It is certain that Margaret, though unattractive in person, and assuming in manners, so that the girls complained that “she put upon them,” or, with her burly masculine existence, quite reduced them to satellites, yet inspired an enthusiastic attachment.  I hear from one witness, as early as 1829, that “all the girls raved about Margaret Fuller,” and the same powerful magnetism wrought, as she went on, from year to year, on all ingenuous natures.  The loveliest and the highest endowed women were eager to lay their beauty, their grace, the hospitalities of sumptuous homes, and their costly gifts, at her feet.  When I expressed, one day, many years afterwards, to a lady who knew her well, some surprise at the homage paid her by men in Italy,—­offers of marriage having there been made her by distinguished parties,—­she replied:  “There is nothing extraordinary in it.  Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her:  they were all in love with her, she understood them so well.”  She had seen many persons, and had entire confidence in her own discrimination of characters.  She saw and foresaw all in the first interview.  She had certainly made her own selections with great precision, and had not been disappointed.  When pressed for a reason, she replied, in one instance,

’I have no good reason to give for what I think of ——.  It is a daemoniacal intimation.  Everybody at ——­ praised her, but their account of what she said gave me the same unfavorable feeling.  This is the first instance in which I have not had faith, if you liked a person.  Perhaps I am wrong now; perhaps, if I saw her, a look would give me a needed clue to her character, and I should change my feeling.  Yet I have never been mistaken in these intimations, as far as I recollect.  I hope I am now.’

I am to add, that she gave herself to her friendships with an entireness not possible to any but a woman, with a depth possible to few women.  Her friendships, as a girl with girls, as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had passages of romantic sacrifice and of ecstatic fusion, which I have heard with the ear, but could not trust my profane pen to report.  There were, also, the ebbs and recoils from the other party,—­the mortal unequal to converse with an immortal,—­ingratitude, which was more truly incapacity, the collapse of overstrained affections and powers.  At all events, it is clear that Margaret, later, grew more strict, and values herself with her friends on having the tie now “redeemed from all search after Eros.”  So much, however, of intellectual aim and activity mixed with her alliances, as to breathe a certain dignity and myrrh through them all.  She and her friends are fellow-students with noblest moral aims.  She is there for help and for counsel.  ’Be to the best thou knowest ever true!’ is her language to one.  And that was the effect of her presence.  Whoever conversed with her felt challenged by the strongest personal influence to a bold and generous life.  To one she wrote,—­