SUMMER ON THE LAKES
by Margaret Fuller

Summer days of busy leisure,
Long summer days of dear-bought pleasure,
You have done your teaching well;
Had the scholar means to tell
How grew the vine of bitter-sweet,
What made the path for truant feet,
Winter nights would quickly pass,
Gazing on the magic glass
O'er which the new-world shadows pass;
But, in fault of wizard spell,
Moderns their tale can only tell
In dull words, with a poor reed
Breaking at each time of need.
But those to whom a hint suffices
Mottoes find for all devices,
See the knights behind their shields,
Through dried grasses, blooming fields.
Some dried grass-tufts from the wide flowery field,
A muscle-shell from the lone fairy shore,
Some antlers from tall woods which never more
To the wild deer a safe retreat can yield,
An eagle's feather which adorned a Brave,
Well-nigh the last of his despairing band,—
For such slight fits wilt thou extend thy hand
When weary hours a brief refreshment crave ?
I give you what I can, not what I would
If my small drinking-cup would hold a flood,
As Scandinavia sung those must contain
With which the giants fods may entertain ;
In our dwarf day we drain few drops, and soom must thirst again.

Margaret Fuller
by Frederic A. Moritz

Margaret Fuller "possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time." So wrote Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in <>. Author, editor, and teacher, Fuller contributed significantly to the American Renaissance in literature and reform movements. A brilliant and highly educated member of the Transcendentalist group, she challenged Ralph Waldo Emerson both intellectually and emotionally. Women who attended her "conversations" and many prominent men of her time found Fuller's influence life-changing. Her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, profoundly affected the women's rights movement which had its formal beginning at Seneca Falls, New York, three years later.

THE INTELLECTUAL AS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

Margaret Fuller was an American literary critic, feminist critic, pioneer. She is often considered the country's first woman foreign correspondent. Consider her also the mother of modern human rights reporting.

The New England intellectual broke new paths to use the power of a journalist to spotlight upon controversial issues of human freedom. Fuller - also a poet and an essayist - was perhaps the first great pioneer to make of journalism a "watchdog" to alert American readers to human rights issues abroad.

Margaret Fuller became a foreign correspondent as the last stage in a personal voyage full of intense intellectual and emotional growth. She was an intellectual who became a foreign correspondent - rather than a journalist by trade.

A HIGH STRUNG PRODIGY SHIPS OUT TO THE WORLD

Margaret Fuller's emergence as a writer and journalist marked the transformation of America.

A young country looking primarily to overseas writers for its literary and intellectual life became a more self-confident nation with its own way of reaching out to view the world.
As a social critic, essayist, poet, feminist theorist, and letter writer, Margaret Fuller already had a national reputation when the Universalist Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune a voyage by the day's standards of high tech speed

NEW ENGLAND'S LITERATI TO NEW YORK'S WORD MONGERS

Fuller shared the romantic emphasis of the time on both idealism and realism. Idealism could be expressed in the study of Greek and Roman history and literature, as well as German philosophy. Realism was expressed by emphasis on travel and observation, using journals to document and pass on to readers what had been learned through both mental and physical travel. This aspect of romanticism provided a powerful foundation for Margaret Fuller's journalism.
Sometimes the travel or "excursion" might be the foundation for an exploration of cultural or national or sexual character. By depicting excursions into other "worlds," Fuller drew attention to the ways she and other Americans - both men and women - had been "domesticated." Sometimes, as in the portrait of her mother's garden in her "Autobiographical Romance," she found another world in which the maternalized image of a pastoral retreat that offered escape from a masculine America. At other times the language of mythology and dreams provided her with visionary landscapes in which female figures were able to achieve a nobility and heroism unavailable in contemporary religious narratives.

Fuller's move from the New England literary establishment into the world of New York journalism working was controversial. Historian Perry Miller describes it as her "great act of treason in the eyes of New England intellectuals" (Margaret Fuller, American Romantic, xi.) Fuller's protege Ralph Waldo Emerson conceded the work Fuller was doing in New York might be "honorable," but maintained, "still this employment is not satisfactory to me." (Perry xl). Yet Fuller used her New York time to pioneer journalistically by visiting and analyzing the city's prisons and mental asylums

"Let me gather from the Earth,
one full grown fragrant flower,
Let it bloom within my bosom
through its one blooming hour.
Let it die within my bosom
and to its parting breadth
Mine shall answer, having lived,
I shrink not now from death.
It is this niggard halfness that turns
my heart to stone,
'Tis the cup seen, not tasted,
that makes the infant moan.
Let me for once press firm my lips
upon the movement's brow,
Let me for once distinctly feel
I am happy now.
And bliss shall seal a blessing
upon the moments brow."