The land sharks and pirates were even carrying off the chests and clothing of the sailors, who were wandering around half-naked searching among the debris for their possessions. The second scene occurred a few days later. In it, the solitary figure of the writer and naturalist Thoreau, a few days after his 33rd birthday and far from his natural habitat at Walden Pond, walked up and down the Fire Island barrier beach searching, unsuccessfully, for Margaret Fuller. When she was 11, she was enrolled in the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies, which served up a demanding curriculum for the children of the city's intellectual elite. To excel in all things should be your constant aim, her father once wrote to her.
Mediocrity is obscurity.
Fuller became neither mediocre nor obscure. By this time Fuller had become a full participant with Emerson in the transcendentalist movement, which stressed individualism, self-reliance and the rejection of traditional authority. In 1839 she became editor of the transcendentalists' quarterly journal, The Dial. She was everywhere a welcome guest. In 1844, New-York Daily Tribune editor Horace Greeley hired her as literary editor.