on The Four Seasons, Four Ages of Man, Four Constitutions, Four Monarchies; and if there were any other things which might be grouped in fours, of those she wrote also. Her verse is heavy and stilted, and it is long since any man or woman had patience to read her productions through; but she satisfied the ideals of her time, and made for woman a place in the literature of the new world. Had she not as good a right to write bad poetry as Michael Wigglesworth with his "Day of Doom"? And for that matter, how would Michael have managed to care for his church in Malden, and his duties as "physician to soul and body too" if he had not had in succession three wives, each one of whom in turn patched up his broken health and enabled him to do more good and write more bad verse?

Yet our concern is not with Michael Wigglesworth, nor yet with Anne Dudley Bradstreet. Our concern is with modern women, and we are preparing to consider some of the modern women who are authors, and there are too many of them for our space. Let us keep well this side of the beginning of the nineteenth century for our birthdays, and discuss no women who are still living, and we shall have more names than we can manage.

It is a far cry from Anne Dudley Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Yet they sprang out of a

common stock that same stock that made Puritan New England and literary England. She was born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, May 23, 1810. Her ancestry was long and honorable. Her father was a lawyer and a member of Congress. He taught her the classics, for there was a time when a member of Congress might possibly know the classics. He used to say to her while she was yet a child that she knew more Greek and Latin than half the professors. By the time she had finished her education she knew more of most subjects than the other half. She learned French and Italian, and on the death of her father became teacher of languages in Boston, and subsequently the head of a school in Providence. In 1839 she published a translation of Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe." Emerson said, not of this translation, but of an article by her in the magazine of which she was editor, that never had Goethe had a braver, more intelligent or more sympathetic reader. She became the editor of The Dial, and wrote many brilliant articles. In 1846 she visited Europe, and flung herself with ardor into the cause of Italian liberty. There she met and married the Marquis Ossoli. As they were on their way to America, their vessel was wrecked on Fire Island in 1847 and they and their little son perished. Her tragic death was in some respects a fitting end to a turbulent life.

Margaret Fuller was not wholly a lovable woman, though she was devoted to love. She had eccentricities enough to satisfy Hawthorne, and to furnish material for his ill-natured portrait of her in his "Blythedale Romance." She was an egoist, saying of herself that she had met all people worth knowing in America and found no intellect comparable with her own. She was no violet blushing to a mossy stone. All the self-assertion of rampant feminism was in her. "There is no modesty or moderation in me" she said. Most statements of Margaret Fuller led to discussion or denial, but no one ever disputed that affirmation. Horace Mann said of her that "she had the disagreeableness of forty Fullers." Those who knew her well, Emerson and Hawthorne and the Transcendentalists, either speak harshly of her, or have a hard time apologizing for her. Lowell called her "a very foolish, conceited woman." All that she was. She was not beautiful, though she desired beauty. She was not socially popular, though she had social aspirations. She was not generally loved, though she had a heart that wanted love. At length she made up her mind "to be bright and ugly." She succeeded beyond her finest hopes.

But if this were the whole story of Margaret Fuller, (and some people think it is) we should not now be writing of her. Colonel Higginson said of her that

he had never known a person who left behind her so strong an affection. Emerson said that if one came to her with the humble petition, "Margaret, be merciful to me, a sinner," her love and tenderness were like a seraph's. Egotistical, self-assertive, at times disagreeable, she nevertheless had power to make people think, and not only to force their opinions but to persuade them. Horace Greeley said of her that had she taken to the stage, she would have been the first of actresses; it is equally true that her pupils and her associates came to admire, with a marvellous admiration, and some times with genuine affection, her personality and her powers. One of her pupils said, "I had no idea that I should esteem, and much more, love her. I found myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had seen in nature, observed in life, or read in books." She stirred the minds of men and women in an age when there was need of stirring, and she left behind the memory of vivacity and of stimulating zest. She made people think; most of them, perhaps, did not think as she did; but that was not necessary, or even in all cases desirable.

Let us turn from Margaret Fuller to her contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was a year younger than Margaret Fuller, and was born in the parsonage at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 14, 1811.

Not without reason has some wit divided humanity into three classes, saints, sinners and the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher and his children constitute a class by themselves. As Margaret's father was her teacher, so was Harriet's. She learned less of the classics than Margaret, she learned more of Theology, metaphysics and of common sense. She went to Cincinnati to teach in 1832, and married a theological professor, Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, January 6, 1836. In 1852 they removed to Brunswick, Maine, where she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin.' In the same year they Prof. Stowe taught in She continued writing

removed to Andover, where the Theological Seminary.

which she mingled with her housework. In 1863 the family removed to Hartford, where Prof. Stowe died in August, 1886, and she followed him, July 1, 1896.

The Beechers were all preachers. It was impossible for a child of Lyman Beecher to be anything else. Mrs. Stowe's great book is not in any proper sense a novel, it is a preachment. The plot with which the story begins concerns the separation of a young. mulatto couple and comes to its climax in that most spectacular piece of melodrama in which Eliza crosses the river on the broken ice with the bloodhounds in hot pursuit. Then the story forgets this interesting couple and goes to following the fortunes of an aged negro preacher. There is no literary defense of a plot