Other women have been brave and pure, but this woman was an Abdiel. Never had she faltered in her life, never encountered a sham but to crush it. We did not know what freedom meant, till we had this book. Its advent was an era, not merely in the literature, but in the life, of woman. Its welcome, so profound, so stirring, betrayed the secrets of womanly nature. Do you remember how you sat and discussed this book, far into the night?--how you wondered whether man or woman wrote it?--how the women it enfranchised _looked_ their scorn when you suggested the first possibility?--how your temper and feeling, and sense of justice, were roused by it? All this was because a life resolute and free poured itself out between those covers. A woman delicate, cleanly, quaint, secured the polished purity of every page. Will you start, if I ask you who ever stated the Woman's-Rights' argument with the serene force of the little lace-mender in the "Professor"? Do you not envy her and her husband the happy English home secured by their united labors? Ah! when she gave us later that exquisite miniature of her sister Emily which she called "Shirley," that noble bit of Rubens color which she named "Villette," the same flood of womanly thought and feeling poured through the prayer,--_the same flood_, though we no longer started as when we first heard society's signal gun, and saw her whole fleet hoist the flag of distress. Women ought to buy that old stone house upon the hillside, set in among the tombs, and framed in purple heather. The lives which began and ended there have hedged it in with laurels. Read this life and these works, and learn what fortunes hang upon a noble living. Read them, that you may learn how to cheer the world with what is natural and dignified, to do your Master's work, regardless of narrow criticism or still disdain. The host of imitators who stand about Charlotte Bronté's still-open grave are the best tribute to the power that went out from her,--a power tempered by the sweetest personal graces, by a housekeeping delicate and pure and tasteful, which never lets us dream of Jane in her school at Morton, of Shirley in her peach-room parlor, of the lace-mender at the professor's desk, or Lucy Snowe in the first class of Paul Emanuel, as otherwise than brilliant in cleanliness and order. I turn reluctantly from a life so well known, and now, thank God, beginning to be so well understood. I do not treat of Margaret Fuller as a literary power; for, whatever may be her rank in this respect, she does not exert a tithe of the influence in this way, which attaches to the idea of her as a person, to _herself_ as the centre of the radiant and shining group of women who were known as "Margaret's friends."