 The transcendentalists aspired to rescue the United States from cultural provincialism. American culture was then chiefly based on Calvinism and on the Enlightenment; the transcendentalists wanted to introduce their country to Romanticism and the philosophy of Kant. Fuller was strongly attracted to German Romanticism. Hence her ambition, never realized, to write a biography of Goethe. Of the ancient philosophers to whom her father had introduced her, Fuller’s favorite was Plato.