It is evident from the closing words of this and many other letters that a sense of foreboding was always upon her. In the midst of revolution, war, and death; seeing constantly the separation of families, the ruin of households; her whole soul clung with even more than a mother’s usual yearning to the actual presence of her boy. In interpreting the last tragic moment of her life, this must always be borne in mind. She writes to an American friend in Italy: “I have never answered what you said of the loss of Maria L.’s [Lowell’s] child. These things make me tremble with selfish sympathy. I could not, I think, survive the loss of my child; I wonder daily how it can be done.” How fine and penetrating is that phrase, “selfish sympathy.” No other two words ever expressed the precise emotion she describes, and no one ever felt that emotion more absorbingly than she. It is something, that the one danger she dreaded was the one calamity from which she was to be spared.
After the brief vision of a Roman republic had passed away, it seemed best for the Ossolis to leave Italy for America. Apart from the trifle that Ossoli had been able to secure of his own property, their main dependence must be on her pen. Her book on the Roman republic was ready for publication, and she believed that she could make better terms for it, if once in America, than the offers which she had received by mail. She thus writes: —
