debt to other stray phrases she uses,--her “lyric glimpses,” as Emerson called them. Thus William Hunt, the artist, acknowledged that a wholly new impulse of aspiration was aroused in him by a few stray words she had pencilled on the margin of a passage in Mrs. Jameson's “Italian painters.”

Even the narrative in this book, and its recorded conversations, show that she exerted on travelling acquaintances this stimulating and unlocking power. This showed itself with the Illinois farmers, “the large first product of the soil,” and especially with that vanishing race, who can only be known through the sympathy of the imagination, the Indians. There is no book of travels, except, perhaps, Mrs. Jameson's, which gives more access to those finer traits of Indian character that are disappearing so fast amid persecution and demoralization.