“Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office…. I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me,—even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament,—to a premature grave.”

“Humanity is divided into men, women, and Margaret Fuller.”

— Edgar Poe (c.1845), publication (Ѻ)

“Fuller had read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost exclusively: Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above all GOETHE. It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her that the last writer—food or poison—the most powerful of all mental reagents—the pivotal mind in modern literature—for all before him are ancients, and all who have read him are modern—that this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, that place was filled, nor was there room for any other. She had that symptom which appears to all the students of Goethe.”

— Ralph Emerson (1852), commentary on Margaret Fuller [2]

“She sprang out of the head of all the Zeuses about: her father Timothy Fuller, Emerson, Goethe”; like John Mill, her father’s wish was to make her ‘heir to all he knew’.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick (1986). “The Genius of Margaret Fuller” [3]

“I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”

— Margaret Fuller (c.1840), publication (Ѻ)