likely; but conscientious, vigorous, well-informed, and public-spirited. His daughter Margaret always recognized, after all his mistakes, her great intellectual obligations to him; and his accurate habits of mind were always mentioned by her with admiration. “Your father” she wrote to her brother Richard, many years later, “had very great power of attention; I have never seen any person who excelled him in that;”[1] and she essayed to carry into her ideal realms the same laborious and careful habits which he had brought to bear in law and statesmanship. Meanwhile she derived from her mother a different, and, in some ways, a more elevating influence. Mrs. Fuller long outlived both daughter and husband, and I remember her very well. She must have been one of the sweetest and most self-effacing wives ever ruled by a strong-willed spouse. Her maiden name was Margaret Crane, and she was the daughter of Major Peter Crane, of Canton, Mass. Of what good Puritan stock she also came may be seen not alone in the sturdy militia-title which her father bore, but in the following picture, recalling some of Heine’s or Erckmann-Chatrian’s peasant sketches, of her old mother — the maternal grandmother of Margaret Fuller. The grand-daughter gives this description of the good lady, as she appeared in later life: —
““Mother writes that my dear old grandmother is dead. I am sorry you never saw her. She was a
- ↑ Fuller MSS: ii. p. 691.
