Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/71

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COUNTRY LIFE AT GROTON.
53

dollars from my portion, than feel even the least unwilling. Will you not write to me immediately, and say you love me, and are very glad I am to be so happy???

“It was very unkind in Mr. Robinson to have Mr. Emerson [preach] during my absence. I think I shall join Richard and Arthur in attending Mr. Kittredge’s [church]. I must write a few words to mother, so adieu, from

Your most affectionate daughter, M.”[1]

Fathers are fortunately so constituted as rarely to refuse appeals like this, and Margaret Fuller had her journey. It was her first experience of a pleasure which then, perhaps, had a greater zest than now, as being rarer, and involving more adventure. She went to Newport, then dear to her as the summer home of the Rev. Dr. Channing, — to New York, and to Trenton Falls, accounted one of the glories of America in the simple days when the wonders of Colorado and the Yosemite Valley were unknown. In the autumn she met Miss Harriet Martineau at the house of Professor Farrar, and a new delight opened before her vision. It was proposed that she should make a voyage to England with the Farrars; and under the guidance of her kind friends, long resident in England, she hoped to meet the larger intellectual circle of which she had dreamed. But suddenly a blow fell which crushed this hope and brought the profoundest emotions. Her father was taken ill of cholera, September 30, 1835, and

  1. Fuller MSS i. 153.