intention which can be distinctly comprehended only by throwing the exterior (more sensitive) portions of the mental retina casually over the wide field of universal analogy—­I mean to say that this intention has not been sufficiently considered.  Miss Fuller has erred, too, through her own excessive objectiveness.  She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth.  Holding these opinions in regard to ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century,’ I still feel myself called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism of the work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of “The Broadway Journal.”  That article was not written by myself, and was written by my associate, Mr. Briggs.

“The most favorable estimate of Miss Fuller’s genius (for high genius she unquestionably possesses) is to be obtained, perhaps, from her contributions to ‘The Dial,’ and from her ‘Summer on the Lakes.’  Many of the descriptions in this volume are unrivaled for graphicality, (why is there not such a word?) for the force with which they convey the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject.  This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which leads her to paint a scene less by its features than by its effects.

“Here, for example, is a portion of her account of Niagara:—­

“’Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got at last a proper foreground for these sublime distances.  Before coming away, I think I really saw the full wonder of the scene.  After a while it so drew me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never knew before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new existence.  The perpetual trampling of the waters seized my senses. I felt that no other sound, however near, could be heard, and would start and look behind me for a foe.  I realised the identity of that mood of nature in which these waters were poured down with such absorbing force, with that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil.  For continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome, images such as had never haunted it before, of naked savages stealing behind me with uplifted tomahawks.  Again and again this illusion recurred, and even after I had thought it over, and tried to shake it off, I could not help starting and looking behind me.  What I liked best was to sit on Table Rock close to the great fall; there all power of observing details, all separate consciousness was quite lost.’

“The truthfulness of the passages italicized will be felt by all; the feelings described are, perhaps, experienced by every (imaginative) person who visits the fall; but most persons, through predominant subjectiveness,