Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/249

feel in Europe, an impulse to separate herself for a time from all English-speaking people and plunge into a wholly untried atmosphere. She had new and interesting friends, such as the Milanese Madame Arconati, Marchesa Visconti; and a Polish lady, born Princess Radzivill. But unlike, alas! the majority of Americans in Europe, her whole sympathy was with the party of progress, and the rapid unrolling of events in 1848 made an occasion for her, “such a time as I have always dreamed of,” she writes. She saw the uprising against Austria; the Austrian arms burned in the public square. She was herself poor, a stranger remote from home; but she was for a time better in health than since she was a child, and her whole heart was with the Italian revolution. When Mazzini returned from his seventeen years of exile, she was able to stand by his side. She saw the republic established; she saw it fall. In April, 1849, Rome was besieged by the French army. Yet already a deeper thread than even the welfare of Italy had mingled itself in her life. In December, 1847, she had been secretly married; in September, 1848, her child had been born. But for this climax of her life I must turn to the narratives of others.