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.”[1]
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
- ↑ MS.
