Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson)/Chapter 03

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 

III.

GIRLHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE.

(1810-1833.)

Sarah Margaret, the oldest of the eight children of Timothy and Margaret (Crane) Fuller, was born May 28, 1810, in that part of Cambridge still known as Cambridgeport. There are attractive situations in that suburb, but Cherry Street, can scarcely be classed among them, and the tide of business and the pressure of a tenement-house population have closed in upon it since then. The dwelling of Timothy Fuller still stands at the corner of Eaton Street, and is easily recognized by the three elms in front, two of which, at least, were planted by him in the year when Margaret was born. The garden, in which she and her mother delighted, has long since vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 27, 29, and 31 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants. The pillared doorway, and the carved wreaths above it, give still an old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated birthplace of Margaret Fuller.

In the fragment of an autobiographical romance, given in her “ Memoirs,” there is a graphic sketch of this early home; and the following briefer one, hitherto unpublished, occurs in a journal of travel kept, many years after, for her brother Richard: —

“I feel satisfied, as I thought I should, with reading these bolder lines in the manuscript of Nature. Merely gentle and winning scenes are not enough for me; I wish my lot had been cast amid the sources of the streams, where the voice of the hidden torrent is heard by night; where the eagle soars, and the thunder resounds in long peals from side to side; where the grasp of a more powerful emotion has rent asunder the rocks, and the long purple shadows fall like a broad wing upon the valley. All places, like all persons, I know, have beauty which may be discovered by a thoughtful and observing mind; but only in some scenes and with some people can I expand, and feel myself at home. I feel this all the more for having passed my childhood in such a place as Cambridgeport. There I had nothing except the little flower-garden behind the house, and the elms before the door. I used to long and pine for beautiful places such as I read of. There was not one walk for me except over the bridge; I liked that very much, the river, and the city glittering in sunset, and the lovely undulating line all round, and the light smokes seen in some weather.”^[1]

Her father, from her early childhood, took charge of her education, and devoted to it much time. She began to study Latin at the age of six, and was carried on, from that period, by an intellectual forcing process. It was the custom of the time. Rev. Dr. Hedge, afterwards her intimate intellectual companion, assures me that there was nothing peculiar, for that period, in Mr. Fuller’s method, except that it was applied to a girl. Cambridge boys, if the sons of college-bred men, were brought up in much the same way. Dr. Hedge himself was fitted for college at eleven, and had read half the body of Latin literature before that time. What made the matter worse in her case was not the mere fact that she was a girl, though that doubtless created a need of such watchful care as only a mother can give. There was the serious additional evil that all her lessons must be recited after her father came back from his office, and therefore at irregular hours, often extending late into the evening. High pressure is bad enough for an imaginative and excitable child, but high pressure by candle-light is ruinous; yet that was the life she lived. The fragment of autobiographical romance in which she vividly describes the hcrrors of this method must not, as her brother Arthur has suggested, be taken too literally; but frequent references in her later journals show her deep sense of the wrong she suffered in mind and body by the mistaken system applied in her early youth. Writing in her diary, many years afterwards, of some improvements in physical training, especially as to tightlacing, she says: —

“If we had only been as well brought up in these respects! It is not mother’s fault that she was ignorant of every physical law, young, untaught country girl as she was; but I can’t help mourning, sometimes, that my bodily life should have been so destroyed by the ignorance of both my parents.”^[2]

At thirteen, Margaret Fuller was so precocious in mind and appearance as to take her place in society with much older girls; she went to parties of young people, and gave such entertainments for herself. Having been a pupil at the school, then celebrated, of Dr. Park, in Boston, she once attempted to mingle her two sets of friends — Boston and Cambridge — at a party given in her own house. The attempt was disastrous; she had little natural tact, and her endeavors to pay, as was proper, the chief attention to the stranger guests brought upon her the general indignation of her little world in Cambridge. Partly in consequence of this untoward state of things, and in order to change the scene, she was sent as a pupil to the school of the Misses Prescott, in Groton. There she had a curious episode of personal experience, recorded in her “Summer on the Lakes” as having occurred to a certain fabled “Mariana;” and she received from her teachers a guidance so kind and tender as to make her grateful for it during all her life. She returned from this school in the spring of 1825, being then just fifteen.

At this time she lived, as always, a busy life, — rose before five in summer, walked an hour, practiced an hour on the piano, breakfasted at seven, read Sismondi’s “European Literature” in French till eight, then Brown’s “Philosophy ” till half past nine, then went to school for Greek at twelve, then practiced again till dinner. After the early dinner she read two hours in Italian, then walked or rode; and in the evening played, sang, and retired at eleven to write in her diary. This, be it observed, was at the very season when girls of fifteen or sixteen are, in these days, on their way to the seashore or the mountains. The school where she recited Greek was a private institution of high character in Cambridgeport, known familiarly as the “C. P. P. G. S.,” or “Cambridge Port Private Grammar School,” a sort of academy, kept at that time by Mr. Perkins, a graduate of Yale College. It was so excellent that it drew many pupils from what was then called Old Cambridge, — now Harvard Square, — then quite distinct from “the Port,” and not especially disposed to go to it for instruction. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of Margaret Fuller's fellow pupils, as were John Holmes, his younger brother, and Richard Henry Dana. From those who were her associates in this school, it is possible to obtain a very distinct impression of her as she then appeared.

She came to school for these Greek recitations only, and was wont to walk in with that peculiar carriage of the head and those half-shut eyelids which have been so often described; and which were so far from producing antagonism among the younger girls that they rather caused an amusing sense of envy and emulation. “We thought,” said one among them to me, “that if we could only come into school that way, we could know as much Greek as she did.” Other traits of hers these youthful observers also noted with admiration. There was then a social library in one of the village shops; to this she would go, wearing a hooded cloak; she would take off the cloak, fill the hood with books, swing it over her shoulders, books and all, and so carry it home. “We all wished,” said my informant, “that our mothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our books in the same way.” Yet it does not seem to have been their impression that she neglected her home duties for the sake of knowledge; such was her conceded ability that she was supposed equal to doing everything at once. It was currently reported that she could rock the cradle, read a book, eat an apple, and knit a stocking, all at the same time; and here also the indefatigable imitation of her young admirers toiled after her in vain. How she impressed the boys, meanwhile, may be gathered from Dr. Holmes’s amusing description of the awe with which he regarded the opening sentence of one of her school compositions: “It is a trite remark.”^[3] Alas! he did not know the meaning of the word “trite.”

A lady, who at a later period knew Margaret Fuller well, writes me a characteristic reminiscence of the first glimpse of her; at a time when she came as an unexpected guest to my informant’s house, on the occasion of a little party of younger children. She entered, a tall girl of fifteen, plain, but with “a peculiar swaying grace in her motion.” She happened to carry in her hand a large handkerchief, such as it was the fashion of those days to use; and with this handkerchief for a bâton she at once assumed direction of the children; waving her sign of office by one corner as she guided them in new games, to the great amusement of the mother and elder sisters, who found themselves relieved of all trouble in the entertainment. “I was greatly drawn to her,” says my informant, then a girl of eleven or twelve. Children are keen critics of one another, and this testimony from a juvenile hostess proves the essential bonhomie and cordiality of the stranger guest. And whenever, from this time on, she assumed the part of leadership in a mixed company, it is to be observed that the attitude was always accepted as natural and agreeable by those present; it was only the absent who criticised.

There seems to be no foundation for the view suggested recently, that Mr. Fuller was moved, in his efforts to give his daughter a high education, by a baffled social ambition. In the first place, there was very little room for any such thing; the Cambridge society was very simple, as it still remains; and Mr. Fuller’s standing, being that of a lawyer and congressman, was as good as anybody’s. There was a prejudice against him politically, no doubt, he being a Democrat when the ruling classes in Massachusetts were Federalists; but his social position was unimpaired. Neither he nor his wife had the attribute of personal elegance or grace; but he evidently took pains to fill the prominent place to which he was justly entitled; and an entertainment given by him to John Quincy Adams, the President, in 1826, was one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days of the Lechmeres and Vassalls. He was then residing in a fine old mansion, built by Chief Justice Dana, on what is still called Dana Hill, — a house destroyed by fire in 1839, — and his guests were invited from far and near to a dinner and a ball. Few Cambridge hosts would then have attempted so much as this; but had Mr. Fuller’s social prominence been far less than it was, he would have been the very last person to find out the deficiency. Had he lived next door to an imperial palace, he would have thought that it was he who did the favor by mingling with his neighbors. As to his daughter, he took pride in her precocious abilities, and enjoyed her companionship in his favorite studies; that tells the whole story. Stimulating, even flattering, his companionship might be; but tender, wise, considerate, it could not be. On that side — and it was with her the important side — she cast herself against an iron wall. Her early diaries were burned by herself long after, and it is only by glimpses in her later papers that we can reconstruct this girlish life. Looking back, at the age of thirty, she writes in a fragment of journal: —

“When I recollect how deep the anguish, how deeper still the want, with which I walked alone in hours of childish passion and called for a Father, after saying the word a hundred times, till it was stifled by sobs, how great seems the duty that name imposes.”^[4]

Under ordinary circumstances, the mother’s influence comes in to fill this void. Unfortunately Mr. Fuller for many years deemed it his mission to be both father and mother; and his sweet wife, absorbed in her younger children, insensibly yielded. His authority over his daughter did not stop with the world of books. Many a man feels bound vigorously to superintend the intellectual education of his little maiden, and then leaves all else — dress, society, correspondence — to the domain of the mother. Not so with Mr. Fuller. It is the testimony of those who then knew the family well that his wife surrendered all these departments also to his sway. He was to control the daughter’s whole existence. Jean Paul says that the mother puts the commas and the semicolons into the child’s life, but the father the colons and the periods. In the Fuller household the whole punctuation was masculine. Had Margaret an invitation, her father decided whether it should be accepted, and suggested what she should wear; did she receive company at home, he made out the list; and when the evening came, he and his daughter received them: the mother only casually appearing, a shy and dignified figure in the background. At a later period, after his death, Margaret Fuller and her mother became all-in-all to each other, but at this early period the tie between them, though affectionate, was not intimate; for almost all purposes of direction and guidance she was her father’s child.

Margaret Fuller’s personal appearance at this early period has been described by several of her biographers; but one hears very different accounts of it from different quarters, the least flattering being those given by her own sex. The inexorable memory of a certain venerable Cambridge lady recalls her graphically as she appeared at the ball given by her father to President Adams; a young girl of sixteen with a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head; she was laced so tightly, my informant declares, by reason of stoutness, that she had to hold her arms back as if they were pinioned; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-necked pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner. On the other hand, it is maintained that she had in childhood something of her mother’s peculiar beauty of complexion, this being, however, spoiled at twelve years old by a tendency of blood to the head, which the tight-lacing must have assisted. It is also said that her eyes would have been good had they not been injured by near-sightedness, and that her peculiar smile had only a passing effect of superciliousness, and was really kind and truthful. She had what her school-mate Dr. O. W. Holmes described as “a long and flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother.”^[5] Her hands were smooth and white, and she made such prominent use of them that she was charged by her critics — as was also charged upon Madame de Staël in respect to her arms — with making the most of her only point of beauty.

The total effect was undoubtedly that of personal plainness; and the consciousness of this fact was no doubt made more vivid to her by the traditions and remains of her mother’s beauty, and by the fact that this quality was transmitted in even an enhanced form to her own younger sister Ellen, whom she reared and educated. Ellen Fuller, afterwards the wife of Ellery Channing, the poet, was in person and character one of the most attractive of women. She had a Madonna face, a broad brow, exquisite coloring, and the most noble and ingenuous expression, mingled, in her sister Margaret’s phrase, with “the look of an appealing child.” I knew her intimately, her husband being my near relative, and our households being for various reasons closely brought together; and have always considered her one of the most admirable women I have ever had the good fortune to meet. She not only had an active and cultivated mind, and a strength of character that surmounted some of life’s severest trials, but she was as singularly gifted in the sphere of home and social life as was her sister in that of literature. She instantly drew to her all strangers by her face, while her elder sister had no such advantage; and though it is certain that no shade of jealousy ever came between these high-minded persons, it was not in human nature that Margaret Fuller should not have felt her own conscious want of attractions to be enhanced by the contrast.

As a tribute to this fair sister, and also to the deep feeling which Margaret Fuller at last learned to cherish toward her father, I copy the following reminiscence from a diary kept by her many years later: —

“I remembered our walking in the garden avenue, between the tall white lilies and Ellen’s apple-tree; she was a lovely child then, and happy, but my heart ached, and I lived in just the way I do now. Father said, seeing me at a distance, ‘Incedo regina,’ etc. Poor Juno! Father admired me, and, though he caused me so much suffering, had a true sense at times of what is tragic for me. The other day, when C—— was cutting a lock of my hair for one who so little knows how to value it, I thought of my finding it in Father’s desk, with all these other little tokens. It was a touching sight. Father, if you hear me, know that your daughter thinks of you with the respect and relenting tenderness you deserve. Time has removed all obstructions to a clear view of what you were. I am glad you were withdrawn from a world which had grown so bitter to you; but I wish we might reach you with our gentle thoughts.”^[6]

Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is now a city of 52,000 inhabitants, had, at the time of Margaret Fuller’s birth, but 2,328. When she was twenty years old it had 6,072, divided between three detached villages; and was in many respects a very pleasant place in which to be born and bred. It was, no doubt, in the current phrase of to-day, “provincial;” in other words, it was not one of the two or three great capitals of the civilized world; but there are few places in any country which bring together a larger proportion of cultivated and agreeable families than must then have been found in this quiet academic suburb. One could not quite venture to say of it as Stuart Newton, the painter, said of Boston, during a brilliant London career about that period, “I meet in London occasionally such society as I met in Boston all the time;” but it needs only to mention some of the men who made Cambridge what it was, between 1810 and 1880, to show that my claim for the little town is not too high. Judge Story, whose reputation is still very wide, was then the head of the law school, and in the zenith of his fame; the all-accomplished Edward Everett was Greek professor; English was taught by Edward T. Channing, who certainly trained more and better authors than any teacher yet known in America; George Ticknor was organizing the department of modern languages; George Bancroft was a tutor. The town in which these men lived and taught may have been provincial in population, but it was intellectually metropolitan; where McGregor sits, there is the head of the table. Moreover, by a happy chance, the revolutions of Europe were sending to this country, about that time, many highly cultivated Germans and Italians, of whom Harvard College had its full share. Charles Follen taught German; Charles Beck, Latin; Pietro Bachi, Italian; Friedrich Gräter gave drawing lessons. England, too, contributed to the American Cambridge the most delightful of botanists and ornithologists, — his books being still classics, — Thomas Nuttall. He organized the Botanic Garden of the college, and initiated the modern tendency toward the scientific side of education. From some of these men Margaret Fuller had direct instruction; but she was, at any rate, formed in a society which was itself formed by their presence.

And, since young people are trained quite as much by each other as by their elders, it was fortunate that Margaret Fuller found among the young men who were her contemporaries some companions well worth having. She went into society, as has been seen, very early — far too early. The class with which she may be said to have danced through college — to adopt Howells's phrase — was that of 1829, which has been made, by the wit and poetry of Holmes, the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. With Holmes she was not especially intimate, though they had been school-mates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the class — William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke — she formed a life-long friendship, and they became her biographers. Another of these biographers — the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge, her townsman — knew her also at this period, though he had already left college and had previously been absent from Cambridge for some years, at a German gymnasium. Still another associate, also of the class of 1829, was her kinsman, George T. Davis, afterwards well known as a member of Congress from the Greenfield (Mass.) district, — a man of the world and of brilliant gifts.

But after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own sex; and since Margaret Fuller's mother was one of the self-effacing sort, it was fortunate for the young girl that, by a natural reaction, she sought feminine influences outside of her own home. She was one of those maidens who form passionate attachments to older women; and there was fortunately in Cambridge at that time a group of highly cultivated ladies, most of whom belonged to the college circle, and who in turn won her ardent loyalty. My elder sister can well remember this studious, self-conscious, overgrown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with kisses and treasuring her every word. It was the same at another time with my aunt, Miss Ann G. Storrow, a person of great wit and mental brilliancy; the same with Mrs. J. W. Webster, a most winning and lovely woman, born at the Azores and bearing a tropic softness and sweetness in her manners. Most of these ladies were too much absorbed in their own duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer; but she fortunately encountered one friend who resolutely took her in hand.

This lady was the wife of the Harvard professor of astronomy; a woman of uncommon character and cultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no children of her own, did many good services for the children of her friends. She was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, or, as she always preferred to call herself on her title-pages, Mrs. John Farrar. Having myself resided for some time beneath this lady's roof, I can certify to her strong and well-balanced nature, and her resolute zeal in moulding the manners as well as morals of the young. She was one of our first and best writers for children; her “Young Lady's Friend” was almost the pioneer manual of its kind; and her “Recollections of Seventy Years” is an admirable record of a well-spent life. She was the friend of Miss Martineau and others of the ablest English women of her time; she readily saw the remarkable intellect of Margaret Fuller, and also perceived the defects of her training. She undertook to mould her externally, to make her less abrupt, less self-asserting, more comme il faut in ideas, manners, and even costume. She had her constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser, and instructed her dressmaker; took her to make calls, took her on journeys. Mrs. Farrar had, moreover, often with her a young kinswoman who furnished outwardly and inwardly a charming model, Miss Anna Barker, of New Orleans, now Mrs. S. G. Ward. This lady, whose gifts and graces have since won affectionate admiration in two continents, was soon a warm friend of Margaret Fuller; who had already another friend of similar attractions in Miss Harriet Fay, now Mrs. W. H. Greenough, then living in the very next house at Cambridgeport and for a time her inseparable companion. Dr. Holmes has once or twice referred to this last fair maiden in his writings as “the golden blonde,” and describes vividly in his “Cinders from the Ashes” the manner in which she won the hearts of all the school-boys.^[7] One of her especial attractions was a head covered with sunny curls, the free gift of nature; and it was believed by penetrating — that is, feminine — observers that the less facile ringlets for which Margaret Fuller's hair was kept in unsightly curl-papers all the morning were due to a hopeless emulation of her lovely friend. It was, in short, Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier in a school-room. At any rate, it is very probable that the early intimacy with these beautiful and attractive maidens had much to do with creating in Margaret Fuller that strong admiration for personal charms — amounting almost to envy, but never to ungenerous jealousy — which marked her life-time.

How ardent and how deep were her emotions towards these early friends can best be seen from this passage, which appears without date in her diary: —

“I loved —— for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. Her face was always gleaming before me, her voice was echoing in my ear, all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image. This love was for me a key which unlocked many a treasure which I still possess; it was the carbuncle (emblematic gem!) which cast light into many of the darkest corners of human nature. She loved me, too, though not so much, because her nature was ‘less high, less grave, less large, less deep;’ but she loved more tenderly, less passionately. She loved me, for I well remember her suffering when she first could feel my faults, and knew one part of the exquisite veil rent away.”^[8]

Margaret Fuller's precocity and her taste for hard study naturally created for her the reputation, among those who did not know her, of a grave young pedant. Nothing could be wider of the mark; she was full of sentiment, began to write poetry at fifteen, and produced some verses at seventeen which her brother has preserved in print; verses mourning, as is the wont of early youth, over the flight of years and life's freshness already vanished.

STANZAS.

WRITTEN AT THE AGE OF SEVENTEEN.

I.
“	Come, breath of dawn! and o'er my temples play;
	Rouse to the draught of life the wearied sense;
	Fly, sleep! with thy sad phantoms, far away;
	Let the glad light scare those pale troublous shadows hence!
II.
“	I rise, and leaning from my casement high,
	Feel from the morning twilight a delight;
	Once more youth's portion, hope, lights up my eye,
	And for a moment I forget the sorrows of the night.
III.
“	O glorious morn! how great is yet thy power!
	Yet how unlike to that which once I knew,
	When, plumed with glittering thoughts, my soul would soar,
	And pleasures visited my heart like daily dew!
IV.
“	Gone is life's primal freshness all too soon;
	For me the dream is vanished ere my time;
	I feel the heat and weariness of noon,
	And long in night's cool shadows to recline.”[9]

When these moods passed by, she was the gayest of companions, overflowing with wit, humor, anecdote, and only too ready sarcasm. This can best be seen in one of her letters to the correspondent with whom she was at her gayest, a brilliant and attractive woman long since dead, the wife of the Rev. D. H. Barlow, of Lynn, Mass., and the mother of General F. C. Barlow. To her Margaret Fuller writes thus, with girlish exuberance, at the age of seventeen; fully recognizing, as the closing words show, the ordeal of criticism through which she often had to make her way: —

“Cambridge, November 19, 1830. 

…“Many things have happened since I echoed your farewell laugh. Elizabeth [Randall] and I have been fully occupied. She has cried a great deal, painted a good deal, and played the harp most of all. I have neither fertilized the earth with my tears, edified its inhabitants by my delicacy of constitution, nor wakened its echoes to my harmony; yet some things have I achieved in my own soft feminine style. I hate glare, thou knowest, and have hitherto successfully screened my virtues therefrom. I have made several garments fitted for the wear of American youth; I have written six letters, and received a correspondent number; I have read one book, — a piece of poetry entitled, ‘Two Agonies,’ by M. A. Browne, (pretty caption, is it not?) — and J. J. Knapp's trial; I have given advice twenty times, — I have taken it once; I have gained two friends and recovered two; I have felt admiration four times, horror once, and disgust twice; I have been a journey, and showed my penetration in discovering the beauties of Nature through a thick and never-lifted shroud of rain; I have turned two new leaves in the book of human nature; I have got a new pink bag (beautiful!). I have imposed on the world, time and again, by describing your Lynn life as the perfection of human felicity, and adorning my visit there with all sorts of impossible adventures, — thus at once exhibiting my own rich invention and the credulous ignorance of my auditors (light and dark, you know, dear, give life to a picture); I have had tears for others' woes, and patience for my own, — in short, to climax this journal of many-colored deeds and chances, so well have I played my part, that in the self-same night I was styled by two several persons, ‘a sprightly young lady,’ and ‘a Syren!!’ Oh rapturous sound! I have reached the goal of my ambition. Earth has nothing fairer or brighter to offer. ‘Intelligency’ was nothing to it. A ‘supercilious,’ ‘satirical,’ ‘affected,’ ‘pedantic,’ ‘Syren’!!!! Can the olla podrida of human nature present a compound of more varied ingredients, or higher gusto?”^[10] …

At the beginning of 1833 she wrote as follows in her diary, looking forward to an uneventful year. She was at this time living in what was then a picturesque old house, now shorn of part of its amplitude and of its superb row of great linden trees, — the Brattle House on Brattle Street, Cambridge. The great buildings of the University Press now cover the ground once laid out in formal old-fashioned gardens, with fish ponds, bridges, and spring-houses, every inch of which was once familiar to me as I played there with the younger Fullers, little dreaming that I should ever be the biographer of the staid elder sister who sat, book in hand, beneath the doorway, or perhaps wrote at the window this passage in her diary, by way of forecast of the immediate future: —

“I have settled the occupations of the coming six months. Some duties come first, — to parents, brothers, and sisters, — but these will not consume above one sixth of the time: the family is so small now, mother will have little need of my sewing: we shall probably see very little company. The visits required of me by civility will be few. When the Farrars return, I hope to see them frequently, and E. Woodward I may possibly know, if she comes. But I shall not, of free-will, look out of doors for a moment’s pleasure. I shall have no one to stay here for any time except E. I love her, and she is never in the way. All hopes of traveling I have dismissed. All youthful hopes, of every kind, I have pushed from my thoughts. I will not, if I can help it, lose an hour in castle-building and repining, — too much of that already. I have now a pursuit of immediate importance: to the German language and literature I will give my undivided attention. I have made rapid progress for one quite unassisted. I have always hitherto been too constantly distracted by childish feelings to acquire anything properly, but have snatched a little here and there to feed my restless fancy therewith. Please God now to keep my mind composed, that I may store it with all that may be hereafter conducive to the best good of others. Oh, keep me steady in an honorable ambition; favored by this calm, this obscurity of life, I might learn everything, did not feeling lavish away my strength. Let it be no longer thus. Teach me to think justly and act firmly. Stifle in my breast those feelings which, pouring forth so aimlessly, did indeed water but the desert, and offend the sun’s clear eye by producing weeds of rank luxuriance. Thou art my only Friend! Thou hast not seen fit to interpose one feeling, understanding breast between me and a rude, woful world. Vouchsafe then thy protection, that I may hold on in courage of soul!”^[11]

Before midsummer it had been decided that the family should remove to Groton, and we find her writing from that village, July 4, 1833.

1. Fuller MSS. ii. 711-3.
2. MS. Diary, 1844.
3. Atlantic Monthly, xxiii, 117.
4. MS.
5. Atlantic Monthly, xxiii. 116.
6. MS. Diary, 1844. Mr. Fuller’s reference was to Virgil’s description of Juno, “Ast ego quæ divum incedo regina.”
7. Atlantic Monthly, xxiii. 116.
8. Fuller MSS. i. 445.
9. Life Without and Within, p. 370.
10. Fuller MSS. i. 1.
11. Fuller MSS. i. 409. She was reading Shelley at this time, and in his early poem On Death occur the lines: —

    “O man, hold thee on in courage of soul
     Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way.”