Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/69

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COUNTRY LIFE AT GROTON.
51

Margaret Fuller. To be sure, her brother Eugene, who was her nearest companion, was now absent. “Eugene and I,” she writes in a later diary, “were near of an age, and loved to wander out together, over the streams and through the woods, walking and talking or oftener silent.”[1] Eugene Fuller was not the most intellectual of her brothers, but the most winning and attractive; he had graduated at Harvard in 1834, and was at this time private tutor at the plantation of my uncle, Colonel Samuel Storrow, at Farley, Culpeper County, Virginia. This explains an allusion in the following letter, written by Margaret Fuller to her father during a temporary visit in Cambridge, — which I give to show how cordial a tie really united them, in spite of her criticisms. The “dearest” and “most affectionate” mean a good deal.

Boston, June 2, 1835.

Dearest Father, — I was very glad to receive your letter although ’t was but brief. You have of late omitted to write to me when I was absent, and I have felt as if you thought of me less than I wished you should.

“I have been passing ten days at Cambridge, with Mrs. Farrar, and indeed they were most happy. Everybody so kind, the country so beautiful, and my own spirits so light. We made little excursions almost every day. Last Thursday I rode twenty-two miles on horseback without any fatigue. Mrs. F. had a most agreeable party the day before I came away. But of

  1. MS. Diary, 1844.