Carlyle’s first impression of Margaret Fuller.
Yesternight there came a bevy of Americans from Emerson, one Margaret Fuller, the chief figure of them, a strange, lilting, lean old maid, not nearly such a bore as I expected.
Thomas Carlyle: Letter in ‘Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London,’ by James Anthony Froude. New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
Free translation of the above.
Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings.... Her dialect is very vernacular,—extremely exotic in the London climate.
Thomas Carlyle: Letter to R. W. Emerson, December, 1846. ‘The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson’: Supplementary Letters. Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1886.
Account of her visit to Ambleside.
Margaret Fuller, who had been, in spite of certain mutual repulsions, an intimate acquaintance of mine in America, came to Ambleside.... I gave her and the excellent friends with whom she was travelling, the best welcome I could. My house was full: but I got lodgings for them, made them welcome as guests, and planned excursions for them. Her companions evidently enjoyed themselves; and Margaret Fuller as evidently did not, except when she could harangue the drawing-room party without the interruption of any other voice within its precincts. There were other persons present, at least as eminent as herself, to whom we wished to listen; but we were willing that all should have their turn: and I am sure I met her with every desire for friendly intercourse. She presently left off conversing with me, however; while I, as hostess, had to see that my other guests were entertained according to their various tastes. During our excursion in Langdale she scarcely spoke to anybody, and not at all to me; and when we afterwards met in London, when I was setting off for the East, she treated me with the contemptuous benevolence which it was her wont to bestow on common place people. I was, therefore, not surprised when I became acquainted, presently after, with her own account of the matter. She told her friends that she had been bitterly disappointed in me. It had been a great object with her to see me, after my recovery by mesmerism, to enjoy the exaltation and spiritual development which she concluded I must have derived from my excursions in the spiritual world; but she had found me in no way altered by it; no one could have discovered that I had been mesmerised at all; and I was so thoroughly common place that she had no pleasure in intercourse with me.