(Sarah) Margaret Fuller

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(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER

MARCHÉSA D’OSSOLI

US’S 1ST FOREIGN WAR CORRESPONDENT

[PER EDGAR ALLAN POE,

HUMANITY WAS ONCE UPON A TIME DIVIDED INTO

“MEN, WOMEN, AND MARGARET FULLER”]

AS A COMPARISON PARTITION, CONSIDER “MAN, WOMAN, AND NABISCO” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1808

The French army occupied Rome, and invaded Spain seizing Barcelona and Madrid. Joseph Bonaparte, who had been King of Naples, became King of Spain, and General Joachim Murat, began to rule in Naples in his stead (he would hold that job until 1815). There were widespread uprisings in Spain, and British troops landed in Portugal. Henry Crabb Robinson, sent by the Times of London to report on the Peninsular War, became the 1st war correspondent (Margaret Fuller, 1st female war correspondent, wasn’t yet born).

#1 Male #1 Female HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1810

May 23, Wednesday: Sarah Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts.1

King Solomon II was deposed as the Kingdom of Imeret’i (in Georgia) was annexed by Russia.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 23 of 5 Mo// The mind again refreshed with the Springs of Life. This eveng in looking forward to Y Meeting while setting at home with my dear H, my feelings were quite raised to a lively sensibility that I seldom have. I rememberd some favord seasons, at that time & as from present apperiences We shall be more at liberty to enjoy the company of our friends than the last. There seem’d something encourageing in the prospect, but how will be cannot tell, sickness or other disappointments may assail us & all our promised enjoyment be frustrated, but be that as it may I hope we shall be favord with the Life of Religion ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1. At age 10 she would be given permission to assume her mother’s name, Margaret. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1815

Sarah Fuller (Margaret Fuller), age 6, was reading the classics under the tutelage of her father Timothy Fuller.2

THE LONDON THEATRE. A COLLECTION OF THE MOST CELEBRATED DRAMATIC PIECES. CORRECTLY GIVEN, FROM COPIES USE IN THE THEATRES, BY THOMAS DIDBIN, OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE. / (VOLUME III: CATO. A TRAGEDY. BY JOSEPH ADDISON, ESQ. CORRECTLY GIVEN, FROM COPIES USED IN THE THEATRES, BY THOMAS DIDBIN, AUTHOR OF SEVERAL DRAMATIC PIECES: AND PROMPTER OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE) (London: Printed at the Chiswick Press, by C. Whittingham; for Whittingham and Arliss, Paternoster Row, 1815) CATO: A TRAGEDY

2. The Honorable Timothy Fuller had been born on July 11, 1778 in Chilmark, Massachusetts, a son of the Reverend Timothy Fuller, the initial settled minister of Princeton, Massachusetts. He had received a classical education at Harvard College and graduated in 1801 with 2d honors. He had become a lawyer and during this period was serving in the Massachusetts State Senate as a Democratic- Republican. In 1809 he had gotten married with Margaret Crane. The Honorable Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane Fuller would produce 8 children before his suddenly, intestate, and insolvent death of cholera in Groton, Massachusetts on October 1, 1835: — The 1st daughter Sarah Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts on May 23, 1810; got married (or something) with Giovanni, Marchese Ossoli, and bore one child, Angelo Philip Ossoli, at Rieti, Italy on September 5, 1848; parents and child drowned on July 19, 1850; — Julia Adelaide Fuller, died in childhood — The 1st son Eugene Fuller was born at Cambridge on May 14, 1815, graduated from Harvard College (just barely) in 1834; got married with a widow of New Orleans Mrs. Anna Eliza Rotta, and drowned on June 21, 1859 — The 2d son William Henry Fuller never went to college but applied himself to mercantile pursuits in New Orleans and then in Cincinnati, and later resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, getting married with Frances Elizabeth Hastings on February 28, 1840 (her mother was a Hammond, a niece of Mrs. Craigie of Craigie House, Cambridge); resided at Cambridge and died in New-York during December 1878 (his wife survived him, dying on May 13, 1885) — Ellen Kilshaw Fuller was born on August 7, 1820, got married with Ellery Channing II on September 24, 1841, and died on September 22, 1856 — Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller, born August 10, 1822, graduated from Harvard College, 1843; got married with, 1st on September 18, 1850, Elizabeth Godfrey Davenport, of Mendon, Massachusetts, who died March 4,1856; got married with, 2d, on September 28, 1859, Emma Lucilla Reeves of Wayland, Massachusetts — Richard Frederick Fuller — James Lloyds Fuller, died unmarried on July 7, 1891 — Edward Brecks Fuller, died in childhood HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1816

Opening of the Boston Infant School. At the city’s 7 public schools there were 2,365 pupils 836 of whom were female.

At the age of 6 Sarah Fuller (Margaret Fuller) began home study of Latin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1818

Sarah Fuller, age 8, was reading William Shakespeare under the tutelage of her father Timothy Fuller. At age 8 or 9 she would encounter the play Romeo and Juliet and would be deeply moved. As an adult she would write “At eight or nine years old the passions are not infrequently felt in their full shock.”3

MARGARET FULLER

3. At age 10 she would ask to assume her mother’s name, Margaret. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1819

December: Sarah Fuller, age 10, wrote a letter to her father requesting that she be named Sarah Margaret Fuller (and be addressed as Margaret rather than as Sarah).

MARGARET FULLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1821

August 11, Saturday: In The Middlesex Gazette an article signed “S” recounted the convenient local legend “–the oldest people telle [sic] me that they heard it in their youth–” that Henry Thoreau would reference in Draft F of “The Ponds.”

WALDEN: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named.

A deep and clear body of isolated water such as Walden Pond must have seemed quite mysterious before the development of the geological theory of ice ages, and before the development of an account of how buried masses of ice often linger at the edge of a retreating glacier and gradually melt over centuries or dozens of centuries, to leave precisely such deep water-filled holes. Alas, however, a people with a “forgotten” history of genocide, such as these white Concordians, are ever in dire need of some fanciful account by which their record can precisely be reversed and the people they victimized be portrayed as aggressors while the guilty (or themselves, descendants of the guilty parties and inheritors of the loot the guilt and the shame of genocide) can be allowed to posture as innocent prisoners being tortured and burned alive by barbarous savages. Barbarous savages whom these white Christians trapped in their peaceable villages in the snow of that winter of 1676- 1677, and roped together at the neck, and marched onto the Deer Island concentration camp in Boston Harbor and destroyed by starvation and exposure.4 Note that in this 1821 news item the existence of Walden Pond has become a fanciful proof that it is God, not white Concordians, who destroys strange peoples who interfere with the legitimate agendas of white Concordians. This article is not a “news story” at all, but rather it is a fantasy by which white people, as inheritors of desperate deeds, have discovered a way to add to the original affect of the viciousness and greed of their parents the affect of outrage of a surviving victim and thus mobilize, in the service of their own lives, the force of a shame which might otherwise forestall them from further such acts of desperation.

4.The scenario is rather a familiar one –although its deeps have never adequately been fathomed– at least we have been able to observe this legitimation-myth as it repeated itself in Minnesota during our race war and then in Germany before and during World War II. Margaret Fuller, not one easy to deceive, described it as “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Walden Pond This pond, in the southerly part of town, has something singular, both in its appearance and in the tradition concerning it. It is said that the place which now contains a body of water, was once a high hill — that on this hill the Indians assembled at certain seasons to celebrate their religious festivals, and at other times to burn and torture prisoners taken in the wars with the early settlers of the country; it was on a meeting of numerous chiefs and tribes for the latter purpose, that this celebrated hill disappeared in the midst of their barbarous rejoicings, and sunk with all its savage inhabitants upon it. And on account of the remarkable depth of the water, which has never been fathomed, it was supposed to have continued to sink to such an amazing depth, that the bottom dropped out one day. This much for tradition — We do not vouch for the truth of the story, still there is enough that is singular about this pond, to warrant a stranger in going a little distance to view it; its banks are very bold, and decorated on all sides with evergreens and other forest trees — its waters are pure — no weeds or grass grow on its borders, no stream runs into it, or issues from it, and it is found to be highest in the driest time. In this deep water many pike and pickerell have been taken, weighing from one to five pounds, and it is confidently asserted, that others have been seen which would probably weigh from ten to twenty pounds; this sort never have been taken. Some of your readers, it is hoped, will give a more particular description of this singular pond.

Perhaps father John Thoreau, or someone else who regularly read the gazettes, clipped this vicious article when it was printed and passed it on to Henry in 1853/1854 while he was writing the history of the pond. Perhaps it was passed on with the suggestion that Thoreau be the one to realize the last sentence, “give a more particular description of this singular pond” — give a description of this singular pond that will particularly and effectively remove it forever from the list of geographical landforms available for use by white people as legitimators of genocide. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI We may remember that indeed there was a “high hill” near Concord, upon which a “barbarous” event had taken place. However, this barbarous event was not the torture and slaughter of innocent white people by savage red people, but was, instead, the murder of Native American women and children by white Concordians. For which, you must refer to the events of 1676.

Walden

Mount Misery

According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), in the course of this year: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 1 (1817-1823) -Downing gives a cursory account of the Thoreau and Dunbar heritage and more fully traces the nature and movement of the Thoreau family in the first five years of Henry’s life. Thoreau’s father, John, while intellectual, “lived quietly, peacefully and contentedly in the shadow of his wife,” Mrs. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was dynamic and outspoken with a strong love for nature and compassion for the downtrodden. • 1st Helen -quiet, retiring, eventually a teacher. • 2nd John Jr. -“his father turned inside out,” personable, interested in ornithology, also taught. • 3rd Henry (born July 12,1817) -speculative but not noticeably precocious. • 4th Sophia -independent, talkative, ultimately took over father’s business and edited Henry’s posthumous publications. The Thoreau’s constantly struggled with debt, and in 1818 John Sr. gave up his farm outside Concord and moved into town. Later the same year he moved his family to Chelmsford where he opened a shop which soon failed and sent him packing to Boston to teach school. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

In 1836, in John Warner Barber’s CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS: CONTAINING A GENERAL COLLECTION OF INTERESTING FACTS, TRADITIONS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, ANECDOTES, ETC., RELATING TO THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF EVERY TOWN IN CONNECTICUT, WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS (Durrie & Peck and J.W. Barber), in regard to Lake Quinebaug (Nell Alexander’s Lake) in Killingly, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Connecticut:

In ancient times, when the red men of this quarter had long enjoyed prosperity, that is, when they had found plenty of game in the woods, and fish in the ponds and rivers, they at length fixed a time for a general powwow, a sort of festival for eating, drinking, smoking, singing and dancing. The spot chosen for this purpose was a sandy hill, or mountain, covered with tall pines, occupying the situation where the lake now lies. The powwow lasted four days in succession, and was to continue longer had not the Great Spirit, enraged at the licentiousness which prevailed there, resolved to punish them. Accordingly, while the red people in immense numbers were capering about upon the summit of the mountain, it suddenly “gave way” beneath them, and sunk to a great depth, when the water from below rushed up and covered them all except one good old squaw, who occupied one of the peaks, which now bears the name of Loon's Island. Whether the tradition is entitled to credit or not we will do it justice by affirming that in a clear day, when there is no wind and the surface of the lake is smooth, the huge trunks and leafless branches of gigantic pines may be occasionally seen in the deepest part of the water, some of them reaching almost to the surface, in such huge and fantastic forms as to cause the beholder to startle!

Professor Robert M. Thorson has inferred in his WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAV ID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE (Harvard UP, 2013, page 307), that the Concord fable about the inversion of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts would be merely Henry’s extrapolation from this fable about Alexander’s Lake in Killingly, Connecticut, pointing out that in his personal copy of WALDEN we find the

notation in his handwriting “This is told of Alexanders Lake in Killingly, CT, by Barber in his Con. Hist. Coll.” “That Thoreau borrowed this story of topographical inversion for Walden suggests he thought it applied there as well.” Nevertheless, Concord had been the initial inland town settled in all of New England and the record we have of its Walden Pond fable dates to 1821 or earlier, whereas the Killingly region had not been settled by white intrusives until 1700 –in fact the 42d such town settled in Connecticut– and the record we have of its Alexander’s Lake fable has been dated only as far back as 1835. Aiding us in this is evidence of Concord’s criminal motivation: we don’t yet know of any criminal motivation in the case of Killingly, but, in the case of Concord, we do know of a decided motive for the creation of such a fable: the fable helped conceal through the common criminal tactic of inversion the town shame of a mass murder of reds by whites, followed by the undeniable hanging of white town citizens on Boston’s common for this sad race atrocity. Unless and until, therefore, we have chronological evidence to the contrary from Connecticut, it is going to remain more plausible for us to suspect that all the cultural borrowing had been done by Connecticut that to suspect that any of the cultural borrowing had been done by Concordians! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1822

August 10, Saturday: Gilbert Close and Samuel Clisby robbed Ezra Haynes in Cambridge Street (they would hang on the gallows on Boston Neck near the burying grounds).

Arthur Buckminster Fuller was born, a younger brother of Margaret Fuller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1823

Margaret Fuller was attending the school of the Misses Prescott in rural Groton, Massachusetts, where for a time she would be sitting next to a child named Oliver — Oliver Wendell Holmes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1824

During this year or the next, Margaret Fuller, age 15, would write to General Lafayette:

Sir, the contemplation of a character such as yours fills the soul with a noble ambition. Should we both live, and it is possible to a female, to whom the avenues of glory are seldom accessible, I will recal [sic] my name to your recollection. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1825

June 16, Thursday: In Boston, a lavish reception was given for the Marquis de Lafayette at the home of Mayor Josiah Quincy, Sr. A 15-year-old Margaret Fuller attended with her parents.

In Weimar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe received two packages from composers. One includes piano quartets from Felix Mendelssohn. The other contained some songs to Goethe poems from Franz Schubert. Although Goethe would write a long letter of thanks to Mendelssohn he would not respond to Schubert (this would be not only the first but also the sole occasion on which Schubert would attempt to approach the poet).

July 17, Sunday: In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 17th of 7 M / Our Meetings were both small & to me dry seasons, but I expect some thought there was some favour as we had preaching in both, but none of it of a stamp that stood very high in my mind. — Took tea at D Buffums, who is complaining & not at Meeting he appears to have some fever, but better RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Daniel Webster wrote from Niagara Falls: My dear Mrs. Blake, Before leaving here I wish to say an additional word or two on the subject of the Falls, by way of explaining or correcting some things in my letter. In the first place I said, I think, that Goat Island was midway of the Rapids. This may lead to an erroneous opinion. The Rapids in fact, commence precisely at the head of Goat Island, We may stand at the head of the island, and look up and see a mild and even surface. The shore is level to the water, and we may amuse ourselves by throwing in sticks, and speculating on their course, either to the British or American Fall. In the next place, I am convinced that I over-estimated both the breadth of the stream and the amount of water on the American side. I think the stream is not more than one fourth as wide as on the other side; and the proportion of water still less. In the last place, when saying that the rock over which the river falls is limestone, I ought to have added that this limestone constituted but a part of the bank or wall. The first, or upper fifty feet, is limestone, lying in regular strata, as I have mentioned; the next hundred feet is a soft slate stone, which yields in some measure to the action of air, frost, and water. It comes off in small parcels, and is easily picked out of the sides of the bank. I pulled off a piece six feet long, as straight as a walking stick, and not much larger. As these pieces fall down they become pulverized, and turn to a sort of earth. The wearing away of this slate stone necessarily lets fall the limestone from above. Table Rock is the projecting platform of limestone. The slate stone underneath it is already worn away a great depth into the bank; and Table Rock will one day doubtless precipitate itself into the river. At the bottom of this course of slate stone, just about even HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI with the surface of the river, commences another kind of stone. It seems to be a red sandstone, lying in very thin layers. It is of so bright a color that it may sometimes be seen, forming the bottom of the river, where the water is very deep. You will excuse me, my dear Mrs. Blake, for adding these remarks to my long and tedious letter. It is doubtful whether I shall ever see the Falls again. You will be here at some time, and I hope soon. I will not promise myself, that, as you view the scene, you will find any great correspondence between the view itself and my account of it; but I trust you will call to mind those who have been over the spot before you, and be willing to remember even this unsuccessful attempt to describe it to you by Your affectionate and faithful, D. WEBSTER.

P. S. We set out this morning for home. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1826

Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) met.

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1827

The 25-year-old Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) wrote to 17-year-old Margaret Fuller on a woman’s need for independence and her need to reach beyond passionate love.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1828

Margaret Fuller, age 18, developed an infatuation with a 15-year-old kin of the Astor family who had been sent from New-York, where all of the existing Broadway was lit by gas lights, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get some culture. Her name was Anna Barker. “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man. ... I loved Anna for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1830

May 7, Friday: Thomas Hart Benton’s bill to lower land prices (as argued in and around the Hayne-Webster debate) passed the Senate 24-22.

Margaret Fuller wrote an impassioned letter to her cousin and new friend James Freeman Clarke, expressing “her early Rousseauistic-Byronic, perfectionist faith.”

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, accompanied by Nikolai Kuzmich Ivanov, tenor in the Imperial Chapel, set off from St. Petersburg to Italy by way of Germany. Glinka wanted to travel anyway but when a doctor (a friend of his father) stated that the only thing that would cure him would be three years in a warmer climate, his father allowed him to go. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1831

November: Margaret Fuller had a religious experience after being persuaded to attend a Thanksgiving service:

I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fulness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marvelled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here: How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw also, that it MUST do it, — that it must make all this false true, — and saw new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true way most of the relations of earth HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1834

April 7, Monday: Felix Mendelssohn’s overture Melusine, or the Mermaid and the Knight was performed for the initial time, in London. It would become known as “Die schone Melusine.”

In this month appeared the 5th of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS. The Reverend James Freeman Clarke copied the letter he had received from Waldo Emerson about this strange text and sent it to his cousin Margaret Fuller in Groton. Fuller would be reading the work in Fraser’s Magazine eventually as that magazine came out in bound multiple-issue volumes.5

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

The Boston and Worcester Rail-Road experimented with a run of their locomotive “Meteor” from Boston as far as Davis’s tavern in Newton, a distance of 8½ miles, under the observation of a party of Directors and some 50 or 60 other spectators. Caroline J. Barker of West Newton described the engine as looking like “an old boiler.” A top speed of 20 miles per hour was found to be feasible, and an average speed of 18 miles per hour.6

November 17, Monday: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington replaced William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge wrote to Margaret Fuller indicating that he had just finished reading SARTOR RESARTUS.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS 5. Another Transcendentalist who was reading along serially in SARTOR RESARTUS was Bronson Alcott. 6. I have an attestation that this Boston and Worcester Railroad was later to be using passenger engines named “Nathan Hale” and David Henshaw” (this one with a straight smokestack), but that freight engines had names such as “Elephant,” “Lion,” “Tiger,” “Bison,” “Camel,” “Leopard,” “Mercury,” “Ajax,” “Hercules,” “Vesuvius,” “Aetna,” “Hecla,” “Fury” (had a bad rep for constantly breaking down), and “Comet” (with an old-style funnel-shaped smokestack). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

November 30, Sunday: Margaret Fuller wrote to the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge about SARTOR RESARTUS:

SARTOR RESARTUS

“I got a volume of Frazer’s Mag and read all the Sartors I could find.” STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1835

August: While Harriet Martineau was visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s cousin Margaret Fuller they had “some talk about Carlyleism.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS I don’t know where would be the right point in the timeline in which to introduce this material, but at some point in time, Martineau and Fuller had some discussions about slavery. Paula Blanchard, in MARGARET FULLER – FROM TRANSCENDENTALISM TO REVOLUTION (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), has commented on this: Miss Martineau was a necessitarian and a social reformer, with little esthetic feeling and no tolerance of the more speculative flights of philosophy and literature. Her chief interest in the United States was the abolition of slavery, and she made a determined effort to bring Margaret into the abolitionist party. But Margaret, like her father, belonged to the group which called itself “antislavery” rather than “abolitionist,” and which advocated the gradual phasing out of slavery. Nevertheless, their discussions sharpened Margaret’s awareness of social issues, and in Miss Martineau and the women abolitionists of Boston she saw members of her sex assuming leadership, defying social convention, and facing down real physical danger in a totally new kind of role.

Fall: At the age of 25, Margaret Fuller became seriously ill at the family farm in Groton, Massachusetts (she may have contracted her spinal curvature at this time).7

September 30, Wednesday: Commander George Back was promoted to Captain by order in council. Among other honours he would receive the royal medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

In the evening, Margaret Fuller’s father Timothy Fuller fell ill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 2, Friday: A Requiem mass for Vincenzo Bellini was held at Les Invalides. According to a report “Paer, Cherubini, Carafa, and Rossini each held one corner of the shroud.” The earthly remains of the musician were deposited in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, between those of Andre Ernest Modeste Gretry and Francois- Adrien Boieldieu.

Margaret Fuller’s father Timothy Fuller died of the cholera, throwing much family responsibility onto her shoulders.

For the first two days, my grief, under this calamity, was such as I dare not speak of. But since my father’s head is laid in the dust, I feel an awful calm, and am becoming familiar with the thoughts of being an orphan. I have prayed to God that duty may now be the first object, and self set aside. May I have light and strength to do what is right, in the highest sense, for my mother, brothers, and sister.

7. I gather from the condition of the literature that one is not supposed to discuss Sir Percivall Pott’s disease, a spinal variant of tuberculosis, since this disease is an unfortunate one, and one is not supposed to notice that tuberculosis attacked both Thoreau and Fuller, since the connection between her form of tuberculosis damage and his form of tuberculosis damage was not established until the latter part of the century and since Thoreau is a totally famous dead white man whereas Fuller is not in the same ballpark being merely yet another famous dead white woman, and that one most certainly must not mention scoliosis of the spine, since this is a deformity and since it is so shameful to be deformed and since we have agreed that deformities are not only unspeakable but also invisible. We are left by generation after generation of literary scholars with an image in our minds of a grown woman merely sitting passively in her slip with her back against the mast and her arms around her knees, wondering that she could not even summon the courage to attempt to swim through breakers that had just drowned her able-bodied husband, and the able-bodied crewman who had tried to get ashore with her baby, and her baby: Did she have a death wish, these male literary scholars have again and again suggested? (Now just recently, a female literary biographer of Fuller has broken this code of silence, and announced once and for all that Margaret had suffered from scoliosis. Unfortunately, however, this female literary biographer has also gone beyond the available evidence and is now asserting without discussion that the form of scoliosis that had afflicted Margaret was congenital rather than being tuberculosis spondylitis — that this was a spinal condition Margaret had been born with.)

Sir Percivall Pott F.R.S. and Surgeon to St. Bartholomew’s Hoſpital had described this disease in 1779 in REMARKS ON THAT KIND OF PALſY OF THE LOWER LIMBS WHICH IS FREQUENTLY FOUND TO ACCOMPANY A CURVATURE OF THE SPINE, AND IS ſUPPOſED TO BE CAUſED BY IT... (London, 8vo, J. Johnfon, 84 pages) and in 1782 in FARTHER REMARKS UPON THE USELESS STATE OF THE LOWER LIMBS IN CONSEQUENCE OF A CURVATURE OF THE SPINE ... (London, thin 8vo, J. Johnſon). The disease he first there described, tuberculosis spondylitis, has been with us since at least the Egyptian royal mummies and in Thoreau’s era had been killing 3 out of each 10 children it attacked. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 10M 2nd 1835 / This morning word came in from Portsmouth that Uncle Stanton was very low - my Wife & I went our immediately & found he had breathed his last sometime before we got there. We found our dear Aunt in much affliction but as composed as could be expected on the occasion HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI We spent the remainder of the day there & staid all night. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1836

July: At the age of 26 Margaret Fuller visited the Emersons in Concord and failed to make a favorable first impression:

Her extreme plainness, –a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, –the nasal tone of her voice, –all repelled, and I said to myself, we shall never get far.

August 12, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Yesterday Margaret Fuller returned home after making us a visit of three weeks — a very accomplished & very intelligent person.

MARGARET FULLER

Sergeants of the Guard forced the queen regent of Spain to accept a radical ministry, and restored the Constitution of 1812 and the national militia.

The Alert and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. sighted the island of Trinidad.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Friday, August 12th. At daylight made the island of Trinidad, situated in lat. 20 28S., long. 29 08W. At twelve M., it bore N. W. 1/2 N., distant twenty-seven miles. It was a beautiful day, the sea hardly ruffled by the light trades, and the island looking like a small blue mound rising from a field of glass. Such a fair and peaceful-looking spot is said to have been, for a long time, the resort of a band of pirates, who ravaged the tropical seas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 8, Thursday: Some 1,100 to 1,300 alums attended Harvard College’s Bicentennial, and heard a professional choir offer the very original of “Fair Harvard.” Although the very oldest living alumnus, 96-year- old Judge Paine Wingate (Class of 1759, of New Hampshire) was, unfortunately, unable to be present, 86-year- old Samuel Emery (Class of 1774, of Philadelphia) was able to march in the parade. Word arrived that President Josiah Quincy, Sr. had, while researching for a “History of Harvard University” in the College Archives, located in filed-and-forgotten records of an Overseers meeting on January 6, 1644 the first rough sketch for the shield with the Latin motto “VE RI TAS” (“Verity” or “Truth”) and three open books, which was to become the College’s arms. This is how it looks today, as a refrigerator magnet:

During this Bicentennial, a white banner atop a large tent in the Yard for the 1st time publicly displayed this design, which in 1843 would become the basis of the seal officially adopted by the Harvard Corporation, and then in 1847 would be dropped in favor of another seal, and then in 1885 would be readopted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Some of the alums had an interestingly historic discussion:

(following screen)

In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

At the wrap-up of the day, guest speaker Josiah Quincy, Jr. (Class of 1821) made a motion “that this assembly of the Alumni be adjourned to meet at this place on the 8th of September, 1936” — and the motion was unanimously adopted.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI 5th day 8th of 9 M / Our meeting was small but very quietly solid — I missed father Rodman at my right hand being confined at home with a lame back — Thro’ the day my mind has been much at Providence where I have concluded to go tomorrow (if the Steam Boat get in in season) to attend the funeral of my ancient & much beloved friend Moses Brown RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 19, Monday: Formation of “Hedge’s Club” centering around the visits of the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge to Boston from Bangor, Maine.8 In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

8. This would become the Transcendental Club. It was at this first regular meeting that the Reverend Convers Francis first met Bronson Alcott. Francis would also be present for the second meeting, in Alcott’s home in Boston. As the eldest member of the Club, it would become the lot of the Reverend Francis to announce the principal topic for conversation, and to preside. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 21, Wednesday: Margaret Fuller reported to Waldo Emerson that she was hearing “much conversation” about his NATURE “that amuses me.”

Sir William Jardine delivered his presidential address at the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club.

December: Margaret Fuller began teaching at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston.

December 22, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 22 of 12 M / This morning in straping my Razor to Shave it accidentally slipped & took off the tip of my little finger, it bleed so much & was so painful that I did not go to Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Bronson Alcott self-published, through James Munroe and Company of Boston, the 1st volume of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPEL (264 pages). This, and the 2nd volume (Boston MA: CONVERSATIONS, VOL. I

Russell, Shattuck and Company, February 1837, 198 pages), would cost the author $741.00 he did not have, CONVERSATIONS, VOL. II

and buy him an incredible amount of trouble. These conversations had been transcribed by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. However, the original title page, which in accordance with the convention of the time did not list the name of the author, was preceded by a page that read

CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPELS CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT

rather than “transcribed by Elizabeth Peabody,” and evidently resulted from the desire of others who had been involved in the generation of this material that they not be implicated in the folly of its dissemination. Elizabeth Peabody and the new teacher at the school, Margaret Fuller, could see what was coming — the self-convicted supersalesman and self-convinced enthusiast could not Abba Alcott the faithful wife could not help but sympathize with her husband rather than with the helper who wanted no share of the repercussions: in the family record, she altered the name of her third child from Elizabeth Peabody Alcott to Elizabeth Sewall Alcott.

MR. ALCOTT. Do you think these conversations are of any use to you? CHARLES. Yes; they teach us a great deal. MR. ALCOTT. What do they teach you? GEORGE K. To know ourselves. ... MR. ALCOTT. Now, does your spirit differ in any sense from God’s spirit? Each may answer. CHARLES. (10-12 years old). God made our spirits. MR. ALCOTT. They differ from His then in being derived? GEORGE K. (7-10). They are not so good. WILLIAM B. (10-12). They have not so much power. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

AUGUSTINE (7-10). 1 don’t think our spirit does differ much. CHARLES. God is spirit, we are spirit and body. JOSIAH (5 years old). He differs from us, as a king’s body HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI differs from ours. A king’s body is arrayed with more goodness than ours. EDWARD B. (10-12) God’s spirit is a million times larger than ours, and comes out of him as the drops of the ocean. MR. ALCOTT. Jesus said he was the son - the child of God. Are we also God’s sons? WILLIAM B. Oh! before I was born - I think I was a part of God himself. MANY OTHERS. So do l. MR. ALCOTT Who thinks his own spirit is the child of God? (All held up hands). Now, is God your Father in the same sense that he is the Father of Jesus? (Most held up hands). MR. ALCOTT. Does Father and Son mean God and Jesus? CHARLES. No; it means God and any man. MR. ALCOTT. Do you think that were you to use all that is in your spirit, you might also be prophets? SEVERAL. If we had faith enough. WILLIAM B. If we had love enough. CHARLES. A prophet first has a little love, and that gives the impulse to more, and so on, until he becomes so full of love, he knows everything. MR. ALCOTT. Why did the angel say to Mary, “The Lord is with thee”? GEORGE K. I don’t know. The Lord is always with us. ARNOLD (?). The Lord is with us when we are good. AUGUSTINE. The Lord is with us when we are bad, or we could not live. ELLEN (10-12). [mentions Judgment Day] MR. ALCOTT. What do you mean by Judgment Day? ELLEN. The last day, the day when the world is to be destroyed. CHARLES. The day of Judgment is not any more at the end of the world than now. It is the Judgment of conscience at every moment. MR. ALCOTT Where did Jesus get his knowledge? MARTHA (7-10) He went into his own soul. AUGUSTINE. Heaven is in our spirits - in God. It is in no particular place. It is not material. It is wherever people are good. CHARLES. Heaven is everywhere - Eternity. It stops where there is anything bad. It means peace and love. High and white are emblems of it. ANDREW (7-10). Heaven is like a cloud, and God and Jesus and the angels sit on it. MR. ALCOTT Where is it? ANDREW Everywhere. Every person that is good, God looks at and takes care of. FREDERIC (10-12). Wherever there is good. SAMUEL R. (10-12) But in no place. FRANKLIN (10-12). Heaven is the spirit’s truth and goodness. It is in everybody; but mostly in the good. MR. ALCOTT. Can you say to yourself, I can remove this mountain? [Now comes an astonishing rhapsody by the five-year-old Josiah Quincy.] JOSIAH (bursts out). Yes, Mr. Alcott! I do not mean that with my body can lift up a mountain - with my hand; but I can feel; and I know that my conscience is greater than the mountain, for it can feel and do; and the mountain cannot. There is the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI mountain, there! It was made, and that is all. But my conscience can grow. It is the same kind of spirit as made the mountain be, in the first place. I do not know what it may be and do. The body is a mountain, and the spirit says, be moved, it is moved into another place. Mr. Alcott, we think too much about clay. We should think of spirit. I think we should love spirit, not clay. I should think a mother now would love her baby’s spirit; and suppose it should die, that is only the spirit bursting away out of the body. It is alive; it is perfectly happy; I really do not know why people mourn when their friends die. I should think it would be a matter of rejoicing. For instance, now, if we should go into the street and find a box, an old dusty box, and should put into it some very fine pearls, and bye and bye the box should grow old and break, why, we should not even think about the box; but if the pearls were safe, we should think of them and nothing else. So it is with the soul and body. I cannot see why people mourn for bodies. MR. ALCOTT. Yes, Josiah; that is all true, and we are glad to hear it. Shall someone else now speak beside you? [But Josiah’s eloquence is like a mighty river; its momentum is such that he can barely restrain himself, and he is quiet only on condition.] JOSIAH. Oh, Mr. Alcott! then I will stay in at recess and talk. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1837

According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taught school in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporal punishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turned to his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed a superior pencil. Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to members of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as the Transcendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev George Ripley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau (in fall of 1837.) The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferior copy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott moved to Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau. Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Thomas Carlyle’s THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER. COMPREHENDING AN EXAMINATION OF HIS WORKS. ... FROM THE LONDON EDITION. (New York: George Dearborn & Co.). A copy of this would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. THE LIFE OF SCHILLER

From this year into 1840 Carlyle would be offering four courses of lectures in London, on German Literature and on Heroes.

The argument for the almost magical growth of this Scottish author’s reputation was first made by the peripatetic English reformer, Harriet Martineau, in her controversial travelogue SOCIETY IN AMERICA: No living writer exercises so enviable a sway, so far as it goes, as Mr. Carlyle ... [whose] remarkable work SARTOR RESARTUS, issued piecemeal through Fraser’s Magazine, has been republished in America and is exerting an influence proportioned to the genuineness of the admiration it has excited. Perhaps this is the first instance of the Americans having taken to their hearts an English work that came to them anonymous, unsanctioned by any recommendation and even absolutely neglected at home. It has regenerated the preaching of more than one of the clergy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI This English author’s published account of the situation, above, is of course entirely disingenuous, is a deliberate act of mystification of her audience. She had herself already become part of the American movement for this book by Carlyle before she had returned to England.

SARTOR RESARTUS

In April 1835 she had been had been “[fed] with the SARTOR” by the Reverend William Henry Furness in Philadelphia out of the copy he had just received from Waldo Emerson in Boston. In May 1835 while vacationing with Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley and the Reverend George Ripley she had “made the SARTOR her constant companion.” In June 1835 while visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Lexington, Kentucky she had told him that what she was up to was “preparing the people for Carlyleism.” In August 1835 while visiting the Reverend Clarke’s cousin Margaret Fuller they had had “some talk about Carlyleism.” During Fall 1835 she had met with Emerson himself several times as he exercised himself in behalf of Thomas Carlyle. She had visited several times with Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley in Waltham, and in October 1835 she had been staying with the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Newport, Rhode Island when Emerson had sent the Reverend Channing a copy of SARTOR RESARTUS.

February: Bronson Alcott self-published the 2d volume of CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS IN MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, transcribed by Margaret Fuller (Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages).9 Reviews and sermons called the volumes indecent, obscene, and absurd. Suddenly there were angry crowds outside Boston’s Masonic Hall protesting that, inside, Headmaster Alcott was accepting children as spiritual authorities, that he was not assigning to Jesus Christ a special place as uniquely the Son of God — and that clearly he had been informing some of the children of some of the physical details of the process of birth. For instance, little Josiah Quincy was recorded as commenting that babies came about through “naughtiness.” The school lost many of its pupils. Waldo Emerson contributed handsomely to Alcott’s printing bill.

The day after the attacks on Alcott began, Emerson appeared at the office of one of the chief offenders with a letter of complaint in his hand. He was turned away. The anti-transcendentalists had been lying in wait for this sort of ugliness to appear, and they were not to be denied their prey. Not only had this man dared to give sex education to their innocent schoolchildren, he had raised in their susceptible minds suspicions as to the divinity of Christ. What more could you expect of an atheist than that he would be a pervert as well? Were the Christ merely a wise human being, he would be merely a cunning Jew. No! Godly Bostonians could never be

9.I wonder what was the relationship between Henry Thoreau’s continual glosses on “lest ye become again as a little child” and Alcott’s 25-page manifesto of 1836, DOCTRINE AND DISPOSITION OF HUMAN CULTURE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI reconciled to such a blasphemy. The school book was “one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and one-third obscene.”

The roster of Alcott’s paying students dropped to ten, the school was forced to relocate from its suite on the top floor of the Masonic Lodge, into a windowless box room in its basement renting at $250.00 per year, and Alcott’s creditors zeroed in on him. He owed about $6,000.00, which, any way you look at it, is more than half a million in our contemporary money. Everything had to be sold, the Alcott family retaining only the bust of Socrates10 when they moved from their home near Boston Common into a little house on Cottage Place in the South End.

February: Bronson Alcott self-published the 2d volume of CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS IN MR. 11 ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, transcribed by Margaret Fuller (Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages). Reviews and sermons called the volumes indecent, obscene, and absurd. Suddenly there were angry crowds outside Boston’s Masonic Hall protesting that, inside, Headmaster Alcott was accepting children as spiritual authorities, that he was not assigning to Jesus Christ a special place as uniquely the Son of God — and that clearly he had been informing some of the children of some of the physical details of the process of birth. For instance, little Josiah Quincy was recorded as commenting that babies came about through “naughtiness.” The school lost many of its pupils. Waldo Emerson contributed handsomely to Alcott’s printing bill.

10. The Alcott family achieved very little reduction of their debt by selling the school equipment, but it had to be done. It is possible that the Alcott family retained this bust of Socrates, which later traveled with them in their wagon from Concord to Fruitlands, simply because no-one was willing to give them a few pennies for it, in the same way that when I received a box of clothing in my lawyer’s office, after I was divorced in California in 1974, at the bottom of the box were my well-worn hiking boots, brushed off, and tied into a grommet of these old boots there remained a garage sale price tag marked 50¢. 11.I wonder what was the relationship between Henry Thoreau’s continual glosses on “lest ye become again as a little child” and Alcott’s 25-page manifesto of 1836, DOCTRINE AND DISPOSITION OF HUMAN CULTURE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI reconciled to such a blasphemy. The school book was “one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and one-third obscene.”

The roster of Alcott’s paying students dropped to ten, the school was forced to relocate from its suite on the top floor of the Masonic Lodge, into a windowless box room in its basement renting at $250.00 per year, and Alcott’s creditors zeroed in on him. He owed about $6,000.00, which, any way you look at it, is more than half a million in our contemporary money. Everything had to be sold, the Alcott family retaining only the bust of Socrates12 when they moved from their home near Boston Common into a little house on Cottage Place in the South End.

Bronson Alcott. CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS IN MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, Volume II, as transcribed by Margaret Fuller (Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages, 1837) [Refer to the Arno Press, New York reprint edition, two volumes in one, 1972, or to the Lindisfarne Press edition of 1991 titled HOW LIKE AN ANGEL CAME I DOWN]

12. The Alcott family achieved very little reduction of their debt by selling the school equipment, but it had to be done. It is possible that the Alcott family retained this bust of Socrates, which later traveled with them in their wagon from Concord to Fruitlands, simply because no-one was willing to give them a few pennies for it, in the same way that when I received a box of clothing in my lawyer’s office, after I was divorced in California in 1974, at the bottom of the box were my well-worn hiking boots, brushed off, and tied into a grommet of these old boots there remained a garage sale price tag marked 50¢. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 1837-December 1838: At some point Margaret Fuller had accepted an offer of $1,000.00/year from Hiram Fuller (no relation) to leave the Temple School of Bronson Alcott in Boston, where things had been on a downward spiral due to extremely hostile reactions from Boston parents, for the Greene Street Academy of Hiram Fuller (no relation) in Providence, Rhode Island. Remember that a year prior to this Thoreau’s position at Concord’s Central Grammar School, where he was to supervise two male teachers making $100/year and two female teachers making $40/year in a school having over 300 students as well as himself teach 100 boys, had been worth only half that despite the fact that he had a college diploma. Fuller’s salary alone is enough to indicate that not only were the demands to be made on her in Rhode Island to be extreme, but also that for some reason the situation there was dicey. By December, exhausted, she would explain to her girls that she simply had to resign her position. She wrote about this that “I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has spoiled my peace.… Isolation is necessary to me, as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties,’ as the technical phrase is, except to myself.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 10, Saturday: Waldo Emerson gave the dedication address at Hiram Fuller’s Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, staffed by Margaret Fuller (this coincidence of names, Fuller the headmaster versus Fuller the teacher, was merely that, a coincidence).

This address would become the basis for his  speech at Harvard College, coming up that fall.

“If the Allwise would give me light, I should write for the Cambridge men a theory of the Scholar’s office.”

The letters and journals of girls that Fuller taught in Providence would reveal an almost worshipful attitude toward a woman of great passion and intelligence who inspired despite being fiercely demanding. (While Fuller generally succeeded as a role model for girls, unfortunately the gender politics of the age meant that she couldn’t be all that helpful for boys.)13

La fete de Versailles, an intermede en deux parties by Daniel Francois Esprit Auber to words of Scribe, was performed for the 1st time, at Versailles.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 10 of 6 M / Rode to Portsmouth & Huldah Hoag with us attended the Select Yearly Meeting which was rather a low time some obstruction evidently existed, to a free flow of the Ministry but divers short acceptable testimonies were bourne by Wm Evans, Rowland Greene & several others & a Prayer by Susan R Mott in the forepart & Octava Hubbs at the close of the Meeting. — Things ended comfortably, & we dined at Susanna Hathaways —I attended the Meeting for Sufferings in the Afternoon - When we got home we found Isaac & Anna M Thorn had arrived who did not get along in season to attend Meetings today RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September 25, Monday: Dr. Robert William Hooper got married with Ellen Sturgis. Despite the fact that Margaret Fuller would characterize this as a “wasted” union of “perfume” with “the desert wind,” the couple would produce three children: Ellen or “Nella,” Edward or “Ned,” and Marian or “Clover” (they must have been playing doctor, for Nella would be making her entrance to the scene almost immediately).14

13. Johnson, Harriet Hall. “Margaret Fuller as Known by Her Scholars.” Christian Register (April 21, 1910): 427-9

Fergenson, Laraine R. “Margaret Fuller in the Classroom: The Providence Period.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1987): 131-42 14. No date of birth other than “1838” is ever mentioned. Nella would get married with Harvard Professor Ephraim Whitman Gurney. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1838

Mary Rotch, who had a summer house “The Glen” on the outskirts of Newport, Rhode Island, erected a New Bedford home for herself and her companion Mary Gifford at the northwest corner of South 6th Street and Cherry Street (Margaret Fuller would be there with her for awhile; the building would in the 1890s become the Unitarian parsonage).

At some point during this year Margaret wrote in her journal “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man.”

On the road to Stonewall,15 Henry David Thoreau defined friendship erotically in an 1838 poem titled “Friendship.” Love is the “connecting link between heaven and earth,” and lovers are “kindred shapes” possessing a “kindred nature.” Indeed, they are intended “to be mates, / Exposed to equal fates / Eternally.” Lovers are like “two sturdy oaks” whose “roots are intertwined insep’rably,” anticipating also Walt Whitman’s choice of the oak as a symbol of manly love. Thoreau argues wittily that “love cannot speak ... without the help of Greek, / or any other tongue” (Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21), 1:40-43) Plato’s SYMPOSIUM originates the imagery of kindred lovers, and Greek, as the only tongue in which such love can speak, locates the passion within the homoerotic traditions associated with Greece.

December: At some point in 1837 Margaret Fuller had accepted an offer of $1,000.00/year from Rhode Island, and had left the Temple School of Bronson Alcott in Boston, where things were on a downward spiral due to extremely hostile reactions from Boston parents, to teach at Providence’s Greene Street School. (Remember that a year prior to this Thoreau’s position at Concord’s Central Grammar School, where he was to supervise two male teachers making $100.00/year and two female teachers making $40.00/year in a school having over 300 students as well as himself teach 100 boys, had been worth only half that $1,000.00/year despite the fact that he possessed a college diploma! — Fuller’s salary alone is enough to indicate that not only were the demands to be made on her in Rhode Island to be extreme, but also that for some reason the situation there must have been dicey.) By this point, in December, exhausted, she explained to her girls that she simply must resign her position. She wrote about this, that “I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has spoiled my peace.… Isolation is necessary to me, as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties,’ as the technical phrase is, except to myself.”

15. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1839

Margaret Fuller’s translation of ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE appeared in the bookstores. Fuller saw, at the Allston Gallery in Boston, the statue of Orpheus by Thomas Crawford.16

ECKERMANN AND GOETHE

16. She would refer to this in the July 1843 issue of THE DIAL and connect it with Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” as “lessons in reverence.”

Orpheus was a lawgiver by theocratic commission. He understood nature, and made all her forms move to his music. He told her secrets in the form of hymns, nature as seen in the mind of God. Then it is the prediction, that to learn and to do, all men must be lovers, and Orpheus was, in a high sense, a lover. His soul went forth towards all beings, yet could remain sternly faithful to a chosen type of excellence. Seeking what he loved, he feared not death nor hell, neither could any presence daunt his faith in the power of the celestial harmony that filled his soul.

Referring to the statue’s posture, of shading its eyes with its hand, she wrote a poem which concluded with the following couplet:

If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI February 15, Friday: For this day in Canadian history, view the film “February 15, 1839.”

Waldo Emerson sent off a note to Henry Thoreau asking that he help Margaret Fuller find a house in Concord — and as an afterthought invited him to meet an Amos Bronson Alcott at the home of his sister-in-law Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown.

Friday, 15 Feb. [1840] My dear Sir The dull weather & some inflammation still hold me in the house, and so may cost you some trouble. I wrote to Miss Fuller at Groton a week ago that as soon as Saturday (tomorrow) I would endeavor to send her more accurate answers to her request for information in respect to houses likely that to be let in Concord. As I know she & ^ her family must be anxious to learn the facts, as[]soon as may be, I beg you to help me in procuring the information today, if your engagements will leave you space for this charity. My questions are 1. Is Dr Gallup’s house to be vacant shortly, &, if so, what is the rent? It belongs, I believe, to Col. Shattuck. 2. What does Mrs Goodwin determine HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Page 2 in regard to the house now occupied by Mr Gourgas? Since, if she do not wish to apply for that house, I think that will suit Mrs F. If it is to be had, what is the rent? Col. Shattuck is also the lessor of this house.

3. What is the rent of your Aunt[’s] house, & when will it be rentable?

4 Pray ask your father if he knows of any other houses in the village that may want tenants in the spring. If sometime this evening you can without much inconvenience give me an answer to these queries, you will greatly oblige your imprisoned friend R. W. Emerson.

March 8, Friday: Bronson Alcott reported to Margaret Fuller that he feared Jones Very would die or become “hopelessly mad.” At this point, six months of the year which he had allotted to himself had passed, and Very was isolating himself in his room at home at 154 Federal Street in Salem, for a sustained period of solitary concentration, writing sonnets about the manifestation of deity on this earth, upon which to be alive is to be dead and to be dead, alive.

July 9, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller:

JONES VERY I am editing Very’s little book. Three Essays; and verses. Out of two hundred poems, I have selected sixty six that really possess rare merit. The book is to cost 75 cents, and I beg you to announce its coming value to all buyers. If it sells, our prophet will get $150 which, little though it be, he wants.

His contract in Riga not having been renewed, Richard Wagner and his wife Christine Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer Wagner stayed one step ahead of their creditors by abandoning Mitau near Riga, heading toward Paris. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI November 6, Wednesday-April 1844: Margaret Fuller was supporting herself (and other members of her family, I suppose) through offering two-hour “Conversations” for 25-40 women at a time, in Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s parlor on West Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1840

Margaret Fuller wrote a reminiscence of her childhood, of which there is no surviving original text. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Per Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 5 (1838-1841) -Henry Thoreau opened his own tutoring service in June 1838 and by October he had taken over as master of Concord Academy, where he was soon joined by his brother John. John taught the “English branches” and Henry Greek, Latin, French, physical and natural sciences, philosophy and history. The school was successful and very highly regarded but was discontinued after 3 years due to John’s illness. John and Henry left for a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Aug 31, 1839. The fourteen day journey “on the surface was simply a vacation lark of the two young men. But as the years passed, it had a growing significance in Thoreau’s mind.” The trip provided much of the eventual material for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 6 (1839-1842) Thoreau’s Loves -Ellen Devereux Sewall visited Concord and the Thoreau house in June of 1839. Henry fell deeply in love with her and began to write love poems immediately. His brother John also fell for her, and went to visit her immediately after their river trip (at Scituate). Henry “stepped aside” for brother John, whose proposal of marriage was refused. Henry proposed later by mail but, as his journal indicates, expected the refusal he received. Henry never forgot Ellen and shortly before his death avowed “I have always loved her.” Henry fell in love again in 1842 with Mary Russell but it came to nothing. After 1842 Henry Thoreau was a confirmed bachelor and outwardly portrayed a Victorian aversion to the subject of sex. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. Henry Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus - Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo Emerson now editor) NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.” It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom. In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial. The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.” (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

Early in the year John Adolphus Etzler had returned from the West Indies to New-York. Undoubtedly to meet and suitably impress other reformers, he would there attend the Fourier Society of New York’s annual celebration of the French philosopher-utopist Charles Fourier’s birthday. There he would make the acquaintance of a Fourierist socialist and humanitarian, C.F. Stollmeyer, also a recent German immigrant, who was at that time readying Albert Brisbane’s THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF MAN for publication. Stollmeyer was to become not only the publisher of The New World, but also a primary disciple of Etzler. This SOCIAL DESTINY OF MAN, seconded by the writings and lectures of such men as the Reverend Dana McLean Greeley of Concord, the Reverend William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, and Parke Godwin would stimulate the rise of several Phalansterian Associations, in the middle and western states, chiefest of which would be the “North American Phalanx” on the north shore of New Jersey. ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION ONEIDA COMMUNITY MODERN TIMES UNITARY HOME BROOK FARM HOPEDALE

The Reverend Adin Ballou’s “Practical Christians” began to publish a gazette, the Practical Christian, for the “promulgation of Primitive Christianity.” He would write in HISTORY OF THE HOPEDALE COMMUNITY, FROM ITS INCEPTION TO ITS VIRTUAL SUBMERGENCE IN THE HOPEDALE PARISH that this year would initiate “a decade of American history pre-eminently distinguished for the general humanitarian spirit which seemed to pervade it, as manifested in numerous and widely extended efforts to put away existing evils and better the condition HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of the masses of mankind; and especially for the wave of communal thought which swept over the country, awakening a very profound interest in different directions in the question of the re-organization of society; — an interest which assumed various forms as it contemplated or projected practical results.” There would be, he pointed out, a considerable number of what were known as Transcendentalists in and about Boston, who, under the leadership of the Reverend George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman of eminence, would plan and put in operation the Roxbury Community, generally known as the “Brook Farm” Association. A company of radical reformers who had come out from the church on account of its alleged complicity with Slavery and other abominations, and hence called Come-Outers, would institute a sort of family Community near Providence, Rhode Island. Other progressives, with George W. Benson at their head, would found the Northampton Community at the present village of Florence, a suburb of Northampton. One of the debates of the 18th Century was what human nature might be, under its crust of civilization, under the varnish of culture and manners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had an answer. Thomas Jefferson had an answer. One of the most intriguing answers was that of Charles Fourier, who was born in Besançon two years before the Shakers arrived in New York. He grew up to write twelve sturdy volumes designing a New Harmony for mankind, an experiment in radical sociology that began to run parallel to that of the Shakers. Fourierism (Horace Greeley founded the New- York Tribune to promote Fourier’s ideas) was Shakerism for intellectuals. Brook Farm was Fourierist, and such place-names as Phalanx, New Jersey, and New Harmony, Indiana, attest to the movement’s history. Except for one detail, Fourier and Mother Ann Lee were of the same mind; they both saw that humankind must return to the tribe or extended family and that it was to exist on a farm. Everyone lived in one enormous dormitory. Everyone shared all work; everyone agreed, although with constant revisions and refinements, to a disciplined way of life that would be most harmonious for them, and lead to the greatest happiness. But when, of an evening, the Shakers danced or had “a union” (a conversational party), Fourier’s Harmonians had an orgy of eating, dancing, and sexual high jinks, all planned by a Philosopher of the Passions. There is a strange sense in which the Shakers’ total abstinence from the flesh and Fourier’s total indulgence serve the same purpose. Each creates a psychological medium in which frictionless cooperation reaches a maximum possibility. It is also wonderfully telling that the modern world has no place for either. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

According to the dissertation of Maurice A. Crane, “A Textual and Critical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance” at the University of Illinois in 1953, various scholars have fingered Zenobia as: • Mrs. Almira Barlow • Margaret Fuller • Fanny Kemble • Mrs. Sophia Willard Dana Ripley • Caroline Sturgis Tappan

while various other scholars have been fingering Mr. Hollingsworth as: • Bronson Alcott • Albert Brisbane • Elihu Burritt • Charles A. Dana • Waldo Emerson • Horace Mann, Sr. • William Pike • the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, or maybe • the Reverend William Henry Channing, or maybe • the Reverend Theodore Parker

Hawthorne should really have told us more than Zenobia’s nickname, and should really have awarded Hollingsworth a first name more definitive than “Mr.”? Go figure! Lest we presume that an association of this William Henry Channing with Hollingsworth is utterly void of content, let us listen, as Marianne Dwight did, to the reverend stand and deliver on the topic of “devotedness to the cause; the necessity of entire self-surrender”:1 He compared our work with … that of the crusaders.... He compared us too with the Quakers, who see God only in the inner light,... with the Methodists, who seek to be in a state of rapture in their sacred meetings, whereas we should maintain in daily life, in every deed, on all occasions, a feeling of religious fervor; with the perfectionists, who are, he says, the only sane religious people, as they believe in perfection, and their aim is one with ours. Why should we, how dare we tolerate ourselves or one another in sin?

1. Reed, Amy L., ed. LETTERS FROM BROOK FARM, 1844-1847, BY MARIANNE DWIGHT Poughkeepsie NY, 1928. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI January: Margaret Fuller placed a review of Jones Very’s book in Orestes Augustus Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review, as part of her “Chat in Boston Bookstores.” She approached his writing, of course, as if it were mere literary artistry rather than divine illumination.

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

March: Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller and listed Ellery Channing among possible contributors to THE DIAL. Having no response to his letter to Channing, he tried to contact the poet with the famous name through their mutual friend Ward, and, Channing having abandoned his fields in Illinois without raising a crop, Emerson even paid a visit to Channing’s father’s house in hopes of discovering Channing there. (Channing had gone to visit at Brook Farm17 and had then returned toward the West.)

Thoreau composed the 1st version of what would become his essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus, “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS,” “first printed paper of consequence,” for July’s issue of THE DIAL. THE DIAL, JULY 1840

This paper turned two tricks of interest. First, Henry Thoreau espoused an attitude of moving away from creedal closedness, associating creedal closedness with immodesty and openness with modesty rather than vice versa and developing that attitude out of comments such as Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque susurros / Tollere de templis; et aperto vivere voto:

“AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS”: It is not easy for every one to take murmurs and low Whispers out of the temple –et aperto vivere voto– and live with open vow,

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

17. [How could that be? Did the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education already exist in 1840, when they did not solicit Thoreau to join until March 3, 1841?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Second, Thoreau perversely insisted on translating ex tempore in its literal etymological sense “out of time” ignoring what had become the primary sense of the phrase: “haphazard,” “improvised.” Thoreau mobilized this phrase to summon people to live not in time but in eternity:18

“AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS”: The life of a wise man is most of all PEOPLE OF extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity that includes all A WEEK time. He is a child each moment, and reflects wisdom. The far darting thought of the child’s mind tarries not for the development of manhood; it lightens itself, and needs not draw down lightning from the clouds. When we bask in a single ray from ZOROASTER the mind of Zoroaster, we see how all subsequent time has been an idler, and has no apology for itself. But the cunning mind travels farther back than Zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. All the thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again to-day as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. From a real sympathy, all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket.

PERSIUS

TIME AND ETERNITY The force of the essay, then, was to provide Thoreau an opportunity to preach his own doctrines by satirizing a minor Roman satirist, and he admits as much: “As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.” Young Henry is of course that poet, that accessory to the crime.

18. EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES 126. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 15, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 3d lecture of the series, “Politics.”

He wrote Margaret Fuller that Henry Thoreau had “too mean an opinion of ‘Persius’” to revise it himself, but was willing that it be published in THE DIAL if it would appear as is, or if the editors would care themselves to revise it. “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS”

April 21, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller that he was going to “roll up” with Henry Thoreau’s essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus, “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS.” “I read it through this morning & forsee that it may give you some hesitations.... I wish it were shorter.” THE DIAL

April 23, Thursday: Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller that he had Henry Thoreau’s revised essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus and that he advised that it appear in the initial issue of THE DIAL. “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS”

April 25, Saturday: Margaret Fuller wrote Waldo Emerson that Henry Thoreau’s revised essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus would appear in the initial issue of THE DIAL. “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 27, Monday: Edward Whymper, who would become the 1st person to scale the Matterhorn, was born.

Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller that Henry Thoreau had again revised his essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus and that it had become excellent. “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS” THE DIAL

May 8, Friday: Waldo Emerson was making arrangements for the Transcendental Club, the “club of clubs,” to meet at his home on the succeeding Wednesday. He asked Margaret Fuller to let Mr. Ripley19 bring her, “& see me & inspire our reptile wits.” He informed her that he had invited other females, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley and Sarah Freeman Clarke, not to mention of course his Mrs., the lady of the house, Lydian Emerson, and in addition the Reverends Frederic Henry Hedge and Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Thoreau would be there.

On the previous day at 1PM while all had been at peace and most of the population had been at the dining table, a tornado had burst upon the city of Natchez, Mississippi. On this day the surviving citizens were looking around them at devastation. The local Courier would report that a Mrs. Alexander had been pulled “from the ruins of the Steamboat Hotel; she was found greatly injured, with two children in her arms, and they both dead!”

19. George Ripley? Christopher Gore Ripley? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 13, Wednesday: The Transcendental Club met at the Emerson home. Among the attenders were Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, the Reverend Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Robert Bartlett, Margaret Fuller, the Reverends Frederic Henry Hedge and Caleb Stetson, and Jones Very. They discussed the topic “The Inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the Nature of Poetry, and the Causes of the Sterility of Poetic Inspiration in Our Age and Country.” (Strangely, with such a topic, Very did not seem to have anything insightful to offer. He was still issuing his declarative pronouncements but his sources for his inspiration did not seem to be helping him come up with interesting things to say.)

May 14: War is the sympathy of concussion– We would fain rub one against another — its rub may be friction merely but it would rather be titillation.… Let not the faithful sorrow that he has no ear for the more fickle and subtle harmonies of creation, if he be awake to the slower measure of virtue and truth. If his pulse does not beat in unison with the musician’s quips and turns, it accords with the pulse beat of the ages.

July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.20

At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue). I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, and then I came into contact with the world as never before. The Ripleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours. Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these things were discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridge professors. Those were very living years for me.

20. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.21 The collection included such titles as GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. 22 FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840), Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Vol tair e, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western Messenger.

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB 21. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12. 22. Henry Thoreau would consult this on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. GERMAN LITERATURE, I GERMAN LITERATURE, II GERMAN LITERATURE, III HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

July 1, Wednesday:Publication of THE DIAL: A MAGAZINE FOR LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION (Volume I, Number 1, July 1840), a journal of Transcendentalist thought named in honor of the sundial, began at this point and continued into 1844:

“The name speaks of faith in Nature and in Progress.” – The Reverend James Freeman Clarke

This initial issue of THE DIAL included Henry Thoreau’s essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus, which has been termed his “first printed paper of consequence.”

PERSIUS

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

THE DIAL, JULY 1840

Thoreau would later recycle this paper on the satirist Persius with 28 minor modifications into the “Thursday” chapter of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

A WEEK: The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, PEOPLE OF for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. The cunning mind travels further back than Zoroaster each A WEEK instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. The utmost thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again to-day as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. All the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket.

ZOROASTER PERSIUS Thoreau’s effort turned two tricks of interest. First, he espoused an attitude of turning away from creedal closedness, associating creedal closedness with immodesty and openness with modesty rather than vice versa and developing that attitude out of comments such as Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque susurros / Tollere de templis; et aperto vivere voto which translates as “It’s not easy to take murmurs and low whispers out of the temple and live with open vow.” Second, Thoreau perversely insisted on translating ex tempore in its literal etymological sense “out of time” ignoring what had become the primary sense of the phrase: “haphazard,” “improvised.” Thoreau mobilized this phrase to summon people to live not in time but in eternity: “The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity that includes all time. He is a child of each moment, and reflects wisdom.… He must try his fortune again to-day as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. From a real23 sympathy, all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket.” The force of the essay, then, was to provide Thoreau an opportunity to preach his own doctrines by satirizing a minor Roman satirist, and he admits as much: “As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.” Thoreau is of course that poet, that accessory to the crime. Robert D. Richardson, Jr. points out that Thoreau ignored a trope in Persius that had been admired by John

23. EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES 126. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Dryden, in order to do quite different things with this material:

With the cool effrontery of an Ezra Pound, Thoreau declares that there are perhaps twenty good lines in Persius, of permanent as opposed to historical interest. Ignoring the elegant shipwreck trope Dryden so admired in the sixth satire, Thoreau gives the main weight of his essay to a careful reading of seven of those lines. Two lines,

It is not easy for every one to take murmurs and low Whispers out of the temple –et aperto vivere voto– and live with open vow,

permit Thoreau to insist on the distinction between the “man of true religion” who finds his open temple in the whole universe, and the “jealous privacy” of those who try to “carry on a secret commerce with the gods” whose hiding place is in some building. The distinction is between the open religion of the fields and woods, and the secret, closed religion of the churches.

EZRA POUND

I would point out here that those who are familiar with the poetry of the West Coast poet of place, Robinson Jeffers (and I presume Richardson to be as innocent of knowledge of Jeffers as was Jeffers of knowledge of Thoreau), rather than see a linkage to the spirit of a poet who worshiped the Young Italy of Benito Mussolini, will choose to perceive a more direct linkage to Jeffers’s stance of “inhumanism.” But to go on in Richardson’s comment about the “Aulus Persius Flaccus” essay:

Thoreau’s best point takes a rebuke from the third satire against the casual life, against living ex tempore, and neatly converts it into a Thoreauvian paradox. Taking ex tempore literally, Thoreau discards its sense of offhand improvisation and takes it as a summons to live outside time, to live more fully than our ordinary consciousness of chronological time permits.

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.

Interpreting Persius through the lens of Emerson’s “History,” Thoreau contends that

All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself.

Thoreau’s Persius has gone beyond Stoicism to transcendentalism, insisting on open religious feelings as opposed to closed institutional dogmatic creeds, and on a passionate articulation of the absolute value of the present moment.

(Well, first we have Thoreau being like a later poet who was renowned for his personal as well as his political craziness, and then we have Thoreau being an Emerson impersonator, interpreting things through the lens of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s about par for the course, on the Richardson agenda.)

This initial issue also contained some material from Charles Emerson: The reason why Homer is to me like a dewy morning is because I too lived while Troy was, and sailed in the hollow ships of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Grecians to sack the devoted town. The rosy-fingered dawn as it crimsoned the tops of Ida, the broad seashore dotted with tents, the Trojan host in their painted armor, and the rushing chariots of Diomede and Idomeneua, all these I too saw: my ghost animated the frame of some nameless Argive.... We forget that we have been drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present. But when a lively chord in the soul is struck, when the windows for a moment are unbarred, the long and varied past is recovered. We recognize it all. We are no more brief, ignoble creatures; we seize our immortality, and bind together the related parts of our secular being. — Notes from the Journal of a Scholar, The Dial, I, p. 14

This initial issue also contained on page 123 the poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper “I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty” from which Thoreau would quote a large part as the conclusion of his “House-Warming” chapter:24

WALDEN: The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, PEOPLE OF since I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fire-place. Cooking was then, for the most part, no WALDEN longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force.– “Never, bright flame, may be denied to me Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright? What by my fortunes sunk so low in night? Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life’s common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands – nor does to more aspire By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.” Mrs. Hooper

ELLEN STURGIS HOOPER

It is to be noted, as an exercise in becoming aware of how much our attitudes toward copyright have changed, that in the original edition the last line, indicating that the poem was by a Mrs. Hooper, did not appear.

The poem as it had been published in THE DIAL had been entitled “The Wood Fire.” It would appear that

24. Would she be married to Concord’s Harry Hooper, and would he possibly be related to the signer of the Declaration of Independence who lived in the south after attending Boston’s Latin School? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Thoreau had intended to quote even more of the poem, and that seven beginning lines had been suppressed in the process of shortening the WALDEN manuscript for publication:

“When I am glad or gay, Let me walk forth into the briliant sun, And with congenial rays be shone upon: When I am sad, or thought-bewitched would be, Let me glide forth in moonlight’s mystery. But never, while I live this changeful life, This Past and Future with all wonders rife, Never, bright flame, may be denied to me, Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright? What by my fortunes sunk so low in night? Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life’s common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands – nor does to more aspire By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy,” or “To a gentle boy” also appeared in this 1st issue of THE DIAL.

Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne)’s Illustration for the 1st Edition of “To a Gentle Boy” in TWICE-TOLD TALES

The title of the journal came from a phrase that Bronson Alcott had been planning to use for his next year’s diary,

DIAL ON TIME THINE OWN ETERNITY

and the “dial” in question was a garden sundial.25 For purposes of this publication Bronson strove to emulate the selections from his writings that Waldo Emerson had excerpted at the end of the small volume NATURE, attempted, that is, to cast his wisdom in the form of epigrams or “Orphic Sayings” which, even if they were unchewable, at least could be fitted into one’s mouth. In the timeframe in which these were being created, Alcott was reading Hesiod (he had in his personal library HESIOD’S WORKS, TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK, BY MR. T[HOMAS] COOKE, SECOND EDITION, 1740), Dr. Henry More, the Reverend Professor Ralph Cudworth, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When these were finally published, they were the only transcendental material to appear in THE DIAL, of 24 pieces, that would bear the full name of the author rather than be offered anonymously or bear merely the author’s initials. It was as if the other transcendentalist writers associated with THE DIAL were saying to their readers, “Look, this is A. Bronson Alcott here, you’ve got to make allowances.” Here is one of the easier and more pithy examples:

Prudence is the footprint of Wisdom.

Some of these things, however, ran on and on without making any sense at all, and here is one that was seized upon by the popular press and mocked as a “Gastric Saying”:

The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense not to the soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, interchange the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual, Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely....

Well, I won’t quote the whole thing. Was Alcott a disregarded Hegelian who had never heard of Hegel?

25. The name, of course, carried metaphysical freight. For instance, in his 1836 essay NATURE Emerson had quoted the following from Emmanuel Swedenborg — the Swedish religious mentor whom he would later characterize, in REPRESENTATIVE MEN, as the type of “the mystic”:

The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.

And in December 1839, Emerson had written in his journal:

I say how the world looks to me without reference to Blair’s Rhetoric or Johnson’s Lives. And I call my thoughts The Present Age, because I use no will in the matter, but honestly record such impressions as things make. So transform I myself into a Dial, and my shadow will tell where the sun is. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Wouldn’t this be a better world if G.W.F. Hegel also had been ignored? Go figure.26The initial issue included

Americans of Thoreau’s day accepted as axiomatic the Lockean-Jeffersonian principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and Thoreau did not challenge this axiom. But he applied it in an unorthodox way. The unit that gives consent, he asserts, is not the majority but the individual. The reason, he explains, is that consent is a moral judgment, for which each individual is accountable to his own conscience. The majority, on the other hand, is not a moral entity and its right to rule not a moral entitlement. As Bronson Alcott, who set Thoreau the example of resistance to civil government, aptly put it, “In the theocracy of the soul majorities do not rule.” The alleged right of the majority to rule, Thoreau declared, is based merely on the assumption that “they are physically the strongest.”

a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch, “To the Aurora Borealis”: Arctic fount of holiest light, Springing through the winter night, Spreading far behind yon hill, When the earth lies dark and still, Rippling o'er the stars, as streams O'er pebbled beds in sunny gleams; O for names, thou vision fair, To express thy splendours rare! Blush upon the cheek of night, Posthumous, unearthly light, Dream of the deep sunken sun, Beautiful, sleep-walking one, Sister of the moonlight pale, Star-obscuring meteor veil, Spread by heaven's watching vestals; Sender of the gleamy crystals Darting on their arrowy course From their glittering polar source, Upward where the air doth freeze Round the sister Pleiades;-- Beautiful and rare Aurora, In the heavens thou art their Flora, Night-blooming Cereus of the sky, Rose of amaranthine dye, Hyacinth of purple light, Or their Lily clad in white! Who can name thy wondrous essence, Thou electric phosphorescence? Lonely apparition fire! Seeker of the starry choir! Restless roamer of the sky, Who hath won thy mystery? Mortal science hath not ran With thee through the Empyrean, Where the constellations cluster Flower-like on thy branching lustre. After all the glare and toil, And the daylight's fretful coil, 26. July 1840, The Dial, “Orphic Sayings,” xvii. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Thou dost come so milt and still, Hearts with love and peace to fill; As when after revelry With a talking company, Where the blaze of many lights Fell on fools and parasites, One by one the guests have gone, And we find ourselves alone; Only one sweet maiden near, With a sweet voice low and clear, Whispering music in our ear,-- So thou talkest to the earth After daylight's weary mirth. Is not human fantasy, Wild Aurora, likest thee, Blossoming in nightly dreams, Like thy shifting meteor-gleams?

Thoreau’s own copy of this issue of THE DIAL is now at Southern Illinois University. It exhibits his subsequent pencil corrections.

Aulus Persius Flaccus

IF you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of finding the field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent from the words of the prologue, “Ipse semipaganus Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum.” Here is none of the interior dignity of Virgil, nor the elegance and fire of Horace, nor will any Sibyl be needed to remind you, that from those older Greek poets, there is a sad descent to Persius. Scarcely can you distinguish one harmonious sound, amid this unmusical bickering with the follies of men. One sees how music has its place in thought, but hardly as yet in language. When the Muse arrives, we wait for her to remould language, and impart to it her own rhythm. Hitherto the verse groans and labors with its load, but goes not forward blithely, singing by the way. The best ode may be parodied, indeed is itself a parody, and has a poor and trivial sound, like a man stepping on the rounds of a ladder. Homer, and Shakspeare, and Milton, and Marvel, and Wordsworth, are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing. Most of all satire will not be sung. A Juvenal or Persius do not marry music to their verse, but are measured faultfinders at best; stand but just outside the faults they condemn, and so are concerned rather about the monster they have escaped, than the fair prospect before them. Let them live on an age, not a secular one, and they will have travelled out of his shadow and harm's way, and found other objects to ponder. [“nature” should As long as there is nature, the poet is, as it were, particeps read “satire”] criminis. One sees not but he had best let bad take care of itself, and have to do only with what is beyond suspicion. If you light on the least vestige of truth, and it is the weight of the whole body still which stamps the faintest trace, an eternity will not suffice to extol it, while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate. Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI severest correction. Horace would not have written satire so well, if he had not been inspired by it, as by a passion, and fondly cherished his vein. In his odes, the love always exceeds the hate, so that the severest satire still sings itself, and the poet is satisfied, though the folly be not corrected. A sort of necessary order in the development of Genius is, first, Complaint; second, Plaint; third, Love. Complaint, which is the condition of Persius, lies not in the province of poetry. Ere long the enjoyment of a superior good would have changed his disgust into regret. We can never have much sympathy with the complainer; for after searching nature through, we conclude he must be both plaintiff and defendant too, and so had best come to a settlement without a hearing. I know not but it would be truer to say, that the highest strain of the muse is essentially plaintive. The saint’s are still tears of joy. But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire; as impersonal as nature herself, and like the sighs of her winds in the woods, which convey ever a slight reproof to the hearer. The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. Hence have we to do only with the rare and fragmentary traits, which least belong to Persius, or, rather, are the properest utterance of his muse; since that which he says best at any time is what he can best say at all times. The Spectators and Ramblers have not failed to cull some quotable sentences from this garden too, so pleasant is it to meet even the most familiar truths in a new dress, when, if our neighbor had said it, we should have passed it by as hackneyed. Out of these six satires, you may perhaps select some twenty lines, which fit so well as many thoughts, that they will recur to the scholar almost as readily as a natural image; though when translated into familiar language, they lose that insular emphasis, which fitted them for quotation. Such lines as the following no translation can render commonplace. Contrasting the man of true religion with those, that, with jealous privacy, would fain carry on a secret commerce with the gods, he says, — “Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque Tollere susurros de templis; et aperto vivere voto.” To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence. Why should he betake himself to a subterranean crypt, as if it were the only holy ground in all the world he had left unprofaned? The obedient soul would only the more discover and familiarize things, and escape more and more into light and air, as having henceforth done with secrecy, so that the universe shall not seem open enough for it. At length, is it neglectful even of that silence which is consistent with true modesty, but by its independence of all confidence in its disclosures, makes that which it imparts so private to the hearer, that it becomes the care of the whole world that modesty be not infringed. To the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. Our most indifferent acts may be matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI In the third satire he asks, “Est aliquid quò tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum? An passim sequeris corvos, testâve, lutove, Securus quò per ferat, atque ex tempore vivis?” Language seems to have justice done it, but is obviously cramped and narrowed in its significance, when any meanness is described. The truest construction is not put upon it. What may readily be fashioned into a rule of wisdom, is here thrown in the teeth of the sluggard, and constitutes the front of his offence. Universally, the innocent man will come forth from the sharpest inquisition and lecturings, the combined din of reproof and commendation, with a faint sound of eulogy in his ears. Our vices lie ever in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter. Falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth; if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger of becoming true. “Securus quò pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivit, is then the motto of a wise man. For first, as the subtle discernment of the language would have taught us, with all his negligence he is still secure; but the sluggard, notwithstanding his heedlessness, is insecure. The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity that includes all time. He is a child each moment and reflects wisdom. The far darting thought of the child's mind tarries not for the development of manhood; it lightens itself, and needs not draw down lightning from the clouds. When we bask in a single ray from the mind of Zoroaster, we see how all subsequent time has been an idler, and has no apology for itself. But the cunning mind travels farther back than Zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. All the thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again today as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself: The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the life. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. From a real sympathy, all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket. In the fifth satire, which is the best, I find, “Stat contrà ratio, et recretam garrit in aurem. Ne liceat facere id, quod quis vitiabit agendo.” Only they who do not see how anything might be better done are forward to try their hand on it. Even the master workman must be encouraged by the reflection, that his awkwardness will be incompetent to do that harm, to which his skill may fail to do justice. Here is no apology for neglecting to do many things from a sense of our incapacity, — for what deed does not fall maimed and imperfect from our hands? — but only a warning to bungle less. The satires of Persius are the farthest possible from inspired; evidently a chosen, not imposed subject. Perhaps I have given him credit for more earnestness than is apparent; but certain it is, that that which alone we can call Persius, which is forever independent and consistent, was in earnest, and so HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI sanctions the sober consideration of all. The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most wilfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact. The buffoon may not bribe you to laugh always at his grimaces; they shall sculpture themselves in Egyptian granite, to stand heavy as the pyramids on the ground of his character. T.

July 2, Thursday: Waldo Emerson noted that on page 18 of the printed version of THE DIAL in Henry Thoreau’s essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus there was a truly egregious error, in that the word “nature” had been typeset rather than “satire.” He asked Margaret Fuller to do the dog labor of pen-correcting this in all the printed copies that might come into her hand before they were posted. THE DIAL, JULY 1840

[This pen correction couldn’t have needed longer than an hour since the magazine never amounted to more than 220 copies. You will not be able to see Margaret’s pen correction in the above electronic copy because it does not amount to electronic copy of one of the original posted copies, but instead actually is electronic copy of the material as it was then republished with three issues bound together as one “annual” volume.]

Before July 17: John Thoreau, Jr. again followed Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall to Scituate, before the 17th, and this time as he strolled with her on the beach, while her chaperone Miss Prudence Ward was resting on some rocks, out of earshot, he proposed marriage.27 She accepted him, then shortly afterward declined. It is known that her mother learned of this proposal and responded that her minister father disapproved of Transcendentalists; Miss Ellen would be sent to stay with relatives in Watertown, New York safely out of the reach of those Thoreau boys. Henry Thoreau submitted “THE SERVICE” to Margaret Fuller for THE DIAL:

“THE SERVICE”: A man’s life should be a stately march to an unheard music, and when to his fellows it seems irregular and inharmonious, he will be stepping to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can detect. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound — when the deepened melody is no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous circumstances, for then the music will not fail to swell into corresponding volume and distinctness and rule the movement it accompanies. ... To the sensitive soul the Universe has her own fixed measure and rhythm, which is its measure also and constitutes the regularity and health of its pulse. When the body marches to the measure of the soul then is true courage and invincible strength.

In this, Thoreau made use of a couplet from Robert Herrick’s poem “To Fortune”: TUMBLE me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, smiling yet ; Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be Patient in my necessity. Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun Me, as a fear’d infection ; HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Yet, scare-crow-like, I’ll walk as one Neglecting thy derision.

27. It is this incident to which Thoreau would refer on page 293 of A WEEK:

A WEEK: I am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. The miracle is, that what is is, when it is so difficult, if not impossible, for anything else to be; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path; that every man can get a living, and so few can do anything more. So much only can I accomplish ere health and strength are gone, and yet this suffices. The bird now sits just out of gunshot. I am never rich in money, and I am never meanly poor. If debts are incurred, why, debts are in the course of events cancelled, as it were by the same law by which they were incurred. I heard that an engagement was entered into between a certain youth and a maiden, and then I heard that it was broken off, but I did not know the reason in either case. We are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance, now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted. I cannot change my clothes but when I do, and yet I do change them, and soil the new ones. It is wonderful that this gets done, when some admirable deeds which I could mention do not get done. Our particular lives seem of such fortune and confident strength and durability as piers of solid rock thrown forward into the tide of circumstance. When every other path would fail, with singular and unerring confidence we advance on our particular course. What risks we run! famine and fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, — and yet every man lives till he — dies. How did he manage that? Is there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, — we have walked a plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still without delay, while I go about the streets, and chaffer with this man and that to secure it a living. It is as indifferent and easy meanwhile as a poor man’s dog, and making acquaintance with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a mountain stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at last. I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources. No matter what imprudent haste in my career; I am permitted to be rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the Indies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“THE SERVICE”: The Romans “made Fortune sirname to Fortitude,” for fortitude is that alchemy that turns all things to good fortune. The man of fortitude, whom the Latins called fortis is no other than that lucky person whom fors favors, or vir summae fortis. If we will, every bark may “carry Cæsar and Cæsar’s fortune.” For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself; he was no artist, but an artisan, who first made shields of brass. For armor of proof, mea virtute me involvo, — I wrap myself in my virtue; “Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, smiling yet.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI August 16, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

After seeing Anna Barker I rode with Margaret Fuller to the plains. She taxed me, as often before, so now more explicitly with inhospitality of soul. She & Caroline would gladly be my friends, yet our intercourse is not friendship, but literary gossip. I count & weigh but do not love. They make no progress with me, but however often we have met, we still meet as strangers. They feel wronged in such relation, & do not wish to be catechised & criticized. I thought of my experience with several persons which resembled this: and confessed that I would not converse with the divinest person more than one week. M. insisted that it was no friendship which was so soon thus exhausted, & that I ought to know how to be silent & companionable at the same moment. She would surprise me — she would have me say & do what surprised myself. I confess to all this charge with humility unfeigned. I can better converse with George Bradford than with any other. Elizabeth Hoar & I have a beautiful relation not however quite free from the same hardness & fences.

GEORGE PARTRIDGE BRADFORD

So, who was this Anna Barker? She was a Quaker girl who had converted to Unitarianism, who eventually, as HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the wife of the wealthy New-York banker Samuel Gray Ward, would become a Roman Catholic. As described in [her] sonnet, the unique friendship Margaret Fuller and Anna Barker possessed seems to “transcend separation.” Despite Barker’s absence, the love Fuller feels for her friend emerges in the text through the imagery of “graceful trees and gentle slopes,” images that are commonly characteristic of sentimental love poems. Fuller’s description of holding Barker, “the bright being,” illuminates the extent of Fuller’s emotional attachment to her friend, a connection so strong that “lovers” seems to be a more appropriate description of their relationship than simply “friends.” The poem evokes an image of two young lovers standing on a sandy shoreline, sharing their “heart’s power” for the “present hour,” realizing that they will later remember with “tender thoughts” and “moonlight memories” the beauty and mutual love of that evening. To carry this notion a step further, seven years after this sonnet was written, Fuller wrote the following in her journal: “that night when she [Anna] leaned on me and her eyes were such a deep violet blue, so like night, as they never were before, and we both felt such a strange mystic thrill and knew what we had never known before”. This entry is oddly reminiscent of the sonnet discussed here (e.g. “of the bright being I had held so dear, / beneath the summer sky”); it would be logical to surmise that it refers to the night detailed in the poem. Whatever else they mean, these words imply the homoerotic feelings Fuller possessed for Barker, feelings that are present, though delicately rendered, in the poem discussed here. Despite the fact that it was considered inappropriate for persons of opposite sex to display affection publicly toward each other during the nineteenth century in the United States, it was quite acceptable for persons of the same sex, especially females, to do so. Such behavior was viewed as “girlishly pure, a sign of sensibility and emotional responsiveness [...] innocent, permissible, and unthreatening.” But, a nineteenth-century best seller entitled “A Young Lady’s Friend” by Eliza Farrar, Fuller’s friend and mentor, who introduced her to Barker, states: All kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never indulged in before gentlemen. There are some reasons for this, which will readily suggest themselves, and others, which can only be known to those well acquainted with the world. This historical insight into nineteenth-century cultural norms suggests that relationships between women, such as Fuller and Barker, were likely viewed as natural and healthy relationships that probably attracted very little attention and were entirely acceptable. The fact that Fuller wrote numerous poems to women, including the seven to Barker, was considered normal behavior, despite her use of phrases such as “divinist (sic) love” when referring to Barker. Romantic or familial, she still desired to love and to be loved by anyone who shared an emotional connection with her. Gender made no difference to Fuller, who once wrote, “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man [...]. It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI spiritual.” According to Fuller biographer Joan von Mehren, for a period of ten years, Barker “served as Margaret’s most cherished romantic love.” She goes on to say, Margaret’s poems and terms of endearment, especially in her later characterization of her love for Anna as “the same love we shall feel when we are angels,” suggest that Anna’s attraction, while based on the power of opposites (the beautiful Anna, the brilliant Margaret), was possibly sustained by Margaret’s need, as Bell Chevigny has suggested, “to resolve her sexual identity by transcending sex itself.” Fuller once wrote in her journal that love between persons of the same sex is “unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.” This observation can be interpreted in multiple ways, either that sexual relations between persons of the same sex is a completely spiritual experience, untainted by acts normally considered to be morally improper, or that sex is never an issue between persons of the same gender if their relationship is of a truly deep and spiritual nature. By understanding Fuller’s intellectual approach to same-sex relationships, one may surmise that Anna Barker was in all probability Fuller’s first love. It is unclear, however, whether or not Fuller and Barker ever experienced a sexually intimate relationship with one another, although several biographers believe that the possibility exists.28

28. From “‘In death thy life is found’: An Examination of the Forgotten Poetry of Margaret Fuller,” thesis by Staci E. Lewis, May 2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI During a summer visit to North Reading, Timothy Flint died in the residence of his brother at Salem, Massachusetts. The cause of his death at the age of 60 was set down as a liver problem, “biliousness.”

Harmony Grove Cemetery then and now

He left with friends in Salem a manuscript entitled “Second part of Recollections of the Mississippi Valley” (meanwhile, back home in Louisiana, the slaves of the Lunenburg plantation were so contented in their enslavement that they were busily building their slavemaster’s family one of those standard white-pillared Southern mansions with a big veranda where these benevolent white people could relax and sip their mint juleps while being fanned by some little black house servant. –Hoo-hah, tell us about how to be happy!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

August 16th, 1840: A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the Vedas.

September: Waldo Emerson wrote Caroline Sturgis, with the information that George Partridge Bradford was translating François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon “& sent me yesterday two sheets concerning Friendship.”

Toward the end of the month, after writing to Margaret Fuller that it would be “better to part now,” Emerson made a note in his journal “You would have me love you? What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you.” The next day Margaret wrote back to Waldo: “How often have I said, This light will never understand my fire. …I am no saint….” Emerson would respond to this attempt at communication with “I think I could wish it unwritten.” –And it would be all downhill from there.

October 7, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller that he had been consulting Simon Ockley’s HISTORY OF THE SARACENS, “which I read hastily many years ago, the book which Gibbon praises so heartily.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 27, Monday: It being Monday, the day of the weekly cattle fair in Brighton, supplying the Boston meat markets, William Allen and Nathaniel Hawthorne rode there in a wagon carrying a calf that was to be sold for slaughter. Its mother having already been sent to market, and it having had no breakfast, it kept baa-ing especially whenever it saw cows standing in the pastures alongside the road. Allen intended to purchase four piglets for fattening, driven up to Brighton from New York State. Hawthorne had on his blue stuff coat. He noted that the people of Brighton seemed to be of a bulky make, the sort “who lived on flesh-diet,” and he noticed that they had mottled faces, “as if they adhered to the old fashion of spirit-drinking.” On the way home, one of the piglets bit Allen’s finger to the bone.

Correction of the last proof-sheets for the October THE DIAL was left to Henry Thoreau so that Waldo Emerson could go on a jaunt with Nathaniel to the Shakers of Harvard, Massachusetts (this was the issue in which Margaret Fuller’s “Festus” was to appear). FESTUS; A POEM PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

Hawthorne to his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS:

September 27. — A ride to Brighton yesterday morning, it being the day of the weekly Cattle Fair. William Allen and myself went in a wagon, carrying a calf to be sold at the fair. The calf had not had his breakfast, as his mother had preceded him to Brighton, and he kept expressing his hunger and discomfort by loud, sonorous baas, especially when we passed any cattle in the fields or in the road. The cows, grazing within hearing, expressed great interest, and some of them came galloping to the roadside to behold the calf. Little children, also, on their way to school, stopped to laugh and point at poor little Bossie. He was a prettily behaved urchin, and kept thrusting his hairy muzzle between William and myself, apparently wishing to be stroked and patted. It was an ugly thought that his confidence in human nature, and nature in general, was to be so ill- rewarded as by cutting his throat, and selling him in quarters. This, I suppose, has been his fate before now! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI It was a beautiful morning, clear as crystal, with an invigorating, but not disagreeable coolness. The general aspect of the country was as green as summer, — greener indeed than mid or latter summer, — and there were occasional interminglings of the brilliant hues of autumn, which made the scenery more beautiful, both visibly and in sentiment. We saw no absolutely mean nor poor-looking abodes along the road. There were warm and comfortable farm-houses, ancient, with the porch, the sloping roof, the antique peak, the clustered chimney, of old times; and modern cottages, smart and tasteful; and villas, with terraces before them, and dense shade, and wooden urns on pillars, and other such tokens of gentility. Pleasant groves of oak and walnut, also, there were, sometimes stretching along valleys, sometimes ascending a hill and clothing it all round, so as to make it a great clump of verdure. Frequently we passed people with cows, oxen, sheep, or pigs for Brighton Fair. On arriving at Brighton, we found the village thronged with people, horses, and vehicles. Probably there is no place in New England where the character of an agricultural population may be so well studied. Almost all the farmers within a reasonable distance make it a point, I suppose, to attend Brighton Fair pretty frequently, if not on business, yet as amateurs. Then there are all the cattle-people and butchers who supply the Boston market, and dealers from far and near; and every man who has a cow or a yoke of oxen, whether to sell or buy, goes to Brighton on Monday. There were a thousand or two of cattle in the extensive pens belonging to the tavern- keeper, besides many that were standing about. One could hardly stir a step without running upon the horns of one dilemma or another, in the shape of ox, cow, bull, or ram. The yeomen appeared to be more in their element than I have ever seen them anywhere else, except, indeed, at labor; — more so than at musterings and such gatherings of amusement. And yet this was a sort of festal day, as well as a day of business. Most of the people were of a bulky make, with much bone and muscle, and some good store of fat, as if they had lived on flesh- diet; — with mottled faces too, hard and red, like those of persons who adhered to the old fashion of spirit- drinking. Great, round-paunched country squires were there too, sitting under the porch of the tavern, or waddling about, whip in hand, discussing the points of the cattle. There were also gentlemen-farmers, neatly, trimly, and fashionably dressed, in handsome surtouts and trousers, strapped under their boots. Yeomen, too, in their black or blue Sunday suits, cut by country tailors, and awkwardly worn. Others (like myself) had on the blue, stuff frocks which they wear in the fields, the most comfortable garments that ever were invented. Country loafers were among the throng, — men who looked wistfully at the liquors in the bar, and waited for some friend to invite them to drink, — poor, shabby, out-at-elbowed devils. Also, dandies from the city, corseted and buckramed, who had come to see the humors of Brighton Fair. All these, and other varieties of mankind, either thronged the spacious bar-room of the hotel, drinking, smoking, talking, bargaining, or walked about among the cattle-pens, looking with knowing eyes at the horned people. The owners of the cattle stood near at hand, waiting for offers. There was something indescribable in their aspect, that showed them to be the owners, though they mixed among the crowd. The cattle, brought from a hundred separate farms, or rather from a thousand, seemed to agree very well together, not quarrelling in the least. They almost all had a history, no doubt, if they could but have told it. The cows had each given her milk to support families, — had roamed the pastures, and come home to the barn-yard, — had been looked upon as a sort of member of the domestic circle, and was known by a name, as Brindle or Cherry. The oxen, with their necks bent by the heavy yoke, had toiled in the plough-field and in haying-time for many years, and knew their master's stall as well as the master himself knew his own table. Even the young steers and the little calves had something of domestic sacredness about them; for children had watched their growth, and petted them, and played with them. And here they all were, old and young, gathered from their thousand homes to Brighton Fair; whence the great chance was that they would go to the slaughter-house, and thence be transmitted, in sirloins, joints, and such pieces, to the tables of the Boston folk. William Allen had come to buy four little pigs to take the places of four who have now grown large at our farm, and are to be fatted and killed within a few weeks. There were several hundreds, in pens appropriated to their use, grunting discordantly, and apparently in no very good humor with their companions or the world at large. Most or many of these pigs had been imported from the State of New York. The drovers set out with a large number, and peddle them along the road till they arrive at Brighton with the remainder. William selected four, and bought them at five cents per pound. These poor little porkers were forthwith seized by the tails, their legs tied, and then thrown into our wagon, where they kept up a continual grunt and squeal till we got home. Two of them were yellowish, or light gold-color, the other two were black and white, speckled; and all four of very piggish aspect and deportment. One of them snapped at William's finger most spitefully, and bit it to the bone. All the scene of the Fair was very characteristic and peculiar, — cheerful and lively, too, in the bright, warm sun. I must see it again; for it ought to be studied. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 17, Saturday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

GEORGE RIPLEY Yesterday George & Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller & Alcott SOPHIA RIPLEY discussed here the new social plans. I wished to be convinced, to be thawed, to be made nobly mad by the kindlings before my MARGARET FULLER eye of a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was arithmetic BRONSON ALCOTT & comfort; this was a hint borrowed from the Tremont House & U.S. Hotel; a rage in our poverty & politics to live rich & gentlemanlike, an anchor to leeward against a change of weather; a prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great questions of pauperism & property.

BROOK FARM

October 18, Monday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Margaret Fuller, rejecting a poem “With frontier strength ye 29 stand your ground” for THE DIAL. This letter indicates that Thoreau was already contemplating going “to the THE DIAL, OCTOBER 1841

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present unless to tame the guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid his native snows. He is friendly; he will find the generous office that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine or the heather. The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, will mould the man, and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere, but if I give my impression of him I will say He says too constantly of nature She is mine; She is not yours till you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently All places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false. I do not know that I have more to say now, perhaps these words will say nothing to you; If intercourse should continue, perhaps a bridge may be made between the minds so widely apart, for I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me as widely as most of your kind do. If you should find yourself inclined to write to me, as you thought you might, I dare say many thoughts would be suggested to me! –many have already by seeing you day by day. Will you finish the poem in your own way and send it for the Dial. Leave out “And seems to milk the sky” —The image is too low. Mr Emerson thought so too. Farewell. May Truth be irradiated by Beauty!— Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut, and write to me about Shakspeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him which I have never yet been led to express. Margaret F. The pencilled paper Mr E. put into my hands. I have taken the liberty to copy it– You expressed one day my own opinion that the moment such a crisis is passed we may speak of it. There is no need of artificial delicacy, of secrecy, it keeps its own secret, it cannot be made false. Thus you will not be sorry that I have seen the paper. Will you not send me some other records of the good week.

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in America, nor a good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water, and plenty of them, — that he is free to allow, — to all others gifts of nature or man, his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and, moreover, the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his virtues do not come out until he quarrels. Transfer these traits to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and we shall have no bad picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand as a favorable impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the present day. A sharp dogmatic man with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand, a master of all elegant learning and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. His partialities and dislikes are by no means calculable, but are often whimsical and amusing; yet they are quite sincere, and, like those of Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the man. What he says of Wordsworth, is true of himself, that he delights to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry, “Gentlemen, there is a better man than all of you.” Bolivar, Mina, and General Jackson will never be greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr. Landor think as he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and Xenophon, out of our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or “Lucas on Happiness,” or “Lucas on Holiness,” or even Barrow’s Sermons. Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty. A less pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion of licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech, that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies, and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight. In Mr. Landor’s coarseness there is a certain air of defiance; and the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness and over- refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his fingers in a sess-pool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A sort of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too decided not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no good book. But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings are open to harsher censure; but we love the man from sympathy, as well as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were able, to put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty years we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI oppressor, whether public or private, we feel how dignified is this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world. Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make good in the nineteenth-century the claims of pure literature. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own love, is a friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of Homer and Aeschylus, — Horace, Ovid, and Plutarch, — Erasmus, Scaliger, and Montaigne, — Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton, — Dryden and Pope, — we pass at once out of trivial associations, and enter into a region of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted all beneath the moon, and entered that crystal sphere in which everything in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and immortal. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. The existence of the poorest play- wright and the humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm attaches to the most inferior names which have in any manner got themselves enrolled in the registers of the House of Fame, even as porters and grooms in the courts, to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and Dennis, Aubrey and Spence. From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors, housekeepers, and men of care and fear. What boundless leisure! what original jurisdiction! the old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen; an elysian light tinges all objects. “In the afternoon we came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon.” And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to have the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined as ours. There are vast spaces in a thought; a slave, to whom the religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master’s freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for the renovation of society and nature, as to disesteem or deny the literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means, organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence in the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason for its being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If rhyme rejoices us, there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers us, we should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes place for its hour, and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your actions, as if they were better than Homer’s verses or Raphael’s pictures. Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside their enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of them; but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their task. Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to this sacred class, and among these, few men of the present age, have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love of beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and contemptuous expressions. But beyond his delight in genius, and his love of individual and civil liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more rare, the appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable considered with his intense nationality, to which we have already alluded. He is buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish. He has the common prejudices of the English landholder; values his pedigree, his acres, and the syllables of his name; loves all his advantages, is not insensible to the beauty of his watchseal, or the Turk’s head on his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride, there is a noble nature within him, which instructs him that he is so rich that he can well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others the painting of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating character. He draws his own portrait in the costume of a village schoolmaster, and a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature over fortune. Not only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the whimsical selection of his heads prove this taste. He draws with evident pleasure the portrait of a man, who never said anything right, and never did anything wrong. But in the character of Pericles, he has found full play for beauty and greatness of behavior, where the circumstances are in harmony with the man. These portraits, though mere sketches, must be valued as attempts in the very highest kind of narrative, which not only has very few examples to exhibit of any success, but very few competitors in the attempt. The word Character is in all mouths; it is a force which we all feel; yet who has analyzed it? What is the nature of that subtle, and majestic principle which attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the atmosphere and the landscape? A moral force, yet wholly unmindful of creed and catechism, intellectual, but scornful of books, it works directly and without means, and though it may be resisted at any time, yet resistance to it is a suicide. For the person who stands in this lofty relation to his fellow men is always the impersonation to them of their conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the extreme delicacy of this element, evanescing before any but the most sympathetic vision, that it has so seldom been employed in the drama and in novels. Mr. Landor, almost alone among living English writers, has indicated his perception of it. These merits make Mr. Landor’s position in the republic of letters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no friendships, that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI he discriminates his faults with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position is by no means the highest in literature; he is not a poet or a philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge, a man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor’s definitions are only enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized. But as it is not from the highest Alps or Andes, but from less elevated summits, that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so is Mr. Landor the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has commented on a wide variety of writers, with a closeness and an extent of view, which has enhanced the value of those authors to his readers. His Dialogue on the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the genius of Epicurus. The Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the best of all criticisms on the Essays of Bacon. His picture of Demosthenes in three several Dialogues is new and adequate. He has illustrated the genius of Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides. Then he has examined before he expatiated, and the minuteness of his verbal criticism gives a confidence in his fidelity, when he speaks the language of meditation or of passion. His acquaintance with the English tongue is unsurpassed. He “hates false words, and seeks with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.” He knows the value of his own words. “They are not,” he says, “written on slate.” He never stoops to explanation, nor uses seven words where one will do. He is a master of condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar way. He knows the wide difference between compression and an obscure elliptical style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of phrase, and even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There is no inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any more than in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is found room for every possible variety of expression. Yet it is not as an artist, that Mr. Landor commends himself to us. He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method, by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius. His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory, sentiment, and personal history, and what skill of transition he may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest at last, not on the spirit of the dialogue, or the symmetry of any of his historical portraits, but on the value of his sentences. Many of these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not plants and animals, but the genetical atoms, of which both are composed. All our great debt to the oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold dust. Of many of Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of Socrates, that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them how or where you will. We will enrich our pages with a few paragraphs, which we hastily select from such of Mr. Landor’s volumes as lie on our table. ______“The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI hope from another. It is he, who while he demonstrates the iniquity of the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious, both as weak and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him...... Him I would call the powerful man who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great man, I was going on to show thee, is somewhat more. He must be able to do this, and he must have that intellect which puts into motion the intellect of others.” “All titulars else must be produced by others; a knight by a knight, a peer by a King, while a gentleman is self-existent.” “Critics talk most about the visible in sublimity ... the Jupiter, the Neptune. Magnitude and power are sublime, but in the second degree, managed as they may be. Where the heart is not shaken, the gods thunder and stride in vain. True sublimity is the perfection of the pathetic, which has other sources than pity; generosity, for instance, and self-devotion. When the generous and self-devoted man suffers, there comes Pity; the basis of the sublime is then above the water, and the poet, with or without the gods, can elevate it above the skies. Terror is but the relic of a childish feeling; pity is not given to children. So said he; I know not whether rightly, for the wisest differ on poetry, the knowledge of which, like other most important truths, seems to be reserved for a purer state of sensation and existence.” “O Cyrus, I have observed that the authors of good make men very bad as often as they talk much about them.” “The habit of haranguing is in itself pernicious; I have known even the conscientious and pious, the humane and liberal dried up by it into egoism and vanity, and have watched the mind, growing black and rancid in its own smoke.” GLORY. “Glory is a light which shines from us on others, not from others on us.” “If thou lovest Glory, thou must trust her truth. She followeth him who doth not turn and gaze after her.” RICHARD I. “Let me now tell my story ... to confession another time. I sailed along the realms of my family; on the right was England, on the left was France; little else could I discover than sterile eminences and extensive shoals. They fled behind me; so pass away generations; so shift, and sink, and die away affections. In the wide ocean I was little of a monarch; old men guided me, boys instructed me; these taught me the names of my towns and harbors, those showed me the extent of my dominions; one cloud, that dissolved in one hour, half covered them. “I debark in Sicily. I place my hand upon the throne of Tancred, and fix it. I sail again, and within a day or two I behold, as the sun is setting, the solitary majesty of Crete, mother of a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI religion, it is said, that lived two thousand years. Onward, and many specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the monument of a greater man than I am. I leave them afar off.... and for whom? O, abbot, to join creatures of less import than the sea-mews on their cliffs; men praying to be heard, and fearing to be understood, ambitious of another’s power in the midst of penitence, avaricious of another’s wealth under vows of poverty, and jealous of another’s glory in the service of their God. Is this Christianity? and is Saladin to be damned if he despises it?” DEMOSTHENES. “While I remember what I have been, I never can be less. External power can affect those only who have none intrinsically. I have seen the day, Eubulides, when the most august of cities had but one voice within her walls; and when the stranger, on entering them, stopped at the silence of the gateway, and said, ‘Demosthenes is speaking in the assembly of the people.’" “There are few who form their opinions of greatness from the individual. Ovid says, ‘the girl is the least part of herself.’ Of himself, certainly, the man is.” “No men are so facetious as those whose minds are somewhat perverted. Truth enjoys good air and clear light, but no playground.” “I found that the principal means (of gratifying the universal desire of happiness) lay in the avoidance of those very things, which had hitherto been taken up as the instruments of enjoyment and content; such as military commands, political offices, clients, adventures in commerce, and extensive landed property.” “Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means of meriting or of obtaining the higher.” “Praise keeps good men good.” “The highest price we can pay for a thing is to ask for it.” “There is a gloom in deep love as in deep water; there is a silence in it which suspends the foot; and the folded arms, and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song.” “Anaxagoras is the true, firm, constant friend of Pericles; the golden lamp that shines perpetually on the image I adore.” [The Letter of Pericles to Aspasia in reply to her request to be permitted to visit Xeniades.] “Do what your heart tells you; yes, Aspasia, do all it tells you. Remember how august it is. It contains the temple, not only of Love, but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of one to the extremity of the other. “Bend in pensiveness, even in sorrow, on the flowery bank of youth, whereunder runs the stream that passes irreversibly! let the garland drop into it, let the hand be refreshed by it — but — may the beautiful feet of Aspasia stand firm.” E. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

December 1, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Margaret Fuller in Jamaica Plain, to return his manuscript “THE SERVICE” rejected for THE DIAL.30

1st Decr. I am to blame for so long detaining your manuscript. But my thoughts have been so engaged that I have not found a suitable hour to reread it as I wished till last night. This second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be pained not to meet it again. But then the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I can not read it through without pain. I never once feel myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic. It is true as Mr E. says, that essays not to be compared with this have found their way into the Dial. But then those are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding which induces us to permit their presence. Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding. Yet I hope you will give it me again, and if you see no force in my objections disregard them. S.M. Fuller.

30. The piece would not be published until 1902. “THE SERVICE” IN 1902 HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1841

Spring: Ellery Channing II, while studying law in Cincinnati and discovering that he was not motivated for such pursuits, became enamored of another person from the Boston area, a Miss Ellen Kilshaw Fuller, younger sister of Margaret Fuller, daughter of Timothy Fuller, deceased, and Mrs. Margaret Crane Fuller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 12, Monday: Birth of the Reverend John Stetson Barry and Louisa Young Barry’s 1st child, Caroline Louisa Barry.

In the continuing snowstorm, Nathaniel Hawthorne arrived at Brook Farm: “But I reflect that the Plymouth pilgrims arrived in the midst of storm... and nevertheless they prospered, and became a great people.”

THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; BROOK FARM after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the WALDO EMERSON Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau ELLERY CHANNING about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that LONGFELLOW I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. BRONSON ALCOTT Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Nathaniel to his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS, as rendered into poetry by Robert Peters:

Hawthorne as Agriculturalist I My first lesson in agriculture: I went to see our cows foddered …

We have eight cows, and the number is increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk-pail.

I intend to convert myself into a milkmaid, this evening … I shall perform my duty with fear and trembling.

II I did not milk the cows last night.

III Miss Fuller’s cow hooks the other cows and has made herself ruler of the herd.

Robert Peters. HAWTHORNE: POEMS ADAPTED FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS. Fairfax CA: Poet-Skin / Red Hill Press, 1977

April 13, Tuesday: Benjamin Pierce was born to Franklin Pierce and Jane Means Appleton Pierce (this child would die in a train accident on January 6, 1853 at the age of eleven).

Jean Baptiste Nothomb replaced Jean Louis Joseph Lebeau as head of government for Belgium.

The new Hoftheater in Dresden, designed by Gottfried Semper, opened with a performance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Torquato Tasso.

Please choose which of these alternative entries for Tuesday, April 13th more pleases you:

A.) Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Amelia Peabody whom he was already referring to as his wife, from “Oak Hill” (the Brook Farm community31 of West Roxbury):

31. For documents relating to Brook Farm, refer to Sams, Henry W., ed. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BROOK FARM, Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1958. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI B.) Hawthorne, a notorious gynophobe,32 found occasion to poke something in fun at a heifer or two. Since his missive was directed to his “Ownest love” (which is to say, to his fiancée Sophia who was already constructing herself as this gynophobe’s loyal little Other), and since it expressed his barely concealed contempt for a female other than herself, he of course understood that no matter how utterly humorous or humorless his missive was, it would be eagerly seized:

Here is thy poor husband in a polar Paradise! I know not how to interpret this aspect of Nature — whether it be of good or evil omen to our enterprise. But I reflect that the Plymouth pilgrims arrived in the midst of storm and stept ashore upon mountain snow-drifts; and nevertheless they prospered, and became a great people — and doubtless it will be the same with us. ... Belovedest, I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, as thou mayest well suppose — except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer, belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail. Thou knowest best, whether, in these traits of character, she resembles her mistress.

32. Gynophobe, n., a man who should, but seldom does, attempt misogamy (I made this up — to peruse all of Hawthorne’s letters to his fiancée, refer to LOVE LETTERS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Chicago: Dofobs Society, 1907). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

April 14, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau was reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT ... EDITED FROM THE AUTHOR’S MS. BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE (London: W. Pickering, 1840). COLERIDGE’S CONFESSIONS

Nathaniel Hawthorne again wrote his “Sweetest” from Brook Farm, reporting the old reluctant-worker trick of demonstrating great strength and manliness as a mask for great laziness and righteousness, by immediately figuring out a way to break the tools. How many times have you hired some neighborhood kid to help you with something in your garage, only to have the kid pull this stunt on you and then grin and hand you the broken tool and stick out his hand for his pay? —Who did this city dude Hawthorne think he had fooled, besides Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley the preacher’s wife?

But this morning, I have done wonders. Before breakfast, I went out to the barn, and began to chop hay for the cattle; and with such “righteous vehemence” (as Mr. Ripley says) did I labor, that, in the space of ten minutes, I broke the machine. ... Belovedest, Miss Fuller’s cow hooks the other cows, and has made herself ruler of the herd, and behaves in a very tyrannical manner. Sweetest, I know not when I shall see thee; but I trust it will not be longer than till the end of next week. I love thee! I love thee! I would thou wert with me; for then would my labor be joyful — and even now, it is not sorrowful. Dearest, I shall make an excellent husbandman. I feel the original Adam reviving within me.

Isn’t he just great at slinging the shit? –Such a creative writer, somebody get him a pitchfork!

May 25, Tuesday: On Waldo Emerson’s 38th birthday, Margaret Fuller commented that he had begun to spend 5 or 6 hours a day working in his garden and that his health, which had seemed in a very low state that spring, was improving day by day. She also remarked that Emerson had hired Henry Thoreau as “his working-man this year.”

September 13, Monday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller informing her that he had promised to revise Henry Thoreau’s poem on Wachusett and asking her to return it. In his letter he conveyed this superordinate evaluation:

H.T. is full of a noble madness lately, and I hope more highly of him than ever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Closing of the 1st (special) session of the 27th federal Congress. Human enslavement was still legal in these United States of America, the land of the free and home of the brave.

September 19, Sunday: John Shepard Keyes, done with his formal education without having learned very much at all, trying to figure out what on earth he was going to do with the rest of his life, began to read law in his father John Keyes’s Concord office. He informs us in passing that, despite his general feckless indolence, he was hanging out with the likes of Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Thoreau. Enough of college, I came back to Concord and taking two or three weeks to think about what I should do about various chances for teaching, including a Kentucky school Dr Jarvis wrote to me of from Louisville and one in New York Mr Shackford knew of, and a plan for going out to India with Augustine Heard that came to nothing, I decided on the law I was not fit for a school master, had no facilities for getting into business and as Father evidently preferred it I entered my name in his office Sept 19, 1841 my twentieth birthday and began Blackstone. The office was then in the northwest corner of the Robbins harness shop that stood on the site of the Town House yard, at the corner of Bedford Street, and the business being given up the other parts were in use as Irish tenements. It was a pleasant room facing the common under the shade of the big elm with an open piazza over the door that was very inviting in summer, as from its shelter the Court House, jail tavern stores all the life of the village could be seen. Here I brought Dr Ripleys old secretary, my college sofa, a chair or two, and taking down from the dusty shelves of Fathers law book case a well worn copy of the commentaries, read 8 hours a day Into all the life there was going in Concord I was soon plunged. Father had a little law business, but not enough to be much of an interruption to my reading, I kept pretty strictly to my work for the day time, but my evenings were devoted to some thing else. Mr. Emerson had then the habit of assembling at his house all the villagers that were interested in the discussions of the Transcendentalists by whom he was surrounded. Margaret Fuller, A.B. Alcott, et id omne genus held forth in his parlor to any who would listen and an additional attraction to me was ‘Saint Mary’ then teaching his children and living there who inspired me with something of the worship devout Catholics have for their saints, and drew me there oftener than philosophy would. Then my friend of commencement day whose father and mine from being old friends and townsmen in their birthplace, had quarrelled over anti masonry and didnt speak to each other, was visiting at one of my daily resorts, and attracted me the more perhaps from the fact of the quarrel. A photographer or daguerrotyper rather had opened a saloon in Shepherds Hall and to it as a new art all Concord flocked to be taken and criticize. I had seen the plates of Daguerres own work when they were first exhibited in Boston at a show, and became somewhat interested in the art. I had kept up my pleasant acquaintance with Thoreau who was at this time living in his shanty at Walden, where I sometimes went to see him, and oftener met him in his walks or on the river. I had some of his naturalist instincts and tastes, used to compare notes with him on birds and beasts, though I was no botanist as HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI he was. His life in Walden, has been somewhat misrepresented as it was by no means so much that of a hermit as is now thought He was at Mr Emersons & the village nearly every day, often partaking of his meals there and at his fathers house and though not intrusive was altogether too egotistic to be either shy or retiring He loved the woods the pond and the river and having met a disappointment in his other love, sought their consolation in preference to that of society. I had built and took great pleasure in a dainty boat named the ‘Fanny Elssler’ that would barely carry two, and was almost as crank as the wherries of later date In this I occasionally persuaded a lady friend to risk a row on the river. I recall once at high water landing with Jane Whiting on Egg Rock, and while sitting chatting on the top, seems Fanny Elssler quietly float downstream beyond recall. Waiting and wondering how we should get away for it was an island at that stage of the spring floods old Capt Moore came whistling along was hailed and brought back the truant boat, with a grin on his old face, and a story of the adventure I heard of often At another time with Martha, the oar caught in roping under the bridge, the current tipped the boat and we were barely saved by great exertion from drowning and ending prematurely this interesting story— J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

Hawthorne to his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS:

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October: Margaret Fuller was houseguest of the Emersons, and they had “strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversations.” She would go into his library in his absence and fondle his books. Emerson and Fuller passed

notes between each other, little Wallie acting as the messenger, notes such as “there is nothing I wish more than to be able to live with you without disturbing you.” Caroline Sturgis referred to them as “the rock and the wave.” Waldo dreamed of the world as an apple and ate it, although what if anything this dream had to do with his days spent with Fuller is unknown — who can figure dreams out? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 12, Tuesday: The combined British detachment that had ventured out from the relative safety of the metropolis, Cabul, Afghanistan, by this morning had become large enough to transit the pass of Khoord-Cabul, and this was effected with some loss due to long range sniper fire down from the rocks at the sides of the defile. The force then set up a defensive camp perimeter on the far side of the defile at Khoord-Cabul and the 13th light infantry again subjected itself to losses due to its exposure to this unrelenting rifle fire, by returning through the pass to its defensive camp perimeter at Bootkhak. For some nights the camps would repel attacks, “that on the 35th native infantry being peculiarly disastrous, from the treachery of the Affghan horse, who admitted the enemy within their lines, by which our troops were exposed to a fire from the least suspected quarter. Many of our gallant sepoys, and Lieutenant Jenkins, thus met their death.”33

Frederick Douglass addressed the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society at the Universalist meetinghouse in Concord.

33. Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). THE MILITARY OPERATIONS AT CABUL: WHICH ENDED IN THE RETREAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BRITISH ARMY, JANUARY 1842, WITH A JOURNAL OF IMPRISONMENT IN AFFGHANISTAN. Philadelphia PA: Carey and Hart, 1843; London: J. Murray, 1843 (three editions); Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). PRISON SKETCHES: COMPRISING PORTRAITS OF THE CABUL PRISONERS AND OTHER SUBJECTS; ADAPTED FOR BINDING UP WITH THE JOURNALS OF LIEUT. V. EYRE, AND LADY SALE; LITHOGRAPHED BY LOWES DICKINSON. London: Dickinson and Son, [1843?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI We very much need to know who was in town at the time, and who did and who did not attend this meeting: • Bronson Alcott ? • Abba Alcott ? • Anna Bronson Alcott ? • Louisa May Alcott (8 years old)? • Phineas Allen ? • Perez Blood ? • Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks ? • Squire Nathan Brooks ? • Caroline Downes Brooks ? • George Merrick Brooks ? • Deacon Simon Brown ? •Mrs. Lidian Emerson ? • Waldo Emerson ? • Reverend Barzillai Frost ? • Margaret Fuller ? • William Lloyd Garrison ? • Nathaniel Hawthorne ? • Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar ? • Edward Sherman Hoar ? • Senator George Frisbie Hoar ? • Elizabeth Sherman Hoar ? • Squire Samuel Hoar ? •Dr. Edward Jarvis ? • Deacon Francis Jarvis ? • John Shepard Keyes, Judge John Shepard Keyes ? • John M. Keyes ? • Reverend George Ripley ? • Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley ? • Reverend Samuel Ripley ? • Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley ? • Lemuel Shattuck ? • Daniel Shattuck ? • Sheriff Sam Staples ? • Henry David Thoreau ? • John Thoreau, Senior ? • Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau ? • John Thoreau, Jr. ? • Helen Louisa Thoreau ? • Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau ? • Aunt Maria Thoreau ? • Aunt Jane Thoreau ? • Alek Therien ? • Miss Prudence Ward ? • xxxxxx ? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 13, Wednesday: Fanny Elssler, the most egregious Austrian prior to Adolf Hitler, or perhaps even Arnold Schwartzeneger,34 had come to town! Fanny Elssler was the world’s first truly international star. In Europe she reigned alongside two other matchless talents of the mid-century — Rachel, the daughter of a Jewish peddler who became the greatest actress of her time, and the incomparable Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. Fanny was the first of the three to allow her talents to be imported to the US. The pristine, classical, almost spiritual perfection of traditional European ballet had given way to a romantic era to which Fanny Elssler’s talents were perfectly suited. She was earthy and voluptuous, and her graceful, exotic movements across a stage were filled with intoxicating, primitive passion. But how many Americans had ever heard of Fanny Elssler? And what red-blooded Yankee would pay good hard-earned money to watch a foreigner prance and tiptoe about a stage? The answer would be forged by the innovative skills of Elssler’s manager, a strange, dandified American known as Chevalier Henry Wikoff. Phineas Taylor Barnum would learn more from this controversial young man about promotion than he ever dared admit.... As many an admirer had done before him, Wikoff also became Fanny’s lover.... Pretty soon Fanny had first New York, then the whole country at her feet. The Chevalier had literally masterminded a new kind of American insanity — “Elsslermania.” Waldo Emerson watched as, agile and sensuous in downtown Boston, she danced Nathalie.

I saw in Boston Fanny Elssler in the ballet of Nathalie.

For this performance, or, at least, for her performance of La Sylphide, theatergoers were proving currently to be willing to pay even $288.00 a ticket,35 considerably more than the annual income of a seamstress. –And that was after the authorities had forced her to lengthen her skirts to the point at which the audience was warmly complaining that the dancer “could hardly move.” Clearly, Elssler’s fanny and other erroneous zones were proving far more efficacious than raw oysters, in reminding Bostonians of bounteous Nature and of necessary real Progress. And, while downtown, probably on this date, he also had happened to glimpse a famous Bostonian on the street — and this great man, Secretary of State of the United States of America, was refusing

34. Horace Greeley, who knew a good thing when he saw it, publicly attacked her life of “wantonness and shame.” Over the course of 208 US performances, the dancer would clear $140,000 for herself and her manager Chevalier Henry Wikoff, or approximately $673 an evening (her guarantee against the box-office draw was the first $500), a nightly princely sum which would have represented two years income to a skilled white male American artisan. 35. Emerson was attending this ballet, most likely, in the company of Margaret Fuller. Presumably their tickets cost at least $50 each, so the question is, how did Emerson and Fuller come up with this sort of disposable income? Did they perchance have access to freebie tickets? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to meet his eye!

I saw Daniel Webster in the street — but he was changed since I saw him last — black as a thunder cloud, & care worn: the anxiety that withers this generation among the young & thinking class had crept up also into the great lawyer’s chair, & too plainly, too plainly he was one of us. I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw me, and would not meet my face. The canker worms have crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm & swing down from that. No wonder the elm is a little uneasy.

Also on this notably productive excursion Emerson had his Daguerreotype made:

The Artist stands aside & lets you paint yourself.

Meanwhile in beautiful downtown Boston, Frederick Douglass was addressing the annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 18, Monday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Margaret Fuller, rejecting a poem “With frontier strength ye 36 stand your ground” for THE DIAL. This letter indicates that Thoreau was already contemplating going “to the THE DIAL, OCTOBER 1841

lonely hut,” presumably meaning his purchase of the Hollowell Farm rather than his building a cabin on Walden Pond. This letter also referred to some sort of secret about Thoreau to which Fuller was privy, which Canby hypothesizes had to do with Thoreau’s unsuccessful proposal of marriage to Ellen Devereux Sewall. 18th Octr 1841. I do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are a noble recognition of nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of woman. I cannot define my position here, and a large class of readers would differ from me. As the poet goes on to “Unhewn, primeval timber For knees so stiff, for masts so limber” he seems to chase an image, already rather forced, into conceits. Yet now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines, (with the exception of such offences against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye &c as to which we are already agreed) which I could not make to him self. He is healthful, sane, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature; he is not wilfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited. Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail, we can number and mark the substances embedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling, as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present unless to tame the guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid his native snows. He is friendly; he will find the generous office that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine or the heather. The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, will mould the man, and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere, but if I give my impression of him I will say He says too constantly of nature She is mine; She is not yours till you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently All places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false. I do not know that I have more to say now, perhaps these words will say nothing to you; If intercourse should continue, perhaps a bridge 36. Material which Thoreau was eventually able to include in the essay “A Walk to Wachusett” and place in the Boston Miscellany of Literature for January 1843. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI may be made between the minds so widely apart, for I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me as widely as most of your kind do. If you should find yourself inclined to write to me, as you thought you might, I dare say many thoughts would be suggested to me! –many have already by seeing you day by day. Will you finish the poem in your own way and send it for the Dial. Leave out “And seems to milk the sky” —The image is too low. Mr Emerson thought so too. Farewell. May Truth be irradiated by Beauty!— Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut, and write to me about Shakspeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him which I have never yet been led to express. Margaret F. The pencilled paper Mr E. put into my hands. I have taken the liberty to copy it– You expressed one day my own opinion that the moment such a crisis is passed we may speak of it. There is no need of artificial delicacy, of secrecy, it keeps its own secret, it cannot be made false. Thus you will not be sorry that I have seen the paper. Will you not send me some other records of the good week.

This issue of THE DIAL contained Waldo Emerson’s essay on Walter Savage Landor: We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect muscular man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech instantly betrays the English traveller; — a man nowise cautious to conceal his name or that of his native country, or his very slight esteem for the persons and the country that surround him. When Mr. Bull rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong, he is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him, persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in the roadside, and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after it has been told him; he wonders they do not make elder-wine and cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed with elder bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water, and plenty of them, — that he is free to allow, — to all others gifts of nature or man, his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and, moreover, the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his virtues do not come out until he quarrels. Transfer these traits to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and we shall have no bad picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand as a favorable impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the present day. A sharp dogmatic man with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand, a master of all elegant learning and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. His partialities and dislikes are by no means calculable, but are often whimsical and amusing; yet HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI they are quite sincere, and, like those of Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the man. What he says of Wordsworth, is true of himself, that he delights to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry, “Gentlemen, there is a better man than all of you.” Bolivar, Mina, and General Jackson will never be greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr. Landor think as he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and Xenophon, out of our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or “Lucas on Happiness,” or “Lucas on Holiness,” or even Barrow’s Sermons. Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty. A less pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion of licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech, that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies, and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight. In Mr. Landor’s coarseness there is a certain air of defiance; and the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness and over- refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his fingers in a sess-pool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A sort of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too decided not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no good book. But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings are open to harsher censure; but we love the man from sympathy, as well as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were able, to put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty years we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private, we feel how dignified is this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world. Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make good in the nineteenth-century the claims of pure literature. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own love, is a friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of Homer and Aeschylus, — Horace, Ovid, and Plutarch, — Erasmus, Scaliger, and Montaigne, — Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton, — Dryden and Pope, — we pass at once out of trivial associations, and enter into a region of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted all beneath the moon, and entered that crystal sphere in which everything in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and immortal. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. The existence of the poorest play- HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI wright and the humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm attaches to the most inferior names which have in any manner got themselves enrolled in the registers of the House of Fame, even as porters and grooms in the courts, to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and Dennis, Aubrey and Spence. From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors, housekeepers, and men of care and fear. What boundless leisure! what original jurisdiction! the old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen; an elysian light tinges all objects. “In the afternoon we came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon.” And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to have the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined as ours. There are vast spaces in a thought; a slave, to whom the religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master’s freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for the renovation of society and nature, as to disesteem or deny the literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means, organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence in the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason for its being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If rhyme rejoices us, there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers us, we should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes place for its hour, and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your actions, as if they were better than Homer’s verses or Raphael’s pictures. Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside their enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of them; but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their task. Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class, and among these, few men of the present age, have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love of beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and contemptuous expressions. But beyond his delight in genius, and his love of individual and civil liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more rare, the appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable considered with his intense nationality, to which we have already alluded. He is buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish. He has the common prejudices of the English landholder; values his pedigree, his acres, and the syllables of his name; loves all his advantages, is not insensible to the beauty of his watchseal, or the Turk’s head on his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride, there is a noble nature within him, which instructs him that he is so HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI rich that he can well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others the painting of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating character. He draws his own portrait in the costume of a village schoolmaster, and a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature over fortune. Not only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the whimsical selection of his heads prove this taste. He draws with evident pleasure the portrait of a man, who never said anything right, and never did anything wrong. But in the character of Pericles, he has found full play for beauty and greatness of behavior, where the circumstances are in harmony with the man. These portraits, though mere sketches, must be valued as attempts in the very highest kind of narrative, which not only has very few examples to exhibit of any success, but very few competitors in the attempt. The word Character is in all mouths; it is a force which we all feel; yet who has analyzed it? What is the nature of that subtle, and majestic principle which attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the atmosphere and the landscape? A moral force, yet wholly unmindful of creed and catechism, intellectual, but scornful of books, it works directly and without means, and though it may be resisted at any time, yet resistance to it is a suicide. For the person who stands in this lofty relation to his fellow men is always the impersonation to them of their conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the extreme delicacy of this element, evanescing before any but the most sympathetic vision, that it has so seldom been employed in the drama and in novels. Mr. Landor, almost alone among living English writers, has indicated his perception of it. These merits make Mr. Landor’s position in the republic of letters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no friendships, that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet he discriminates his faults with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position is by no means the highest in literature; he is not a poet or a philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge, a man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor’s definitions are only enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized. But as it is not from the highest Alps or Andes, but from less elevated summits, that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so is Mr. Landor the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has commented on a wide variety of writers, with a closeness and an extent of view, which has enhanced the value of those authors to his readers. His Dialogue on the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the genius of Epicurus. The Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the best of all criticisms on the Essays of Bacon. His picture of Demosthenes in three several Dialogues is new and adequate. He has illustrated the genius of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides. Then he has examined before he expatiated, and the minuteness of his verbal criticism gives a confidence in his fidelity, when he speaks the language of meditation or of passion. His acquaintance with the English tongue is unsurpassed. He “hates false words, and seeks with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.” He knows the value of his own words. “They are not,” he says, “written on slate.” He never stoops to explanation, nor uses seven words where one will do. He is a master of condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar way. He knows the wide difference between compression and an obscure elliptical style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of phrase, and even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There is no inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any more than in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is found room for every possible variety of expression. Yet it is not as an artist, that Mr. Landor commends himself to us. He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method, by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius. His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory, sentiment, and personal history, and what skill of transition he may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest at last, not on the spirit of the dialogue, or the symmetry of any of his historical portraits, but on the value of his sentences. Many of these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not plants and animals, but the genetical atoms, of which both are composed. All our great debt to the oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold dust. Of many of Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of Socrates, that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them how or where you will. We will enrich our pages with a few paragraphs, which we hastily select from such of Mr. Landor’s volumes as lie on our table. ______“The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is he, who while he demonstrates the iniquity of the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious, both as weak and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him...... Him I would call the powerful man who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great man, I was going on to show thee, is somewhat more. He must be able to do this, and he must have that intellect which puts into motion the intellect of others.” “All titulars else must be produced by others; a knight by a knight, a peer by a King, while a gentleman is self-existent.” “Critics talk most about the visible in sublimity ... the Jupiter, the Neptune. Magnitude and power are sublime, but in the second degree, managed as they may be. Where the heart is not shaken, the gods thunder and stride in vain. True sublimity HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI is the perfection of the pathetic, which has other sources than pity; generosity, for instance, and self-devotion. When the generous and self-devoted man suffers, there comes Pity; the basis of the sublime is then above the water, and the poet, with or without the gods, can elevate it above the skies. Terror is but the relic of a childish feeling; pity is not given to children. So said he; I know not whether rightly, for the wisest differ on poetry, the knowledge of which, like other most important truths, seems to be reserved for a purer state of sensation and existence.” “O Cyrus, I have observed that the authors of good make men very bad as often as they talk much about them.” “The habit of haranguing is in itself pernicious; I have known even the conscientious and pious, the humane and liberal dried up by it into egoism and vanity, and have watched the mind, growing black and rancid in its own smoke.” GLORY. “Glory is a light which shines from us on others, not from others on us.” “If thou lovest Glory, thou must trust her truth. She followeth him who doth not turn and gaze after her.” RICHARD I. “Let me now tell my story ... to confession another time. I sailed along the realms of my family; on the right was England, on the left was France; little else could I discover than sterile eminences and extensive shoals. They fled behind me; so pass away generations; so shift, and sink, and die away affections. In the wide ocean I was little of a monarch; old men guided me, boys instructed me; these taught me the names of my towns and harbors, those showed me the extent of my dominions; one cloud, that dissolved in one hour, half covered them. “I debark in Sicily. I place my hand upon the throne of Tancred, and fix it. I sail again, and within a day or two I behold, as the sun is setting, the solitary majesty of Crete, mother of a religion, it is said, that lived two thousand years. Onward, and many specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the monument of a greater man than I am. I leave them afar off.... and for whom? O, abbot, to join creatures of less import than the sea-mews on their cliffs; men praying to be heard, and fearing to be understood, ambitious of another’s power in the midst of penitence, avaricious of another’s wealth under vows of poverty, and jealous of another’s glory in the service of their God. Is this Christianity? and is Saladin to be damned if he despises it?” DEMOSTHENES. “While I remember what I have been, I never can be less. External power can affect those only who have none intrinsically. I have seen the day, Eubulides, when the most august of cities had but one voice within her walls; and when the stranger, on entering them, stopped at the silence of the gateway, and said, ‘Demosthenes is speaking in the assembly of the people.’" HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI “There are few who form their opinions of greatness from the individual. Ovid says, ‘the girl is the least part of herself.’ Of himself, certainly, the man is.” “No men are so facetious as those whose minds are somewhat perverted. Truth enjoys good air and clear light, but no playground.” “I found that the principal means (of gratifying the universal desire of happiness) lay in the avoidance of those very things, which had hitherto been taken up as the instruments of enjoyment and content; such as military commands, political offices, clients, adventures in commerce, and extensive landed property.” “Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means of meriting or of obtaining the higher.” “Praise keeps good men good.” “The highest price we can pay for a thing is to ask for it.” “There is a gloom in deep love as in deep water; there is a silence in it which suspends the foot; and the folded arms, and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song.” “Anaxagoras is the true, firm, constant friend of Pericles; the golden lamp that shines perpetually on the image I adore.” [The Letter of Pericles to Aspasia in reply to her request to be permitted to visit Xeniades.] “Do what your heart tells you; yes, Aspasia, do all it tells you. Remember how august it is. It contains the temple, not only of Love, but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of one to the extremity of the other. “Bend in pensiveness, even in sorrow, on the flowery bank of youth, whereunder runs the stream that passes irreversibly! let the garland drop into it, let the hand be refreshed by it — but — may the beautiful feet of Aspasia stand firm.” E. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1842

The initial portion of Margaret Fuller’s translation of CORRESPONDENCE OF FRÄULEIN GÜNDERODE WITH BETTINA VON ARNIM was published in Boston by E.P. Peabody. A copy of this would find its way into Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

GÜNDERODE

Although the planned following 3 volumes of Fuller’s translation of the fictitious correspondence between Bettina Brentano von Arnim and Caroline von Günderode would not materialize, the project would eventually be completed by Mrs. M. Wesselhoeft and would appear anonymously in Boston in 1861. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited Brook Farm along with his future sister-in-law Barbara Channing.

At the highest spot on Brook Farm, three minutes walk from the Hive, the Brook Farmers were in this year erecting their “Eyrie.” This would constitute the residence of the Reverend and Mistress George Ripley, and would contain four small dormitories for pupils. Subsequently Mrs. A.G. Alvord would create a residence for herself, which also would accommodate 6 or 7 other residents, as well as schoolrooms for the younger children. Although Margaret Fuller would not ever remain in this structure overnight (she did not join with this group, but merely visited to lead classes), it would for some reason eventually come to be known as the “Margaret Fuller Cottage.” In an outbreak of the small pox, this structure would do service as their hospital. In addition, Ichabod Morton would build the “Pilgrim House” for himself and his family, although after two weeks on the farm they would change their minds and go back home. This building had doubled parlors and appeared as if it were a duplex having two entrance doors.

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 9, Thursday: Frederick Douglass spoke again in Northbridge, Massachusetts.

Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller about Charles King Newcomb’s article for THE DIAL: “I wish you to know that I have Dolon in black & white, & that I account Charles K a true genius: his writing fills me with joy, so simple so subtle & so strong is it. There are sentences in Dolon worth the printing the Dial that they may go forth.”

Summer: Margaret Fuller’s brother Richard F. Fuller moved to Concord. –It seems that Margaret had put him up to it, with the idea that Henry David Thoreau would prove to be an excellent and utterly cheap (unreimbursed) tutor in preparation for Richard’s matriculation exams at Harvard College that fall. (This scheme having worked so well, Thoreau was given a music box with placid Lucerne on the lid. It would be interesting to know what tune it played.)

Abraham Lincoln resumed his courtship of Mary Todd.

July 9, Saturday: In an apartment at 13 West Street in Boston, the apartment in which Margaret Fuller had held her “conversations” and out of which Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had published THE DIAL, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke united Sophia Amelia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne in holy matrimony, and then the married couple traveled by carriage to Concord, through occasional showers, arriving at their new/old home, the Old Manse which they had agreed to rent, at about 5PM. The Peabodys had attended this ceremony, but the Hawthornes, sensitive to the loss of the man of the family, had refrained. (The honeymoon couple would occupy the tiny rooms of the Old Manse, a colossal antique dollhouse, for the next three and a half years.)

July 19, Tuesday-22, Friday On July 19th, Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller’s brother Richard F. Fuller began a hike from Concord to Mount Wachusett “who like me / standest alone without society,” between Worcester and Fitchburg, via Princeton, studying Virgil’s GEORGICS along the way so Richard would be ready for his matriculation exams that fall at Harvard College, and while on his way back home on July 22d, after parting from his walking companion, he passed the sites on the Nashua and the North Nashua streams of Lancaster (now part of Leominster State Forest) at which the ransom of Mistress Mary Rowlandson by John Hoar of Concord had occurred on May 3, 1676. CAPTIVITY AND RESTAURATION

Later he would write about this, as “A WALK TO WACHUSETT”. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

A WALK TO WACHUSETT: The needles of the pine, All to the west incline. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or with Virgil and his compeers roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs:— With frontier strength ye stand your ground, With grand content ye circle round, Tumultuous silence for all sound, Ye distant nursery of rills, Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills; ... Upholding heaven, holding down earth, Thy pastime from thy birth, Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other; May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon, though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairyland would exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI For a detailed description of that walking trip, consult William Howarth’s commentary, which is merely excerpted here.

On July 19, 1842, Thoreau left Concord with Richard Fuller, a Harvard undergraduate and the brother of Margaret Fuller, Thoreau’s editor at The Dial. The hikers had knapsacks, some provisions, and a tent. The tent was heavy, so they took turns carrying it. Starting before dawn, they marched over twenty-five miles to a village (now West Sterling) on the Stillwater River. In the morning, they ascended Wachusett and camped there overnight, enjoying a fine sunrise view on July 21. Then they descended and walked to Harvard, where they spent the night. On July 22 they parted company, Fuller going home to Groton and Thoreau back to Concord....

Howarth has reconstructed the jaunt for those who do not understand that this is history and are therefore condemned to repeat it: the two young men left Concord on Lexington Road, which is now MA2A, and went down Main Street, which is now MA62, to the Concord Turnpike, which is now MA2, to Acton (MA111) to Willow Street, took West Acton Road to Stow, walked via MA117 to Bolton, via MA62 through Sterling, via MA140 to West Sterling, via MA140 to Wachusett Mountain State Reservation, on the Bolton Pond Trail to Old Indian Trail, and to the summit. Thence they walked via MA140 to Sterling, via MA62 to Still River, via MA110 to Harvard, and Thoreau continued via MA2 to Concord while Fuller went home to Groton. But as the TV stunt person says, don’t you try this without expert assistance:

For instance, Helen Gere Cruickshank has commented: Though the climb to the summit of Wachusett Mountain is popular today, few would care to walk from Concord to the base of the mountain as Thoreau did. The unpaved road which made a pleasant footpath a century ago is now paved and congested with roaring cars. But once on the mountain trails, Red-eyed Vireos, Phoebes, Robins, and Cuckoos can be heard in spring and summer. From the summit, the surrounding country looks like a relief map and the climber sees many of the landmarks which birds must note as they travel above them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

The hour of departure on July 19 was early; Fuller said they were underway “about quarter to five.” The small stream where they rested ... is Great Brook, which crosses MA 117 just east of Meadow Road. Fuller said they cut the walking staves in a woods “between Concord and Stowe.” Their hilltop view of Wachusett ... was possibly from Wataquadock Hill (600').... Wachusett Reservation is a year-round state park, replete with Visitor Center (maps and displays) and auto road. Carriage roads first appeared here in the 1850s; today’s paved surface is a two-mile, one-way loop. The road is free, easy to “climb,” and just two hours’ driving time from greater Boston. Hence, Wachusett is one of the busiest mountains in North America. A quarter of a million visitors ascend each year; ten thousand a day come during the fall foliage season. Not all of them leave behind “the gross products of plains and valleys.” Near the lower gate a sign reads: NO SKATEBOARDING ON ROAD. Walking time via Thoreau’s route, the Bolton Pond and Old Indian trails, is about forty-five minutes. Changes in mountain vegetation since his visit reflect the species succession that occurs on undisturbed land. The sugar maples he saw have given way to hemlocks, part of the climax forest. Fallen hemlock needles, rich in tannin, create an acidic “duff” or humus for evergreen shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron. This soil is thick and damp, but easily eroded by rain and hikers. Along the path, most tree roots are exposed, making dark gnarled shapes against the gray-green lichens on rock shelves and ledges. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

The trail is steep and wet, but at intervals it crosses flat shoulders open to the sky. These “benches” are forested or farmed patches where trees were cleared early in the twentieth century. Recovery is slow at this elevation: the new growth is small and wind-stunted. At 1,200 feet, the trail enters a large artificial clearing, the West and Long John ski trails. Both trails form long slashes of meadow, attracting flowers and birds, but also human traffic. New trails and chair lifts are planned, enough to accommodate 1,900 skiers an hour. The exact elevations of Wachusett (2,006’) and Princeton (1,175') differ from Thoreau’s figures. Wachusett is not above the normal tree line, yet its summit is bare. Three hundred years of erosion, partially induced by fires and storms, have removed the thin topsoil and exposed sandstone, shale, and gray-banded gneiss. On the same observatory foundation that Thoreau climbed, Harvard University built a weather station in the 1850s. A long succession of summit houses (offering meals and beds) ensued; last in this line was a refreshment stand, now [1982] boarded up. A fire tower and microwave antenna are the main structures today. Monadnock (3,165') is twenty- eight miles northwest.... Camping is no longer permitted on Wachusett, but the auto road is open at sunrise and sunset, when low-angled light provides the best views. Thoreau’s cold, windy night in July was no exaggeration. Evening temperatures can drop to 50 degrees, and gusts of 20 m.p.h. will produce a wind- chill equivalent of 32 degrees. The “immense landscape” Thoreau saw after sunrise ... was about forty-five miles in diameter. Maximum visibility attained has been 120 miles, but today’s hazy, polluted air usually reduces the view to twenty or thirty miles. To the east is Boston, with its prominent Hancock tower; north and west are Monadnock and Hoosac, where Thoreau was to travel in 1844. He was mistaken to think of these mountains as parts of a common ... “range,” but accurate in describing their similar configurations.... If America’s subsequent history has not confirmed this optimism, Wachusett still poses the alternatives Thoreau saw. East of the mountain are Fitchburg and Lowell, once thriving industrial centers but now fallen into decay. West and southwest are many acres of forest and wildlife sanctuary, a protected land where “progress” may never come. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI August:Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Martha McBride and with Ruth Vose Sayers as well.

Margaret Fuller suggested to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne that her sister Mrs. Ellen Fuller Channing and husband Mr. Ellery Channing II be allowed to board at the Old Manse in Concord — but by letter this proposition was declined. However, Henry Thoreau was able to secure for the newlyweds the little red farmhouse next to Waldo Emerson’s garden, on the Cambridge Turnpike, at a rent of $55.00 ($5.00 more per year than the rental cost of The Manse because its antique rooms were undesirably tiny, and because it was so costly to heat during the winter). Margaret and Ellery stayed with the Emersons for several weeks and when they departed Emerson was the editor of THE DIAL. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September:Nathaniel Hawthorne noted in his journal that

We have been living in eternity, ever since we came to this old Manse.

The study on the northwest side of the second floor, in which Emersons and Ripleys had written their sermons, and in which Waldo Emerson had written out a vision of his faith in the future, NATURE, Hawthorne found “blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers that hung around.” This would have been the perfect setting for the writing of THE SCARLET LETTER, had he been posing with quill pen in hand for a videotape of the author of THE SCARLET LETTER writing THE SCARLET LETTER, but videotape had not been invented yet. So Hawthorne got all these grim old Puritan prints off his walls and had the little room brightened with paint and wallpaper, and then in his “delightful little nook” he installed a print of a madonna by Raphael and “two pleasant pictures of the Lake of Como.” He also installed a bronze vase given him by Margaret Fuller, in which to put ferns, and another vase to keep full of freshly cut flowers from the yard.

Margaret Fuller mentioned, in her journal, the various attitudes possible toward the past love affair between Elizabeth Sherman Hoar and the deceased Charles Chauncy Emerson:

I suppose the whole amount of the feeling is that women cant bear to be left out of the question. ...when Waldo’s wife, and the mother of that child that is gone [Waldo Jr.] thinks me the most privileged of women, & that EH [Elizabeth Hoar] was happy because her love [Charles Chauncy Emerson] was snatched away for a life long separation, & thus she can know none but ideal love: it does seem a little too insulting at first blush. –And yet they are not altogether wrong.

September 28, Wednesday: A federal court decided John Brown’s bankruptcy case, as the culmination of years of dicey business decisions. His creditors were awarded all but the essentials which the Brown family needed to sustain life — but this proceeding did free him. A failed surveyor, farmer, speculator, schoolteacher, tanner, and cattleman, he showed up as a wool dealer in an 1848 credit report: “his condition is questionable.” Winter 1849: “may or may not be good.” Summer 1850: “his means are equally obscure.” Still in his forties, he looked sixty to credit reporters. The HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI agency lost him when he switched lines of work yet again, only to fail yet again. Like many another misfit who pushed a doomed venture too far, he quit when he had no other choice. Having grown whiskers for the first time, his craggy face looked still more ancient. Everyone had an opinion of this broken man. “Served him right.” Overhearing such comments, Thoreau said he felt proud even to know him and questioned why people “talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The bankrupt court had restored this loser’s freedom in 1842. Now it was 1859, and no earthly court could save John Brown after his failure at Harpers Ferry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Waldo Emerson continued in his journal:

1 Next morning, we begun our walk at 6 /2 o’clock for the Shaker 1 Village distant 3 /2 miles. Whilst the good Sisters were getting ready our breakfast, we had a conversation with Seth Blanchard & Cloutman of the Brethren, who gave an honest account by yea & by nay of their faith & practice. They were not stupid like some whom I have seen of their society, & not worldly like others.... From the Shaker Village we came to Littleton, & thence to Acton, still in the same redundance of splendour. It was like a day of July, and from Acton we sauntered leisurely homeward to finish the nineteen miles of our second day before four in the afternoon.

After the two walkers returned to Concord, Margaret Fuller came visiting the Emerson home for two weeks.

Lidian Emerson was on opium and began to fantasize connections between Margaret and Waldo, and Margaret had to defend by pointing out that on two of the evenings Lidian supposed she spent talking to Waldo, actually she had been with Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau while Waldo had been alone, writing in his study.

There was embarrassment at the dining table when Lidian burst into tears at an imagined slight. After the meal the two women went walking and evidently bonded somewhat, for Lidian confided to Margaret that “she has a lurking hope that Waldo’s character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union.” Margaret mused on this in her journal:

I suppose the whole amount of the feeling is that women cant bear to be left out of the question. ...when Waldo’s wife, and the mother of that child that is gone [Waldo Jr.] thinks me the most privileged of women, & that EH [Elizabeth Hoar] was happy because her love [Charles (?) Emerson] was snatched away for a life long separation, & thus she can know none but ideal love: it does seem a little too insulting at first blush. – And yet they are not altogether wrong. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI An entanglement arose when Ellery Channing wanted to visit his former love Caroline Sturgis on Naushon Island one last time, at her suggestion, before his new wife Ellen Fuller Channing would arrive in Concord from Boston. Margaret Fuller had no objection and Ellery went to Naushon but then Ellen arrived early in Concord and discovered his absence and Margaret was unwilling to admit where he was — and everyone became rather upset. Margaret recorded:

If I were Waldo’s wife, or Ellery’s wife, I should acquiesce in all these relations, since they needed them. I should expect the same feeling from my husband, & I should think it little in him not to have it. I felt I should never repent of advising Ellery to go whatsoever happened. Well, he came back next day, and All’s Well that Ends Well.... Mama [Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins Emerson] & Lidian sympathized with me almost with tears. Waldo looked radiant, & HT [Henry Thoreau] as if his tribe had won a victory. Well it was a pretty play, since it turned out no tragedy at last. Ellery told Ellen at once how it was, and she took it just as she ought.

Bronson Alcott, Henry Wright, Charles Lane, and Lane’s son William (who was about 9 years of age), embarked at Gravesend on the Leland for Boston. They brought a large library of books on mysticism to be used “in the commencement of an Institution for the nurture of men in universal freedom of action, thought, and being.” More important, Lane brought his life savings of approximately $2,000.00. Wright’s bride and infant waited in England for developments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1843

Mary Helen Dunlop has had the following remarks to make about Margaret Fuller’s encounter with non-white Americans in the Midwest, in SIXTY MILES FROM CONTENTMENT: TRAVELING THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN INTERIOR (NY: HarperCollins BasicBooks, 1995, page 101): At Silver Lake, Wisconsin, in 1843, Margaret Fuller and her party, overtaken by a thunderstorm, sought shelter with an encampment of Pottawattami who, Fuller learned later, had returned out of homesickness to visit their former home ground. In their small traveling lodges, many of the Pottawattami lay sick, and as a whole the group was utterly destitute. To Fuller and her friends, however, the Pottawattami displayed only “gentle courtesy” — a quality non-Indians liked to see Indians exhibit. Fuller remarked that “they seemed to think we would not like to touch them: a sick girl in the lodge where I was persisted in moving so as to give me the dry place; a woman with the sweet melancholy eye of the race, kept off the children and wet dogs from even the hem of my garment.” Who did not want to touch whom, however, is not as sharply clear to the reader as it is to Fuller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Walter Roy Harding. THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; enlarged and corrected edition, NY: Dover, 1982; Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Perisus Flaccus -Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo Emerson now editor) “The Natural History of Massachusetts” and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.” It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom. In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial. The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.”

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(b) (1841-1843) -Thoreau cast about for employment and a living situation. On April 26, 1841 he moved in with the Emersons, agreeing to trade several hours of daily labor in exchange for room and board. In mid-July, 1841 he took a four-day journey to the Wachusett Mountains with Richard Fuller and an essay, “A Walk to Wachusett” was published in the Boston Miscellany on Literature. In January of 1842 John Thoreau Jr. died of lockjaw in Henry’s arms. Henry became despondent and developed his brother’s symptoms for a time. Meanwhile, Waldo Emerson lost his son Waldo. Mutual grief brought the two men closer together. In July of 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne moved into the Old Manse in Concord and after Emerson’s introduction, he and Thoreau became friends. Hawthorne went out of his way to praise Thoreau in his prefaces to Mosses from an Old Manse and The Scarlet Letter. Thoreau published “Paradise (to be) Regained,” a critical piece in an 1843 edition of United States Magazine, and Democratic Review with help from Hawthorne and later “THE LANDLORD,” a popular sketch for the same periodical. Thoreau was elected curator for the Concord Lyceum in November of 1843 and arranged an outstanding schedule of lecturers for that winter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 8 (1843) -Anxious to further his literary career Thoreau arranged a job near NYC as a tutor for Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children at their home in Staten Island. But the more he saw of New York, the less he liked it: “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it.” Meeting Henry James, Jr., however, “naturalized and humanized New York” for Thoreau. Horace Greeley volunteered to serve as Thoreau’s literary agent, but Thoreau found publishers of periodicals more interested in “safety” than in his unorthodox work. Thoreau found his employment and his relations with his employer unsatisfactory and suffered from homesickness. He returned to Concord in November after only a half year’s employment, but he did establish valuable contacts, and particularly with Greeley, who would aid him throughout the rest of his literary career.

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 9 (1843-1845) -Thoreau returned to live at home in Concord. He worked at the family pencil business to settle his debts. He established his lifelong friendship with Ellery Channing, who had married Margaret Fuller’s sister and moved to Concord. Before Channing moved to New York to work at Horace Greeley’s tribune, he and Thoreau climbed Greylock (the saddleback adventure from A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS). Although their personalities were quite different, their friendship became “the most intimate and most lasting of Thoreau’s life.” Thoreau once again partook of the vital Concord environment, developing an interest in the anti-slavery movement and participating in Waldo Emerson’s short-lived weekly discussion groups with Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Channing and others. The talks failed because the participants were too self-conscious thinking, “who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said.” The pencil business flourished and the Thoreaus, with the help of Henry’s landscaping and carpentry, built a new house (the Texas House) just outside of Concord. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

January 15, Sunday: Mrs. Lidian Emerson wrote to Waldo Emerson: Henry is about as well as when you were here — and a great comfort to Edith [second daughter, born in 1841] with whom he dances and for whom he plays the flute. Richard Fuller [younger brother of Margaret Fuller and of Ellery Channing’s wife Ellen Fuller Channing] sent him a music box as a N. Year’s gift and it was delightful to see Henry’s child-like joy. I never saw any one made so happy by a new possession. He said nothing could have been so acceptable. After we had heard its performance he said he must hasten to exhibit it to his sisters and mother. My heart really warmed with sympathy and admiration at his whole HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI demeanour on the occasion — and I like human nature better than I did ... Here is Mother [Ruth Haskins Emerson, Waldo’s mother, who lived with the Emerson family] just come in from church — where she affirms she saw Henry in your uppermost seat, not without “astonishment.” It must be that he is converted to the right doctrine. I had a conversation with him a few days since on his heresies — but had no expectation of so speedy a result.

January 16, Monday: Richard F. Fuller, the younger brother of Margaret Fuller and of Ellery Channing’s wife Ellen Fuller Channing whom Henry David Thoreau had taken along on his walk to Wachusett and tutored in Latin free of charge, had sent him a music box with “placid Lucerne on the lid.”37 On this day Thoreau sent off a thank-you note from Concord to Fuller in his dorm room at Harvard College in Cambridge.

Concord Jan 16th 1843. Dear Richard, I need not thank you for your present for I hear its music, which seems to be playing just for us two pilgrims marching over hill and dale of a summer afternoon — up those long Bolton hills and by those bright Harvard lakes, such as I see in the placid Lucerne on the lid— and whenever I hear I hear it it will recall happy hours passed with its donor. When did mankind make that foray into nature and bring off this booty—? For certainly it is but history that some rare virtue in remote times plundered these strains from above, and communicated them to men. Whatever we may think of it, it is a part of the harmony of the spheres you have sent me, which has condescended to serve us Admetuses, and I hope I may so behave that this may always be the tenor of your thought for me. If you have any strains, the conquest of your own spear or quill to accompany these, let the winds waft them also to me. I write this with one of the “primaries” of my osprey's wings, which I have preserved over my glass for some state occasion — and now it offers. Mrs. Emerson sends her love — Yr friend, Henry D. Thoreau

February: Henry Thoreau apparently prepared an essay for THE DIAL that was refused by Margaret Fuller.

(The essay remained unpublished as a fair copy with pencil revisions, until “Sir Walter Raleigh” would be published in 1905 in Boston by the Bibliophile Society as edited by Henry A. Metcalf and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.)

February 8, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau lectured on Sir Walter Raleigh and heroism at the Concord Lyceum.38

37. It would be interesting to know what tune it played, how many prongs it had, where the Fullers had gotten it, and how much it had cost them to make this present after Thoreau had helped them so considerably. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 7, Friday: The Liberator.

Ephraim Merriam died at the age of 47. He had never married but (as Henry Thoreau would) had lived all his life with his mother.

Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne had gone to Boston to visit her sister Mary Tyler Peabody, who was to marry Horace Mann, Sr. and have a honeymoon in Europe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had sort of taken a vow of silence during her absence. However, while he was trying to read the current issue of THE DIAL, which contained an article “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works,” and was seriously considering trying to take a nap, who should knock on his door but Henry Thoreau, with a book to return, bearing the news that he was considering “going to reside at Staten Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson’s brother,” and bearing the news that Ellery Channing was coming back to Concord and that Thoreau had on his behalf searched out and rented a house and land for $55.00 the year: “a little red cottage on the road, with one acre attached.” Thoreau had brought his music box gift from Margaret Fuller and Richard F. Fuller to leave in Hawthorne’s keeping during his absence on Staten Island. Hawthorne and Thoreau discussed the spiritual advantages of change of place (Hawthorne was for it), and discussed THE DIAL, and discussed Bronson Alcott. All in all, Hawthorne was glad that Thoreau was going away, on his own account,

AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS: ... I arose, and began this record in the journal, almost at the commencement of which I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. Thoreau, who came to return a book, and to announce his purpose of going to reside at Staten Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson’s brother. We had some conversation upon this subject, and upon the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects. I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau’s own account, that he is going away; as he is physically out of health, and, morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue; and in all these respects, he may be benefitted by his removal;—also, it is one step towards a circumstantial position in the world. On my account, I should like to have him remain here; he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too.

Hawthorne feared that, for Concord, Channing would be

but a poor substitute for Mr. Thoreau.

We perhaps best understand this distaste for the ersatz, if we take into consideration the sort of weighty drivel that the promising Ellery had to offer to the town of Concord, when he contemplated weighty topics such as

38. Thoreau apparently prepared this essay for THE DIAL but was refused by Margaret Fuller. The essay remained unpublished as a fair copy with pencil revisions, until “Sir Walter Raleigh” was published in 1905 in Boston by the Bibliophile Society, edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. SIR WALTER RALEIGH HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the new railroad past Walden Pond:39

Oh! transient gleams yon hurrying noisy train, Its yellow carriages rumbling with might Of volleyed thunder on the iron rail Pieced by the humble toil of Erin's hand Wood and lake the whistle shrill awakening.

When Channing had completed his move to Concord, Hawthorne took him fishing in the Pond Lily. Hawthorne described their fishing expeditions this way: “Strange and happy times were those, when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semi-circle of the sun.” Not only did the holy vessel Musketaquid that had carried the Thoreau brothers off on their adventure on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers not mean anything in particular to this author Hawthorne, but this accomplished author was able to transform even a fishing trip into his own adventure in ethnic chauvinism: “Indians or any less conventional race,” indeed! (Later, Hawthorne would pass the boat on to Channing rather than back to its builder to whom it had meant so much. The record of this which Thoreau chose to retain was that the boat had simply “passed

39. Notice in the above that the locomotive whistle is still of the “steam trumpet” model, that is, is still of the “whistle shrill” variety which we would associate with slumland factories rather than with bucolic railroads. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI from hand to hand” and had “gone down the stream of time.”)

WALDEN: The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world.This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, –the wood- thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others.

WHIPPOORWILL WOOD THRUSH

THOREAU RESIDENCES

Was this the house that needed work, that Ellery hired Henry to perform? On the list of improvements for Henry to perform was an interesting item:

“Privy — to be moved from where it is now, behind the end of the barn, the filth carried off, & hole filled in. The privy to be whitewashed & have a new door, & the floor either renewed or cleaned up.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 9, Sunday: Nathaniel Hawthorne finally made it all the way through “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works” in the latest issue of the THE DIAL.

It is not very satisfactory, and has not taught me much.

THE DIAL, APRIL 1843

He found he liked Margaret Fuller’s article on Canova much better. He had been chopping wood for exercise, and had hit himself in the face with a stick of kindling and blacked both his eyes. When he walked down to the riverbank and found that the ice had broken up –presumably a few days earlier– and noticed that because the river was very high his boat Pond Lily was full of water and in no condition for a row through the meadows. Then the dinner bell rang and he went in to “an immense joint of roast veal.”

40 Mrs. Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poem “Sweep Ho!” appeared anonymously on page 245 of THE DIAL.

Amy Belding Brown has uncovered in the Congregational church records of Grafton, Massachusetts that on this day, after long debate, the members had passed a resolution declaring slaveholding to be a sin.41

40. A Yale professor opinioned in this year, “Who reads THE DIAL for any purpose than to laugh at its baby poetry or at the solemn fooleries of its mystic prose?” 41. Imagine that. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 21, Sunday: We learn, from a letter that published author Ellery Channing wrote to Margaret Fuller on this date, that Emerson had taken, as a new amanuensis, the 20-year-old resident of Concord and graduate of Dartmouth College Benjamin West Ball, to make a genius out of — now that “oakum-brained Thoreau,” “Pick-character Thoreau,” had been passed along to Emerson’s brother Judge William Emerson on Staten Island.42 THOREAU RESIDENCES

On this same day, this “Pick-character Thoreau” was being written to by Waldo Emerson in a letter addressed to “Henry D. Thoreau, care of Mr. Emerson, Esq., 64 Wall Street, New York”:

Concord, Sunday Eve, 21 May, 1843. My Dear Friend, — Our Dial is already printing, and you must, if you can, send me something good by the 10th of June, certainly, if not before. If William E. can send by a private opportunity, you shall address it to “Care of Miss Peabody, 13 West Street,” or, to be left at Concord Stage Office. Otherwise send by Harnden, — W.E. paying to Boston and charging to me. Let the pacquet bring letters also from you, and from [Giles] Waldo and Tappan, I entreat. You will not doubt that you are well remembered here, by young, older, and old people; and your letter to your mother was borrowed and read with great interest, pending the arrival of direct accounts and of later experiences, especially in the city. I am sure that you are under sacred protection, if I should not hear from you for years. Yet I shall wish to know what befalls you on your way. Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very agreeable to me. Young [Ben- jamin West] Ball has been to see me, and is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise, — born, too, in the good town. Mr. Haw- thorne is well, and Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of ninety acres. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson.

42. Would this Ball family have been residing on a farm in the vicinity of Ball’s Hill (Gleason D9)? Would Benjamin be the son or the grandson of Nehemiah Ball? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

CAPE COD: I used to see packs of half-wild dogs haunting the lonely beach on the south shore of Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of the carrion there cast up; and I remember that once, when for a long time I had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a little one which ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the little one was the first to bark at me. Under these circumstances I could not but remember the words of the poet:–

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As his ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude.

“Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot; Though thou the waters warp, Thy sting is not so sharp As friend remembered not.”

Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of a horse or ox DOG which lay on the beach there, where there was no living creature in sight, a dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of offal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 25, Thursday: The deed to “Fruitlands” was signed (102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard MA 01451 as marked by the red star at the left edge of the map below).

The acreage was purchased from Maverick Wyman with money contributed chiefly by Charles Lane. It was Joseph Palmer, however, who put up the money for the buildings.43

This was Waldo Emerson’s 40th birthday, the “big four zero.”

Margaret Fuller left on her trip through Niagara Falls, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Thousands of families were setting off for the Oregon Territory in the first such mass migration across the Great Plains.

June 10, Saturday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Waldo Emerson. The letter would be posted with a note added on the 15th. Concord, 10 June 1843 Dear Henry, It is high time that you had some token from us in acknowledgment of the parcel of kind & tuneful things you sent us, as well as of your permanent rights in us all. The cold weather saddened our gardens & our landscape here almost until now but todays sunshine is oblit- 43. After the collapse of the community, its assets would wind up in the possession of Palmer “in consideration of seventeen hundred dollars” additional investment, and assumption of a $300.00 mortgage still held by Godfrey Sparrow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI erating the memory of such things. I have just been visiting my petty plantation and find that all your grafts live excepting a single scion and all my new trees, including twenty pines to fill up interstices in my “Curtain,” [Emerson had had a shield of pines planted in the an- gle of the roads to the east of his home, to protect it from prevailing winds.] are well alive. The town is full of Irish & the woods of engi- neers with theodolite & red flag singing out their feet & inches to each other from station to station. Near Mr. Alcott’s [this was the Hosmer Cottage] the road is already begun. [The Fitchburg railroad was crossing the highway near that point.]— From Mr A. & Mr Lane at Harvard we have yet heard nothing. They went away in good spirits having sent “Wood Abram” & Larned & Wm Lane before them with horse & plough a few days in advance of them to begin the spring work. Mr Lane paid me a long visit in which he was more than I had ever known him gentle & open, and it was impossible not to sympathize with & honour projects that so often seem without feet or hands. They have near a hundred acres of land, which they do not want, & no house, which they want first of all. But they account this an advantage, as it gives them the occasion they so much desire of building after their own idea. In the event of their attracting to their company a carpenter or two, which is not impossible, it would be a great pleasure to see their building which could hardly fail to be new & beautiful. They have 15 acres of woodland with good timber. Ellery Channing is excellent company and we walk in all directions He remembers you with great faith & hope thinks you ought not to see Concord again these ten years, that you ought to grind up fifty Concords in your mill & much other opinion & counsel he holds in store on this topic. Hawthorne walked with me yesterday P.m. and not until after our return did I read his “Celestial Rail- road” which has a serene strength which one cannot afford not to praise,–in this low life. Our Dial thrives well enough in these weeks. I print W.E.C.’s “Let- ters” or the first ones, [an unfinished Youth of the Poet and Painter which praised the scenery of the Merrimac River and the Artichoke River near Newbury, while satirizing Cambridge and Boston.] but he does not care to have them named as his for a while. They are very agreeable reading, & their wisdom lightened by a vivacity very rare in the D.— [S. G.] Ward [at that time a Boston banker] too has sent me some sheets on architecture, whose good sense is eminent. I have a valuable manuscript – a sea voyage, from a new hand, which is all clear good sense, and I may make some of Mr Lane’s graver sheets give way for this honest story, otherwise I shall print it in Oc- tober. I have transferred the publishing of the Dial to Jas. Munroe & Co. Do not, I entreat you, let me be in ignorance of any thing good which you know of my fine friends Waldo & Tappan Tappan writes me never a word. I had a letter from H. James, promising to see you, & you must not fail to visit him. I must soon write to him, though my debts of this nature are perhaps too many. To him I much prefer to talk than to write. Let me know well how you prosper & what you HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI meditate. And all good abide with you! R.W.E. 15 June— Whilst my letter has lain on the table waiting for a traveller, your letter & parcel has safely arrived. I may not have place now for the Winter’s Walk in the July Dial which is just making up its last sheets & somehow I must end it tomorrow — when I go to Boston. I shall then keep it for October, subject however to your order if you find a better disposition for it.— I will carry the order to the faithless booksellers [Bradbury & Soden]. Thanks for all these tidings of my friends at N. Y. & at the Island.— & love to the last. I have letters from Lane at “Fruitlands” & from Miss Fuller at Niag- ara. Miss F. found it sadly cold & rainy at the Falls.

Margaret Fuller later, in SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843, attributed some thoughts about the Niagara Falls to this date: Niagara, June 10, 1843. Since you are to share with me such foot-notes as may be made on the pages of my life during this summer’s wanderings, I should not be quite silent as to this magnificent prologue to the, as yet, unknown drama. Yet I, like others, have little to say, where the spectacle is, for once, great enough to fill the whole life, and supersede thought, giving us only its own presence. “It is good to be here,” is the best, as the simplest, expression that occurs to the mind. We have been here eight days, and I am quite willing to go away. So great a sight soon satisfies, making us content with itself, and with what is less than itself. Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily. Having “lived one day,” we would depart, and become worthy to live another. We have not been fortunate in weather, for there cannot be too much, or too warm sunlight for this scene, and the skies have been lowering, with cold, unkind winds. My nerves, too much braced up by such an atmosphere, do not well bear the continual stress of sight and sound. For here there is no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation; all other forms and motions come and go, the tide rises and recedes, the wind, at its mightiest, moves in gales and gusts, but here is really an incessant, an indefatigable motion. Awake or asleep, there is no escape, still this rushing round you and through you. It is in this way I have most felt the grandeur, — somewhat eternal, if not infinite. At times a secondary music rises; the cataract seems to seize its own rhythm and sing it over again, so that the ear and soul are roused by a double vibration. This is some effect of the wind, causing echoes to the thundering anthem. It is very sublime, giving the effect of a spiritual repetition through all the spheres. When I first came, I felt nothing but a quiet satisfaction. I found that drawings, the panorama, &c. had given me a clear notion of the position and proportions of all objects here; I knew where to look for everything, and everything looked as I thought it would. Long ago, I was looking from a hill-side with a friend at one of the finest sunsets that ever enriched, this world. A little cowboy, trudging along, wondered what we could be gazing at. After spying about some time, he found it could only be the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI sunset, and looking, too, a moment, he said approvingly, “That sun looks well enough”; a speech worthy of Shakespeare’s Cloten, or the infant Mercury, up to everything from the cradle, as you please to take it. Even such a familiarity, worthy of Jonathan, our national hero, in a prince’s palace, or “stumping,” as he boasts to have done, “up the Vatican stairs, into the Pope’s presence, in my old boots,” I felt here; it looks really well enough, I felt, and was inclined, as you suggested, to give my approbation as to the one object in the world that would not disappoint. But all great expression, which, on a superficial survey, seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes, after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it. Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got, at last, a proper foreground for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I really saw the full wonder of the scene. After a while it so drew me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never knew before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new existence. The perpetual trampling of the waters seized my senses. I felt that no other sound, however near, could be heard, and would start and look behind me for a foe. I realized the identity of that mood of nature in which these waters were poured down with such absorbing force, with that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil. For continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome, images, such as never haunted it before, of naked savages stealing behind me with uplifted tomahawks; again and again this illusion recurred, and even after I had thought it over, and tried to shake it off, I could not help starting and looking behind me. As picture, the falls can only be seen from the British side. There they are seen in their veils, and at sufficient distance to appreciate the magical effects of these, and the light and shade. From the boat, as you cross, the effects and contrasts are more melodramatic. On the road back from the whirlpool, we saw them as a reduced picture with delight. But what I liked best was to sit on Table Rock, close to the great fall. There all power of observing details, all separate consciousness, was quite lost. Once, just as I had seated myself there, a man came to take his first look. He walked close up to the fall, and, after looking at it a moment, with an air as if thinking how he could best appropriate it to his own use, he spat into it. This trait seemed wholly worthy of an age whose love of utility is such that the Prince Puckler Muskau suggests the probability of men coming to put the bodies of their dead parents in the fields to fertilize them, and of a country such as Dickens has described; but these will not, I hope, be seen on the historic page to be truly the age or truly the America. A little leaven is leavening the whole mass for other bread. The whirlpool I like very much. It is seen to advantage after the great falls; it is so sternly solemn. The river cannot look more imperturbable, almost sullen in its marble green, than it does just below the great fall; but the slight circles that mark the hidden vortex seem to whisper mysteries the thundering voice above could not proclaim, — a meaning as untold as ever. It is fearful, too, to know, as you look, that whatever has been swallowed by the cataract is like to rise suddenly to light here, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI whether uprooted tree, or body of man or bird. The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that they cease to seem so; you can think only of their beauty. The fountain beyond the Moss Islands I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave, lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design. She delights in this, — a sketch within a sketch, a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial thought with its genius. People complain of the buildings at Niagara, and fear to see it further deformed. I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension: the spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects; they are not seen in the great whole, more than an earthworm in a wide field. The beautiful wood on Goat Island is full of flowers; many of the fairest love to do homage here. The Wake-robin and May-apple are in bloom now; the former, white, pink, green, purple, copying the rainbow of the fall, and fit to make a garland for its presiding deity when he walks the land, for they are of imperial size, and shaped like stones for a diadem. Of the May- apple, I did not raise one green tent without finding a flower beneath. And now farewell, Niagara. I have seen thee, and I think all who come here must in some sort see thee; thou art not to be got rid of as easily as the stars. I will be here again beneath some flooding July moon and sun. Owing to the absence of light, I have seen the rainbow only two or three times by day; the lunar bow not at all. However, the imperial presence needs not its crown, though illustrated by it. General Porter and Jack Downing were not unsuitable figures here. The former heroically planted the bridges by which we cross to Goat Island and the Wake-robin-crowned genius has punished his temerity with deafness, which must, I think, have come upon him when he sunk the first stone in the rapids. Jack seemed an acute and entertaining representative of Jonathan, come to look at his great water-privilege. He told us all about the Americanisms of the spectacle; that is to say, the battles that have been fought here. It seems strange that men could fight in such a place; but no temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors. No less strange is the fact that, in this neighborhood, an eagle should be chained for a plaything. When a child, I used often to stand at a window from which I could see an eagle chained in the balcony of a museum. The people used to poke at it with sticks, and my childish heart would swell with indignation as I saw their insults, and the mien with which they were borne by the monarch-bird. Its eye was dull, and its plumage soiled and shabby, yet, in its form and attitude, all the king was visible, though sorrowful and dethroned. I never saw another of the family till, when passing through the Notch of the White Mountains, at that moment glowing before us in all the panoply of sunset, the driver shouted, “Look there!” and following with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI our eyes his upward-pointing finger, we saw, soaring slow in majestic poise above the highest summit, the bird of Jove. It was a glorious sight, yet I know not that I felt more on seeing the bird in all its natural freedom and royalty, than when, imprisoned and insulted, he had filled my early thoughts with the Byronic “silent rages” of misanthropy. Now, again, I saw him a captive, and addressed by the vulgar with the language they seem to find most appropriate to such occasions, — that of thrusts and blows. Silently, his head averted, he ignored their existence, as Plotinus or Sophocles might that of a modern reviewer. Probably he listened to the voice of the cataract, and felt that congenial powers flowed free, and was consoled, though his own wing was broken. HERMIT The story of the Recluse of Niagara interested me a little. It is FRANCIS ABBOTT wonderful that men do not oftener attach their lives to localities of great beauty, — that, when once deeply penetrated, they will let themselves so easily be borne away by the general stream of things, to live anywhere and anyhow. But there is something ludicrous in being the hermit of a show-place, unlike St. Francis in his mountain-bed, where none but the stars and rising sun ever saw him. There is also a “guide to the falls,” who wears his title labelled on his hat; otherwise, indeed, one might as soon think of asking for a gentleman usher to point out the moon. Yet why should we wonder at such, when we have Commentaries on Shakespeare, and Harmonies of the Gospels? And now you have the little all I have to write. Can it interest you? To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph, — mere stops. Yet I suppose it is not so to the absent. At least, I have read things written about Niagara, music, and the like, that interested me. Once I was moved by Mr. Greenwood’s remark, that he could not realize this marvel till, opening his eyes the next morning after he had seen it, his doubt as to the possibility of its being still there taught him what he had experienced. I remember this now with pleasure, though, or because, it is exactly the opposite to what I myself felt. For all greatness affects different minds, each in “its own particular kind,” and the variations of testimony mark the truth of feeling.44 I will here add a brief narrative of the experience of another, as being much better than anything I could write, because more simple and individual. “Now that I have left this ‘Earth-wonder,’ and the emotions it excited are past, it seems not so much like profanation to analyze my feelings, to recall minutely and accurately the effect of this manifestation of the Eternal. But one should go to such a scene prepared to yield entirely to its influences, to forget one’s little self and one’s little mind. To see a miserable worm creep to the brink of this falling world of waters, and watch the trembling of its own petty bosom, and fancy that this is made alone to act upon him excites — derision? No, — pity.” As I rode up to the neighborhood of the falls, a solemn awe imperceptibly stole over me, and the deep sound of the ever- 44. “Somewhat avails, in one regard, the mere sight of beauty without the union of feeling therewith. Carried away in memory, it hangs there in the lonely hall as a picture, and may some time do its message. I trust it may be so in my case, for I saw every object far more clearly than if I had been moved and filled with the presence, and my recollections are equally distinct and vivid.” Extracted from Manuscript Notes of this Journey left by Margaret Fuller. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI hurrying rapids prepared my mind for the lofty emotions to be experienced. When I reached the hotel, I felt a strange indifference about seeing the aspiration of my life’s hopes. I lounged about the rooms, read the stage-bills upon the walls, looked over the register, and, finding the name of an acquaintance, sent to see if he was still there. What this hesitation arose from, I know not; perhaps it was a feeling of my unworthiness to enter this temple which nature has erected to its God. At last, slowly and thoughtfully I walked down to the bridge leading to Goat Island, and when I stood upon this frail support, and saw a quarter of a mile of tumbling, rushing rapids, and heard their everlasting roar, my emotions overpowered me, a choking sensation rose to my throat, a thrill rushed through my veins, “my blood ran rippling to my fingers’ ends.” This was the climax of the effect which the falls produced upon me, — neither the American nor the British fall moved me as did these rapids. For the magnificence, the sublimity of the latter, I was prepared by descriptions and by paintings. When I arrived in sight of them I merely felt, “Ah, yes! here is the fall, just as I have seen it in a picture.” When I arrived at the Terrapin Bridge, I expected to be overwhelmed, to retire trembling from this giddy eminence, and gaze with unlimited wonder and awe upon the immense mass rolling on and on; but, somehow or other, I thought only of comparing the effect on my mind with what I had read and heard. I looked for a short time, and then, with almost a feeling of disappointment, turned to go to the other points of view, to see if I was not mistaken in not feeling any surpassing emotion at this sight. But from the foot of Biddle’s Stairs, and the middle of the river, and from below the Table Rock, it was still “barren, barren all.” Provoked with my stupidity in feeling most moved in the wrong place, I turned away to the hotel, determined to set off for Buffalo that afternoon. But the stage did not go, and, after nightfall, as there was a splendid moon, I went down to the bridge, and leaned over the parapet, where the boiling rapids came down in their might. It was grand, and it was also gorgeous; the yellow rays of the moon made the broken waves appear like auburn tresses twining around the black rocks. But they did not inspire me as before. I felt a foreboding of a mightier emotion to rise up and swallow all others, and I passed on to the Terrapin Bridge. Everything was changed, the misty apparition had taken off its many-colored crown which it had worn by day, and a bow of silvery white spanned its summit. The moonlight gave a poetical indefiniteness to the distant parts of the waters, and while the rapids were glancing in her beams, the river below the falls was black as night, save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river-god. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition, o’er-leaping themselves, they fall on t’ other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away. Then arose in my breast a genuine admiration, and a humble HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI adoration of the Being who was the architect of this and of all. Happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could come unawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely their own. With what gusto does Father Hennepin describe “this great downfall of water,” “this vast and prodigious cadence of water, which falls down after a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel. ’Tis true Italy and Swedeland boast of some such things, but we may well say that they be sorry patterns when compared with this of which we do now speak.”

June 20, Tuesday-21, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass was at the Town Hall in New Bedford for the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Convention.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Mrs. Lidian Emerson from Staten Island:

June 20th 1843 My very dear Friend,

I have only read a page of your letter, and have come out to the top of the hill at sunset[,] where I can see the ocean to prepare to read the rest. It is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. The very crickets here seem to chirp around me as they did not before. I feel as if it were a great daring to go on and read the rest, and then to live accordingly[—] There are more than thirty vessels in sight going to sea — I am almost afraid to look at your letter. I see that it will [make] my life very steep, but it may lead to fairer prospects than this. You seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens, as from the paper. My dear friend it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. It will do as well for another world as for this. Such a voice is for no particular time nor person, but it makes him who may

Page 2 hear it stand for all that is lofty and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI true in humanity. The thought of you will constantly elevate my life[;] it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when I look up at the evening star. I think I know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in Concord. You are not at all strange to me. I could hardly believe after the lapse had of one night that I such a noble letter ^ still at hand to read — that it was not some [fine] dream. I looked at mid night to be sure that it was real. I feel that I am unworthy to know you, and yet they will not permit it wrongfully. I, perhaps, am more willing to deceive by appearances than you say you are[.] [It] would not be worth the while to tell how willing, — but I have the power perhaps [too much] to forget my meanness as soon as seen, and not be incited by permanent sorrow. My actual life is unspeakably mean, compared with what I know and see that it might be — Yet the ground from which I see and say this is some part of it. It ranges from heaven to earth and is all things in an hour. [T]he experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present. We never conceive the greatness of our fates.

Page 3 Are not these faint flashes of light, which sometimes obscure the sun, their certain dawn? My friend, I have read your letter as if I was not reading it. After each pause I could defer the rest forever. The thought of you will be a new motive for every right action. You are another human being whom I know, and might not our topic be as broad as the universe. What have we to do with petty rumbling news? We have our [own] great [a]ffairs. Sometimes in Concord I found my actions dictated, as it were, by your influence, and though it lead almost to trivial Hindoo obser- vances, yet it was good and elevating. To hear that you have sad[]hours is not sad to me. I rather rejoice at the richness of your experience. Only think of some sadness away HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in Pekin — unseen and unknown there — What a mine it is. Would it not weigh down the [who] Celestial empire, with all its gay Chinese? [O]ur sadness is not [sad,] but our cheap joys. Let us be sad[] about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. It is the constant prayer[]and whole Christian religion. I could hope that you would get well soon, and have a health[y] body for this world, but I know this cannot be — and the Fates, after all, are

Page 4 the accomplishers of our hopes — Yet I do hope that you may find it a worthy struggle, and life seem grand still through the clouds. What wealth is it to have such friend[s] that we cannot think of them without elevation. And we can think of them any time, and any where, and it {written perpendicular to text in center of page:

Address: Mrs. Lidian Emerson

Concord

Mass.

Postmark: NEW-YORK

JUN

25}

costs nothing but the lofty disposition. I cannot tell you the joy your letter gives me — which will not quite cease till the latest time. Let me accompany your finest thought. I send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognise.

Henry

Margaret Fuller would write of the events of the 20th in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843: Chicago, June 20. There can be no two places in the world more completely HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI thoroughfares than this place and Buffalo. They are the two correspondent valves that open and shut all the time, as the life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east. Since it is their office thus to be the doors, and let in and out, it would be unfair to expect from them much character of their own. To make the best provisions for the transmission of produce is their office, and the people who live there are such as are suited for this, — active, complaisant, inventive, business people. There are no provisions for the student or idler; to know what the place can give, you should be at work with the rest; the mere traveller will not find it profitable to loiter there as I did. Since circumstances made it necessary for me so to do, I read all the books I could find about the new region, which now began to become real to me. Especially I read all the books about the Indians, — a paltry collection truly, yet which furnished material for many thoughts. The most narrow-minded and awkward recital still bears some lineaments of the great features of this nature, and the races of men that illustrated them. Catlin’s book is far the best. I was afterwards assured by those acquainted with the regions he describes, that he is not to be depended on for the accuracy of his facts, and indeed it is obvious, without the aid of such assertions, that he sometimes yields to the temptation of making out a story. They admitted, however, what from my feelings I was sure of, that he is true to the spirit of the scene, and that a far better view can be got from him than from any source at present existing, of the Indian tribes of the Far West, and of the country where their inheritance lay. Murray’s Travels I read, and was charmed by their accuracy and clear, broad tone. He is the only Englishman that seems to have traversed these regions as man simply, not as John Bull. He deserves to belong to an aristocracy, for he showed his title to it more when left without a guide in the wilderness, than he can at the court of Victoria. He has; himself, no poetic force at description, but it is easy to make images from his hints. Yet we believe the Indian cannot be looked at truly except by a poetic eye. The Pawnees, no doubt, are such as he describes them, filthy in their habits, and treacherous in their character, but some would have seen, and seen truly, more beauty and dignity than he does with all his manliness and fairness of mind. However, his one fine old man is enough to redeem the rest, and is perhaps the relic of a better day, a Phocion among the Pawnees. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches is a valuable book, though a worse use could hardly have been made of such fine material. Had the mythological or hunting stories of the Indians been written down exactly as they were received from the lips of the narrators, the collection could not have been surpassed in interest both for the wild charm they carry with them, and the light they throw on a peculiar modification of life and mind. As it is, though the incidents have an air of originality and pertinence to the occasion, that gives us confidence that they have not been altered, the phraseology in which they were expressed has been entirely set aside, and the flimsy graces, common to the style of annuals and souvenirs, substituted for the Spartan brevity and sinewy grasp of Indian speech. We can HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI just guess what might have been there, as we can detect the fine proportions of the Brave whom the bad taste of some white patron has arranged in frock-coat, hat, and pantaloons. The few stories Mrs. Jameson wrote out, though to these also a sentimental air has been given, offend much less in that way than is common in this book. What would we not give for a completely faithful version of some among them! Yet, with all these drawbacks, we cannot doubt from internal evidence that they truly ascribe to the Indian a delicacy of sentiment and of fancy that justifies Cooper in such inventions as his Uncas. It is a white man’s view of a savage hero, who would be far finer in his natural proportions; still, through a masquerade figure, it implies the truth. Irving’s books I also read, some for the first, some for the second time, with increased interest, now that I was to meet such people as he received his materials from. Though the books are pleasing from, their grace and luminous arrangement, yet, with the exception of the Tour to the Prairies, they have a stereotype, second-hand air. They lack the breath, the glow, the charming minute traits of living presence. His scenery is only fit to be glanced at from dioramic distance; his Indians are academic figures only. He would have made the best of pictures, if he could have used his own eyes for studies and sketches; as it is, his success is wonderful, but inadequate. McKenney’s Tour to the Lakes is the dullest of books, yet faithful and quiet, and gives some facts not to be met with everywhere. I also read a collection of Indian anecdotes and speeches, the worst compiled and arranged book possible, yet not without clews of some value. All these books I read in anticipation of a canoe- voyage on Lake Superior as far as the Pictured Rocks, and, though I was afterwards compelled to give up this project, they aided me in judging of what I subsequently saw and heard of the Indians. In Chicago I first saw the beautiful prairie-flowers. They were in their glory the first ten days we were there, — “The golden and the flame-like flowers.” The flame-like flower I was taught afterwards, by an Indian girl, to call “Wickapee”; and she told me, too, that its splendors had a useful side, for it was used by the Indians as a remedy for an illness to which they were subject. Beside these brilliant flowers, which gemmed and gilt the grass in a sunny afternoon’s drive near the blue lake, between the low oak-wood and the narrow beach, stimulated, whether sensuously by the optic nerve, unused to so much gold and crimson with such tender green, or symbolically through some meaning dimly seen in the flowers, I enjoyed a sort of fairy-land exultation never felt before, and the first drive amid the flowers gave me anticipation of the beauty of the prairies. At first, the prairie seemed to speak of the very desolation of dulness. After sweeping over the vast monotony of the lakes to come to this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon, — to walk, and walk, and run, but never climb, oh! it was too dreary for any but a Hollander to bear. How the eye greeted the approach of a sail, or the smoke of a steamboat; it seemed that anything so animated must come from a better land, where mountains gave religion to the scene. The only thing I liked at first to do was to trace with slow and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and without a change. But after I had ridden out, and seen the flowers, and observed the sun set with that calmness seen only in the prairies, and the cattle winding slowly to their homes in the “island groves,” — most peaceful of sights, — I began to love, because I began to know the scene, and shrank no longer from “the encircling vastness.” It is always thus with the new form of life; we must learn to look at it by its own standard. At first, no doubt, my accustomed eye kept saying, if the mind did not, What! no distant mountains? What! no valleys? But after a while I would ascend the roof of the house where we lived, and pass many hours, needing no sight but the moon reigning in the heavens, or starlight falling upon the lake, till all the lights were out in the island grove of men beneath my feet, and felt nearer heaven that there was nothing but this lovely, still reception on the earth; no towering mountains, no deep tree-shadows, nothing but plain earth and water bathed in light. Sunset, as seen from that place, presented most generally, low- lying, flaky clouds, of the softest serenity. One night a star “shot madly from, its sphere,” and it had a fair chance to be seen, but that serenity could not be astonished. Yes! it was a peculiar beauty, that of those sunsets and moonlights on the levels of Chicago, which Chamouny or the Trosachs could not make me forget.45 Notwithstanding all the attractions I thus found out by degrees on the flat shores of the lake, I was delighted when I found myself really on my way into the country for an excursion of two or three weeks. We set forth in a strong wagon, almost as large, and with the look of those used elsewhere for transporting caravans of wild beasts, loaded with everything we might want, in case nobody would give it to us, — for buying and selling were no longer to be counted on, — with, a pair of strong horses, able and willing to force their way through mud-holes and amid stumps, and a guide, equally admirable as marshal and companion, who knew by heart the country and its history, both natural and artificial, and whose clear hunter’s eye needed, neither road nor goal to guide it to all the spots where beauty best loves to dwell. Add to this the finest weather, and such country as I had never seen, even in my dreams, although these dreams had been haunted by wishes for just such a one, and you may judge whether years of dulness might not, by these bright days, be redeemed, and a sweetness be shed over all thoughts of the West. The first day brought us through woods rich in the moccason- flower and lupine, and plains whose soft expanse was continually touched with expression by the slow moving clouds which “Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath 45. “From the prairie near Chicago had I seen, some days before, the sun set with that calmness observed only on the prairies. I know not what it says, but something quite different from sunset at sea. There is no motion except of waving grasses, — the cattle move slowly homeward in the distance. That home! where is it? It seems as If there was no home, and no need of one, and there is room enough to wander on for ever.” — Manuscript Notes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges,” to the banks of the Fox River, a sweet and graceful stream. We reached Geneva just in time to escape being drenched by a violent thunder-shower, whose rise and disappearance threw expression into all the features of the scene. Geneva reminds me of a New England village, as indeed there, and in the neighborhood, are many New-Englanders of an excellent stamp, generous, intelligent, discreet, and seeking to win from life its true values. Such are much wanted, and seem like points of light among the swarms of settlers, whose aims are sordid, whose habits thoughtless and slovenly.46 With great pleasure we heard, with his attentive and affectionate congregation, the Unitarian clergyman, Mr. Conant, and afterward visited him in his house, where almost everything bore traces of his own handiwork or that of his father. He is just such a teacher as is wanted in this region, familiar enough, with the habits of those he addresses to come home to their experience and their wants; earnest and enlightened enough to draw the important inferences from the life of every day.47 A day or two we remained here, and passed some happy hours in the woods that fringe the stream, where the gentlemen found a rich booty of fish. Next day, travelling along the river’s banks, was an uninterrupted pleasure. We closed our drive in the afternoon at the house of an English gentleman, who has gratified, as few men do, the common wish to pass the evening of an active day amid the quiet influences of country life. He showed us a bookcase filled with books about this country; these he had collected for years, and become so familiar with the localities, that, on coming here at last, he sought and found, at once, the very spot he wanted, and where he is as content as he hoped to be, thus realizing Wordsworth’s description of the wise man, who “sees what he foresaw.” A wood surrounds the house, through which paths are cut in every direction. It is, for this new country, a large and handsome dwelling; but round it are its barns and farm-yard, with cattle and poultry. These, however, in the framework of wood, have a very picturesque and pleasing effect. There is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the aspect of things which gives a feeling of freedom, not of confusion. I wish, it were possible to give some idea of this scene, as viewed by the earliest freshness of dewy dawn. This habitation of man seemed like a nest in the grass, so thoroughly were the buildings and all the objects of human care harmonized with, what was natural. The tall trees bent and whispered all around, as if to hail with, sheltering love the men who had come to dwell among them. The young ladies were musicians, and spoke French fluently, 46. “We passed a portion of one day with Mr. and Mrs. — — , young, healthy, and, thank Heaven, gay people. In the general dulness that broods over this land where so little genius flows, and care, business, and fashionable frivolity are equally dull, unspeakable is the relief of some flashes of vivacity, some sparkles of wit. Of course it is hard enough for those, most natively disposed that way, to strike fire. I would willingly be the tinder to promote the cheering blaze.” — Manuscript Notes. 47. “Let any who think men do not need or want the church, hear these people talk about it as if it were the only indispensable thing, and see what I saw in Chicago. An elderly lady from Philadelphia, who had been visiting her sons in the West, arrived there about one o’clock on a hot Sunday noon. She rang the bell and requested a room immediately, as she wanted to get ready for afternoon service. Some delay occurring, she expressed great regret, as she had ridden all night for the sake of attending church. She went to church, neither having dined nor taken any repose after her journey.” — Manuscript Notes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI having been educated in a convent. Here in the prairie, they had learned to take care of the milk-room, and kill the rattlesnakes that assailed their poultry-yard. Beneath the shade of heavy curtains you looked out from the high and large windows to see Norwegian peasants at work in their national dress. In the wood grew, not only the flowers I had before seen, and wealth of tall, wild roses, but the splendid blue spiderwort, that ornament of our gardens. Beautiful children strayed there, who were soon to leave these civilized regions for some really wild and western place, a post in the buffalo country. Their no less beautiful mother was of Welsh descent, and the eldest child bore the name of Gwynthleon. Perhaps there she will meet with some young descendants of Madoc, to be her friends; at any rate, her looks may retain that sweet, wild beauty, that is soon made to vanish from eyes which look too much on shops and streets, and the vulgarities of city “parties.” Next day we crossed the river. We ladies crossed on a little foot-bridge, from which we could look down the stream, and see the wagon pass over at the ford. A black thunder-cloud was coming up; the sky and waters heavy with expectation. The motion of the wagon, with its white cover, and the laboring horses, gave just the due interest to the picture, because it seemed, as if they would not have time to cross before the storm came on. However, they did get across, and we were a mile or two on our way before the violent shower obliged us to take refuge in a solitary house upon the prairie. In this country it is as pleasant to stop as to go on, to lose your way as to find it, for the variety in the population gives you a chance for fresh entertainment in every hut, and the luxuriant beauty makes every path attractive. In this house we found a family “quite above the common,” but, I grieve to say, not above false pride, for the father, ashamed of being caught barefoot, told us a story of a man, one of the richest men, he said, in one of the Eastern cities, who went barefoot, from choice and taste. Near the door grew a Provence rose, then in blossom. Other families we saw had brought with them and planted the locust. It was pleasant to see their old home loves, brought into connection with their new splendors. Wherever there were traces of this tenderness of feeling, only too rare among Americans, other things bore signs also of prosperity and intelligence, as if the ordering mind of man had some idea of home beyond a mere shelter beneath which to eat and sleep. No heaven need wear a lovelier aspect than earth did this afternoon, after the clearing up of the shower. We traversed the blooming plain, unmarked by any road, only the friendly track of wheels which bent, not broke, the grass. Our stations were not from town to town, but from grove to grove. These groves first floated like blue islands in the distance. As we drew nearer, they seemed fair parks, and the little log-houses on the edge, with their curling smokes, harmonized beautifully with them. One of these groves, Ross’s Grove, we reached just at sunset, It was of the noblest trees I saw during this journey, for generally the trees were not large or lofty, but only of fair proportions. Here they were large enough to form with their clear stems pillars for grand cathedral aisles. There was space enough for crimson light to stream through upon the floor of water which the shower had left. As we slowly plashed through, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI I thought I was never in a better place for vespers. That night we rested, or rather tarried, at a grove some miles beyond, and there partook of the miseries, so often jocosely portrayed, of bedchambers for twelve, a milk dish for universal hand-basin, and expectations that you would use and lend your “hankercher” for a towel. But this was the only night, thanks to the hospitality of private families, that we passed thus; and it was well that we had this bit of experience, else might we have pronounced all Trollopian records of the kind to be inventions of pure malice. With us was a young lady who showed herself to have been bathed in the Britannic fluid, wittily described by a late French writer, by the impossibility she experienced of accommodating herself to the indecorums of the scene. We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room, from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only at a late hour. The outer door had no fastening to prevent their return. However, our host kindly requested we would call him, if they did, as he had “conquered them for us,” and would do so again. We had also rather hard couches (mine was the supper-table); but we Yankees, born to rove, were altogether too much fatigued to stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would in the “bigly bower” of any baroness. But I think England sat up all night, wrapped in her blanket-shawl, and with a neat lace cap upon her head, — so that she would have looked perfectly the lady, if any one had come in, — shuddering and listening. I know that she was very ill next day, in requital. She watched, as her parent country watches the seas, that nobody may do wrong in any case, and deserved to have met some interruption, she was so well prepared. However, there was none, other than from the nearness of some twenty sets of powerful lungs, which would not leave the night to a deathly stillness. In this house we had, if not good beds, yet good tea, good bread, and wild strawberries, and were entertained with most free communications of opinion and history from our hosts. Neither shall any of us have a right to say again that we cannot find any who may be willing to hear all we may have to say. “A’s fish that comes to the net,” should be painted on the sign at Papaw Grove.

June 30, Friday: The Liberator.

Margaret Fuller would write of the events of this day, in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843: Hazelwood, Rock River, June 30, 1843. The only really rustic feature was of the many coops of poultry near the house, which I understood it to be one of the chief pleasures of the master to feed. Leaving this place, we proceeded a day’s journey along the beautiful stream, to a little town named Oregon. We called at a cabin, from whose door looked out one of those faces which, once seen, are never forgotten; young, yet touched with many traces of feeling, not only possible, but endured; spirited, too, like the gleam of a finely tempered blade. It was a face that suggested a history, and many histories, but whose scene would have been in courts and camps. At this moment their circles are dull for want of that life which is waning unexcited in this solitary recess. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The master of the house proposed to show us a “short cut,” by which we might, to especial advantage, pursue our journey. This proved to be almost perpendicular down a hill, studded with young trees and stumps. From these he proposed, with a hospitality of service worthy an Oriental, to free our wheels whenever they should get entangled, also to be himself the drag, to prevent our too rapid descent. Such generosity deserved trust; however, we women could not be persuaded to render it. We got out and admired, from afar, the process. Left by our guide and prop, we found ourselves in a wide field, where, by playful quips and turns, an endless “creek,” seemed to divert itself with our attempts to cross it. Failing in this, the next best was to whirl down a steep bank, which feat our charioteer performed with an air not unlike that of Rhesus, had he but been as suitably furnished with chariot and steeds! At last, after wasting some two or three hours on the “short cut,” we got out by following an Indian trail, — Black Hawk’s! How fair the scene through which it led! How could they let themselves be conquered, with such a country to fight for! Afterwards, in the wide prairie, we saw a lively picture of nonchalance (to speak in the fashion of clear Ireland). There, in the wide sunny field, with neither tree nor umbrella above his head, sat a pedler, with his pack, waiting apparently for customers. He was not disappointed. We bought what hold, in regard to the human world, as unmarked, as mysterious, and as important an existence, as the infusoria to the natural, to wit, pins. This incident would have delighted those modern sages, who, in imitation of the sitting philosophers of ancient Ind, prefer silence to speech, waiting to going, and scornfully smile, in answer to the motions of earnest life, “Of itself will nothing come, That ye must still be seeking?” However, it seemed to me to-day, as formerly on these sublime occasions, obvious that nothing would, come, unless something would go; now, if we had been as sublimely still as the pedler, his pins would have tarried in the pack, and his pockets sustained an aching void of pence. Passing through one of the fine, park-like woods, almost clear from underbrush and carpeted with thick grasses and flowers, we met (for it was Sunday) a little congregation just returning from their service, which had been performed in a rude house in its midst. It had a sweet and peaceful air, as if such words and thoughts were very dear to them. The parents had with them all their little children; but we saw no old people; that charm was wanting which exists in such scenes in older settlements, of seeing the silver bent in reverence beside the flaxen head. At Oregon, the beauty of the scene was of even a more sumptuous character than at our former “stopping-place.” Here swelled the river in its boldest course, interspersed by halcyon isles on which Nature had lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs, three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those same beautiful trees, and with buttresses of rich rock, crested with old hemlocks, which wore a touching and antique grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation. Lofty natural mounds rose amidst the rest, with the same lovely and sweeping outline, showing everywhere the plastic power of water, — water, mother of beauty, — which, by its sweet and eager flow, had left such lineaments as human genius never HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI dreamt of. Not far from the river was a high crag, called the Pine Rock, which looks out, as our guide observed, like a helmet above the brow of the country. It seems as if the water left here and there a vestige of forms and materials that preceded its course, just to set off its new and richer designs. The aspect of this country was to me enchanting, beyond any I have ever seen, from its fulness of expression, its bold and impassioned sweetness. Here the flood of emotion has passed over and marked everywhere its course by a smile. The fragments of rock touch it with a wildness and liberality which give just the needed relief. I should never be tired here, though I have elsewhere seen country of more secret and alluring charms, better calculated to stimulate and suggest. Here the eye and heart are filled. How happy the Indians must have been here! It is not long since they were driven away, and the ground, above and below, is full of their traces. “The earth is full of men.” You have only to turn up the sod to find arrowheads and Indian pottery. On an island, belonging to our host, and nearly opposite his house, they loved to stay, and, no doubt, enjoyed its lavish beauty as much as the myriad wild pigeons that now haunt its flower-filled shades. Here are still the marks of their tomahawks, the troughs in which they prepared their corn, their caches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Summer: As the first great mass migration of white families moved in covered wagons across the Great Plains on their way to the Oregon Territory, Margaret Fuller arrived at Mackinac Island in the straits of the Great Lakes. Some 2,000 Native Americans were visiting to pick up their annual treaty payment, with a long line of birch-bark canoes drawn up on the shore. Most of them were Ojibwa.

At last, after wasting some two or three hours on the “short cut,” we got out by following an Indian trail, –Black Hawk’s! How fair the scene through which it led! How could they let themselves be conquered, with such a country to fight for!

Fuller had no way to know that these bands were back at Mackinac Island because the white father’s experiment of paying them in Dakota territory had been such a terrible failure or success, with almost 10% of the Ojibwa women slaughtered by the Dakota men near Fort Snelling on one dreadful day. Fuller was fascinated with them and took full advantage of the opportunity, only to realize that other white female tourist types found her interest incomprehensible –and unsettling.

In considering Thoreau’s visit to Mackinac Island, you really should go back and review the treatment of the island given by Margaret in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843.48 She wrote several things which Thoreau must certainly have remembered, such as that Mackinac was “an old French town, mellow in its coloring, and with the harmonious effect of a slow growth, which assimilates, naturally, with objects around it. The people

48. Fuller, Margaret. SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843. Boston MA: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844, Chapter VI. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

in its streets, Indian, French, half-breeds, and others, walked with a leisure step, as of those who live a life of taste and inclination, rather than of the hard press of business, as in American towns elsewhere.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July: Waldo Emerson’s “Ethnical Scriptures … from the DESATIR,” his “Gifts,” his poem “To Rhea,” his review of Thomas Carlyle’s PAST AND PRESENT, and five other of his reviews, were presented in this issue of THE DIAL. PAST AND PRESENT

Also in these pages was to be found, however, a noteworthy landmark in feminism: Margaret Fuller’s “The 49 Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women,” which amounts to a first version of WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

FEMINISM

THE DIAL, JULY 1843

In this essay Fuller insisted that as of 1843 the idea Man, however imperfectly realized, had been far more realized than the idea Woman, and that therefore the best way practically to aid the reformation of the sons of the age would be to improve the daughters of the age. While it is true that not all men have been given a fair chance, she pointed out, not one woman had been given a fair chance.

Fuller had seen, at the Allston Gallery in Boston in 1839, the statue of Orpheus that had been sculpted in Rome by Thomas Crawford. When the July issue of THE DIAL was read, it was notable that she had connected this

49. In 1844, when she republished this in expanded form as WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, she explained that by “Man” in this title she had meant both human males and human females, intending to “lay no especial stress on the welfare of either” because “the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other.” That is, she intended the same distinction, between “Man” and “Men,” that Neil Armstrong intended between “man” and “mankind” when he stepped on the surface of the moon and went “That’s a small step for [a] man, an giant leap for mankind.” Boy-type human beings and girl-type human beings were regarded by her not as opposites, nor as natural antagonists in the mode of the “man-hating” early years of the feminist movement, but as, in a luminous metaphor, “twins,” or “minds, partners in work and in life, sharing together on equal terms, public and private interests,” who “work together for a common purpose, and, in all these instances, with the same implement, the pen.” In other words, unlike certain later generation of feminists, Fuller was not sexist. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI with Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” from the first issue of the journal in 1840, as “lessons in reverence.”

Referring to the statue’s posture, of shading its eyes with its hand and staring forward, she penned a sonnet which began:

Each Orpheus must to the depths descend; For only thus the Poet can be wise.

and which concluded with the following couplet:

If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view.

Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 39th birthday.

In the Moravian community of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a town annual tradition of lighting their Spring Park with candles for the 4th of July, a tradition that is going on to the present day, began with this year’s celebration of our nation’s birthday.

In Boston, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, delivered an oration in Faneuil Hall. (This was the first celebration in this historic building.)

When a group from the Association of Industry and Education desired to hold an Independence Day antislavery meeting in the town of Northampton itself, they were denied access not only to the town meetinghouse but also to any and all of the local churches. Their speaker William Lloyd Garrison therefore proceeded to deliver his lecture to the crowd in the main street of the town — from atop a stump. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI In Washington DC, the cornerstone of Temperance Hall was laid (if you are gonna lay a cornerstone to temperance, for sure the day to stage the celebration is the day that the culture is devoting to public drunkenness).

Water was officiously let into the extension of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal created by an aqueduct above the Potomac River.

In Poughkeepsie, New York, due to a holiday firecracker “carelessly thrown by a boy,” God caused a church to be burned to the ground. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Frederick Douglass was in the Town Hall of Kingston, Massachusetts at the annual meeting of the Plymouth County Anti-Slavery Society. This was the period of the “Hundred Conventions,” in which Douglass was lecturing in conjunction with John A. Collins, Charles Lenox Remond, Jacob Ferris, James Monroe, George Bradburn, William A. White, and Sydney Howard Gay. During the month of July Douglass would be in Middlebury, Vermont and then in Ferrisburgh, Vermont with Collins, Bradburn, and Gay, before winding up by himself again, at the end of the month with a lecture in Syracuse, New York:

BONDAGE: In the summer of 1843, I was traveling and lecturing, in company with William A. White, Esq., through the state of Indiana. Anti-slavery friends were not very abundant in Indiana, at that time, and beds were not more plentiful than friends. We often slept out, in preference to sleeping in the houses, at some points. At the close of one of our meetings, we were invited home with a kindly-disposed old farmer, who, in the generous enthusiasm of the moment, seemed to have forgotten that he had but one spare bed, and that his guests were an ill-matched pair. All went on pretty well, till near bed time, when signs of uneasiness began to show themselves, among the unsophisticated sons and daughters. White is remarkably fine looking, and very evidently a born gentleman; the idea of putting us in the same bed was hardly to be tolerated; and yet, there we were, and but the one bed for us, and that, by the way, was in the same room occupied by the other members of the family. White, as well as I, perceived the difficulty, for yonder slept the old folks, there the sons, and a little farther along slept the daughters; and but one other bed remained. Who should have this bed, was the puzzling question. There was some whispering between the old folks, some confused looks among the young, as the time for going to bed approached. After witnessing the confusion as long as I liked, I relieved the kindly-disposed family by playfully saying, “Friend White, having got entirely rid of my prejudice against color, I think, as a proof of it, I must allow you to sleep with me to-night.” White kept up the joke, by seeming to esteem himself the favored party, and thus the difficulty was removed. If we went to a hotel, and called for dinner, the landlord was sure to set one table for White and another for me, always taking him to be master, and me the servant. Large eyes were generally made when the order was given to remove the dishes from my table to that of White’s. In those days, it was thought strange that a white man and a colored man could dine peaceably at the same table, and in some parts the strangeness of such a sight has not entirely subsided.

Waldo Emerson visited Fruitlands and observed some 100 feet of shelving, needed for their library of some 1,000 volumes contributed by Charles Lane, almost all of which were treatises on mysticism.50

Margaret Fuller would write of the events of this day, in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843: A little way down the river is the site of an ancient Indian village, with its regularly arranged mounds. As usual, they had chosen with the finest taste. When we went there, it was one of those soft, shadowy afternoons when Nature seems ready to weep, not from grief, but from an overfull heart. Two prattling, 50. When the colony collapsed Waldo Emerson would purchase some of these volumes, those which are now in the collection of Houghton Library of Harvard College. The remainder of the volumes would be taken by Thoreau to New-York and sold, with the proceeds being sent to Charles Lane. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI lovely little girls, and an African boy, with glittering eye and ready grin, made our party gay; but all were still as we entered the little inlet and trod those flowery paths. They may blacken Indian life as they will, talk of its dirt, its brutality, I will ever believe that the men who chose that dwelling-place were able to feel emotions of noble happiness as they returned to it, and so were the women that received them. Neither were the children sad or dull, who lived so familiarly with the deer and the birds, and swam that clear wave in the shadow of the Seven Sisters. The whole scene suggested to me a Greek splendor, a Greek sweetness, and I can believe that an Indian brave, accustomed to ramble in such paths, and be bathed by such sunbeams, might be mistaken for Apollo, as Apollo was for him by West. Two of the boldest bluffs are called the Deer’s Walk, (not because deer do not walk there,) and the Eagle’s Nest. The latter I visited one glorious morning; it was that of the fourth of July, and certainly I think I had never felt so happy that I was born in America. Woe to all country folks that never saw this spot, never swept an enraptured gaze over the prospect that stretched beneath. I do believe Rome and Florence are suburbs compared to this capital of Nature’s art. The bluff was decked with great bunches of a scarlet variety of the milkweed, like cut coral, and all starred with a mysterious- looking dark flower, whose cup rose lonely on a tall stem. This had, for two or three days, disputed the ground with the lupine and phlox. My companions disliked, I liked it. Here I thought of, or rather saw, what the Greek expresses under the form of Jove’s darling, Ganymede, and the following stanzas took form. Ganymede to his Eagle. Suggested by a Work of Thorwaldsen’s.

Composed on the height called the Eagle’s Nest, Oregon, Rock River, July 4th, 1843.

Upon the rocky mountain stood the boy, A goblet of pure water in his hand; His face and form spoke him one made for joy, A willing servant to sweet love’s command, But a strange pain was written on his brow, And thrilled throughout his silver accents now.

“My bird,” he cries, “my destined brother friend, O whither fleets to-day thy wayward flight? Hast thou forgotten that I here attend, From the full noon until this sad twilight? A hundred times, at least, from the clear spring, Since the fall noon o’er hill and valley glowed, I’ve filled the vase which our Olympian king Upon my care for thy sole use bestowed; That, at the moment when thou shouldst descend, A pure refreshment might thy thirst attend.

“Hast thou forgotten earth, forgotten me, Thy fellow-bondsman in a royal cause, Who, from the sadness of infinity, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Only with thee can know that peaceful pause In which we catch the flowing strain of love, Which binds our dim fates to the throne of Jove?

“Before I saw thee, I was like the May, Longing for summer that must mar its bloom, Or like the morning star that calls the day, Whose glories to its promise are the tomb; And as the eager fountain rises higher To throw itself more strongly back to earth, Still, as more sweet and full rose my desire, More fondly it reverted to its birth, For what the rosebud seeks tells not the rose, The meaning that the boy foretold the man cannot disclose.

“I was all Spring, for in my being dwelt Eternal youth, where flowers are the fruit; Full feeling was the thought of what was felt, Its music was the meaning of the lute; But heaven and earth such life will still deny, For earth, divorced from heaven, still asks the question Why?

“Upon the highest mountains my young feet Ached, that no pinions from their lightness grew, My starlike eyes the stars would fondly greet, Yet win no greeting from the circling blue; Fair, self-subsistent each in its own sphere, They had no care that there was none for me; Alike to them that I was far or near, Alike to them time and eternity.

“But from the violet of lower air Sometimes an answer to my wishing came; Those lightning-births my nature seemed to share, They told the secrets of its fiery frame, The sudden messengers of hate and love, The thunderbolts that arm the hand of Jove, And strike sometimes the sacred spire, And strike the sacred grove.

“Come in a moment, in a moment gone, They answered me, then left me still more lone; They told me that the thought which ruled the world As yet no sail upon its course had furled, That the creation was but just begun, New leaves still leaving from the primal one, But spoke not of the goal to which My rapid wheels would run.

“Still, still my eyes, though tearfully, I strained To the far future which my heart contained, And no dull doubt my proper hope profaned. “At last, O bliss! thy living form I spied, Then a mere speck upon a distant sky; Yet my keen glance discerned its noble pride, And the full answer of that sun-filled eye; I knew it was the wing that must upbear My earthlier form into the realms of air. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“Thou knowest how we gained that beauteous height, Where dwells the monarch, of the sons of light; Thou knowest he declared us two to be The chosen servants of his ministry, Thou as his messenger, a sacred sign Of conquest, or, with omen more benign, To give its due weight to the righteous cause, To express the verdict of Olympian laws.

“And I to wait upon the lonely spring, Which slakes the thirst of bards to whom ’t is given The destined dues of hopes divine to sing, And weave the needed chain to bind to heaven. Only from such could be obtained a draught For him who in his early home from Jove’s own cup has quaffed “To wait, to wait, but not to wait too long. Till heavy grows the burden of a song; O bird! too long hast thou been gone to-day, My feet are weary of their frequent way, The spell that opes the spring my tongue no more can say.

“If soon thou com’st not, night will fall around, My head with a sad slumber will be bound, And the pure draught be spilt upon the ground. “Remember that I am not yet divine, Long years of service to the fatal Nine Are yet to make a Delphian vigor mine. “O, make them not too hard, thou bird of Jove! Answer the stripling’s hope, confirm his love, Receive the service in which he delights, And bear him often to the serene heights, Where hands that were so prompt in serving thee Shall be allowed the highest ministry, And Rapture live with bright Fidelity.”

The afternoon was spent in a very different manner. The family whose guests we were possessed a gay and graceful hospitality that gave zest to each moment. They possessed that rare politeness which, while fertile in pleasant expedients to vary the enjoyment of a friend, leaves him perfectly free the moment he wishes to be so. With such hosts, pleasure may be combined with repose. They lived on the bank opposite the town, and, as their house was full, we slept in the town, and passed three days with them, passing to and fro morning and evening in their boats. To one of these, called the Fairy, in which a sweet little daughter of the house moved about lighter than any Scotch Ellen ever sung, I should indite a poem, if I had not been guilty of rhyme on this very page. At morning this boating was very pleasant; at evening, I confess, I was generally too tired with the excitements of the day to think it so. The house —a double log-cabin— was, to my eye, the model of a Western villa. Nature had laid out before it grounds which could not be improved. Within, female taste had veiled every rudeness, availed itself of every sylvan grace. In this charming abode what laughter, what sweet thoughts, what pleasing fancies, did we not enjoy! May such never desert those who reared it, and made us so kindly welcome to all its HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI pleasures! Fragments of city life were dexterously crumbled into the dish prepared for general entertainment. Ice-creams followed the dinner, which was drawn by the gentlemen from the river, and music and fireworks wound up the evening of days spent on the Eagle’s Nest. Now they had prepared a little fleet to pass over to the Fourth of July celebration, which some queer drumming and fifing, from, the opposite bank, had announced to be “on hand.” We found the free and independent citizens there collected beneath the trees, among whom many a round Irish visage dimpled at the usual puffs of “Ameriky.” The orator was a New-Englander, and the speech smacked loudly of Boston, but was received with much applause and followed by a plentiful dinner, provided by and for the Sovereign People, to which Hail Columbia served as grace. Returning, the gay flotilla cheered the little flag which the children had raised from a log-cabin, prettier than any president ever saw, and drank the health of our country and all mankind, with a clear conscience. Dance and song wound up the day. I know not when the mere local habitation has seemed to me to afford so fair a chance of happiness as this. To a person of unspoiled tastes, the beauty alone would afford stimulus enough. But with it would be naturally associated all kinds of wild sports, experiments, and the studies of natural history. In these regards, the poet, the sportsman, the naturalist, would alike rejoice in this wide range of untouched loveliness. Then, with a very little money, a ducal estate may be purchased, and by a very little more, and moderate labor, a family be maintained upon it with raiment, food, and shelter. The luxurious and minute comforts of a city life are not yet to be had without effort disproportionate to their value. But, where there is so great a counterpoise, cannot these be given up once for all? If the houses are imperfectly built, they can afford immense fires and plenty of covering; if they are small, who cares, — with, such fields to roam in? in winter, it may be borne; in summer, is of no consequence. With plenty of fish, and game, and wheat, can they not dispense with a baker to bring “muffins hot” every morning to the door for their breakfast? A man need not here take a small slice from the landscape, and fence it in from the obtrusions of an uncongenial neighbor, and there cut down his fancies to miniature improvements which a chicken could run over in ten minutes. He may have water and wood and land enough, to dread no incursions on his prospect from some chance Vandal that may enter his neighborhood. He need not painfully economize and manage how he may use it all; he can afford to leave some of it wild, and to carry out his own plans without obliterating those of Nature. Here, whole families might live together, if they would. The sons might return from their pilgrimages to settle near the parent hearth; the daughters might find room near their mother. Those painful separations, which already desecrate and desolate the Atlantic coast, are not enforced here by the stern need of seeking bread; and where they are voluntary, it is no matter. To me, too, used to the feelings which haunt a society of struggling men, it was delightful to look upon a scene where Nature still wore her motherly smile, and seemed to promise room, not only for those favored or cursed with the qualities HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI best adapting for the strifes of competition, but for the delicate, the thoughtful, even the indolent or eccentric. She did not say, Fight or starve; nor even, Work or cease to exist; but, merely showing that the apple was a finer fruit than the wild crab, gave both room to grow in the garden. A pleasant society is formed of the families who live along the banks of this stream upon farms. They are from various parts of the world, and have much to communicate to one another. Many have cultivated minds and refined manners, all a varied experience, while they have in common the interests of a new country and a new life. They must traverse some space to get at one another, but the journey is through scenes that make it a separate pleasure. They must bear inconveniences to stay in one another’s houses; but these, to the well-disposed, are only a source of amusement and adventure. The great drawback upon the lives of these settlers, at present, is the unfitness of the women for their new lot. It has generally been the choice of the men, and the women follow, as women will, doing their best for affection’s sake, but too often in heartsickness and weariness. Beside, it frequently not being a choice or conviction of their own minds that it is best to be here, their part is the hardest, and they are least fitted for it. The men can find assistance in field labor, and recreation with the gun and fishing-rod. Their bodily strength is greater, and enables them to bear and enjoy both these forms of life. The women can rarely find any aid in domestic labor. All its various and careful tasks must often be performed, sick, or well, by the mother and daughters, to whom a city education has imparted neither the strength nor skill now demanded. The wives of the poorer settlers, having more hard work to do than before, very frequently become slatterns; but the ladies, accustomed to a refined neatness, feel that they cannot degrade themselves by its absence, and struggle under every disadvantage to keep up the necessary routine of small arrangements. With all these disadvantages for work, their resources for pleasure are fewer. When they can leave the housework, they have not learnt to ride, to drive, to row, alone. Their culture has too generally been that given to women to make them “the ornaments of society.” They can dance, but not draw; talk French, but know nothing of the language of flowers; neither in childhood were allowed to cultivate them, lest they should tan their complexions. Accustomed to the pavement of Broadway, they dare not tread the wild-wood paths for fear of rattlesnakes! Seeing much of this joylessness, and inaptitude, both of body and mind, for a lot which would be full of blessings for those prepared for it, we could not but look with deep interest on the little girls, and hope they would grow up with the strength of body, dexterity, simple tastes, and resources that would fit them to enjoy and refine the Western farmer’s life. But they have a great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil. If the little girls grow up strong, resolute, able to exert their faculties, their mothers mourn over their want of fashionable delicacy. Are they gay, enterprising, ready to fly about in the various ways that teach them so much, these ladies lament that HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI “they cannot go to school, where they might learn to be quiet.” They lament the want of “education” for their daughters, as if the thousand needs which call out their young energies, and the language of nature around, yielded no education. Their grand ambition for their children is to send them to school in some Eastern city, the measure most likely to make them useless and unhappy at home. I earnestly hope that, erelong, the existence of good schools near themselves, planned by persons of sufficient thought to meet the wants of the place and time, instead of copying New York or Boston, will correct this mania. Instruction the children want to enable them to profit by the great natural advantages of their position; but methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta are as ill suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer, as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds. An elegance she would diffuse around her, if her mind were opened to appreciate elegance; it might be of a kind new, original, enchanting, as different from that of the city belle as that of the prairie torch-flower from the shop- worn article that touches the cheek of that lady within her bonnet. To a girl really skilled to make home beautiful and comfortable, with bodily strength to enjoy plenty of exercise, the woods, the streams, a few studies, music, and the sincere and familiar intercourse, far more easily to be met with here than elsewhere, would afford happiness enough. Her eyes would not grow dim, nor her cheeks sunken, in the absence of parties, morning visits, and milliners’ shops. As to music, I wish I could see in such places the guitar rather than the piano, and good vocal more than instrumental music. The piano many carry with them, because it is the fashionable instrument in the Eastern cities. Even there, it is so merely from the habit of imitating Europe, for not one in a thousand is willing to give the labor requisite to insure any valuable use of the instrument. But out here, where the ladies have so much less leisure, it is still less desirable. Add to this, they never know how to tune their own instruments, and as persons seldom visit them who can do so, these pianos are constantly out of tune, and would spoil the ear of one who began by having any. The guitar, or some portable instrument which requires less practice, and could be kept in tune by themselves, would be far more desirable for most of these ladies. It would give all they want as a household companion to fill up the gaps of life with a pleasant stimulus or solace, and be sufficient accompaniment to the voice in social meetings. Singing in parts is the most delightful family amusement, and those who are constantly together can learn to sing in perfect accord. All the practice it needs, after some good elementary instruction, is such as meetings by summer twilight and evening firelight naturally suggest. And as music is a universal language, we cannot but think a fine Italian duet would be as much at home in the log cabin as one of Mrs. Gore’s novels. The 6th of July we left this beautiful place. It was one of those rich days of bright sunlight, varied by the purple shadows of large, sweeping clouds. Many a backward look we cast, and left the heart behind. Our journey to-day was no less delightful than before, still all new, boundless, limitless. Kinmont says, that limits are sacred; HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI that the Greeks were in the right to worship a god of limits. I say, that what is limitless is alone divine, that there was neither wall nor road in Eden, that those who walked, there lost and found their way just as we did, and that all the gain from the Fall was that we had a wagon to ride in. I do not think, either, that even the horses doubted whether this last was any advantage. Everywhere the rattlesnake-weed grows in profusion. The antidote survives the bane. Soon the coarser plantain, the “white man’s footstep,” shall take its place. We saw also the compass-plant, and the Western tea-plant. Of some of the brightest flowers an Indian girl afterwards told me the medicinal virtues. I doubt not those students of the soil knew a use to every fair emblem, on which we could only look to admire its hues and shape. After noon we were ferried by a girl (unfortunately not of the most picturesque appearance) across the Kishwaukie, the most graceful of streams, and on whose bosom rested many full-blown water-lilies, — twice as large as any of ours. I was told that, en revanche, they were scentless, but I still regret that I could not get at one of them to try. Query, did the lilied fragrance which, in the miraculous times, accompanied visions of saints and angels, proceed from water or garden lilies? Kishwaukie is, according to tradition, the scene of a famous battle, and its many grassy mounds contain the bones of the valiant. On these waved thickly the mysterious purple flower, of which I have spoken before. I think it springs from the blood of the Indians, as the hyacinth did from that of Apollo’s darling. The ladies of our host’s family at Oregon, when they first went, there, after all the pains and plagues of building and settling, found their first pastime in opening one of these mounds, in which they found, I think, three of the departed, seated, in the Indian fashion. One of these same ladies, as she was making bread one winter morning, saw from the window a deer directly before the house. She ran out, with her hands covered with dough, calling the others, and they caught him bodily before he had time to escape. Here (at Kiskwaukie) we received a visit from a ragged and barefooted, but bright-eyed gentleman, who seemed to be the intellectual loafer, the walking Will’s coffee-house, of the place. He told us many charming snake-stories; among others, of himself having seen seventeen young ones re-enter the mother snake, on the approach of a visitor. This night we reached Belvidere, a flourishing town in Boon County, where was the tomb, now despoiled, of Big Thunder. In this later day we felt happy to find a really good hotel. From this place, by two days of very leisurely and devious journeying, we reached Chicago, and thus ended a journey, which one at least of the party might have wished unending. I have not been particularly anxious to give the geography of the scene, inasmuch as it seemed to me no route, nor series of stations, but a garden interspersed with cottages, groves, and flowery lawns, through which a stately river ran. I had no guide- book, kept no diary, do not know how many miles we travelled each day, nor how many in all. What I got from the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large; it is all I have aimed to communicate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The narrative might have been made much more interesting, as life was at the time, by many piquant anecdotes and tales drawn from private life. But here courtesy restrains the pen, for I know those who received the stranger with such frank kindness would feel ill requited by its becoming the means of fixing many spy-glasses, even though the scrutiny might be one of admiring interest, upon their private homes. For many of these anecdotes, too, I was indebted to a friend, whose property they more lawfully are. This friend was one of those rare beings who are equally at home in nature and with man. He knew a tale of all that ran and swam and flew, or only grew, possessing that extensive familiarity with things which shows equal sweetness of sympathy and playful penetration. Most refreshing to me was his unstudied lore, the unwritten poetry which common life presents to a strong and gentle mind. It was a great contrast to the subtilties of analysis, the philosophic strainings of which I had seen too much. But I will not attempt to transplant it. May it profit others as it did me in the region where it was born, where it belongs. The evening of our return to Chicago, the sunset was of a splendor and calmness beyond any we saw at the West. The twilight that succeeded was equally beautiful; soft, pathetic, but just so calm. When afterwards I learned this was the evening of Allston’s death, it seemed to me as if this glorious pageant was not without connection with that event; at least, it inspired similar emotions, — a heavenly gate closing a path adorned with shows well worthy Paradise.

July 11, Tuesday: The supporters of Representative John Quincy Adams celebrated his 76th birthday.

Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller to inform her that Henry Thoreau, as well as others, had appreciated her “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women” in the current issue of THE DIAL.

September 7, Thursday: Margaret Fuller arrived at the Waldo Emerson home in Concord after just having visited with the William Emersons on Staten Island, where she of course encountered Henry Thoreau as well: “We go on in our even way, woods, and fields, and books, — books and fields and woods.” THOREAU RESIDENCES

Isaac Flagg was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, the son of Wilson Flagg. He would, like his father, be educated at Phillips Andover Academy, and go on to Harvard College (unlike his father, he would stick it out and get a degree). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 14, Thursday: Dr. Elisha Kent Kane became an Assistant Surgeon in the US Navy.

Birth of Lavinia Jones, daughter of Mary Jane Richardson and John Jones.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Waldo Emerson from Staten Island, recounting that although he had been reduced to attempting to sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door since “Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell,” John L. O’Sullivan had accepted his article “The Landlord” for publication in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review:

O’Sullivan is printing the Manuscript I sent him some time ago[,] having objec[ted] only to my want of sympathy with the [C]ommunities.—

Staten-Island Sep. 14th Dear Friend, Miss Fuller will tell you the news from these parts, so I will only devote these few moments to what she does not know as well. I was absent only one day and night from the Island, the family expecting me back immediately. I was to earn a certain sum before winter, and thought it worth the while to try various experiments. I carried the Agriculturist about the city, and up as far as Manhattanville, and called at the Croton Reservoir, where [indeed] they did not want any Agriculturists, but paid well enough in their way. Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell. I have tried the Dem. Review — The New Mirror & [Brother] Jonathan[.] The last two as well as the New-World, are overwhelmed with contributions[,] which

Page 2 cost nothing, and are worth no more. The Knickerbocker is too poor, and only the Ladies Companion pays. O’Sullivan is printing the Manuscript I sent him some time ago[,] having objec[ted] only to my want of sympathy with the [C]ommunities. — I doubt if you have made more corrections in my manuscript than I should have done ere this, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI though they may be better, but I am glad that you have taken any pains with it. — I have not prepared any translations for the Dial, supposing there would be no room — though it is the only place for them. I have been seeing [men] during these days, and trying experiments upon trees; have inserted 3 or 4 hundred buds — Quite a Buddhist, one might say — Books I have access to through your brother and Mr Mackean — and have read a good deal — Quarle’s “Divine Poems” as well as Emblems are quite a discovery.

Page 3 I am sorry that Mrs[.] Emerson is so sick. Remember me to her and to your [M]other. I like to think of [your] living on the banks of the [M]ill- brook, in the midst of the garden with all its weeds, for what are botanical distinctions at this distance? Your friend Henry D. Thoreau

Page 4 Return address: H. D. Thoreau Sept. 1843 Address: R. Waldo Emerson Concord Mass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Meanwhile, Isaac Hecker wrote to the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson:

Alcott and Lane have been here 5 days; they started for home yesterday morning. They occupied their time in visiting various individuals and holding conversations. They held three while they were here, one at Wm Channing’s place and there was present Channing, Margaret Fuller, Vethake, and Alcott, and Lane. How they took, I know not, for if they are the “newness” to a Boston transcendental audience what must they be to a New York one? They made our place their home while they were here.

BRONSON ALCOTT MARGARET FULLER Frederick Douglass, George Bradburn, and William A. White arrived in Pendleton, Indiana for a 3-day series of lectures.

September 15, Friday: The Liberator.

September 19, Tuesday: Margaret Fuller returned from her trip to Niagara Falls, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio (she would use this journey as structure for her SUMMER ON THE LAKES IN 1843).

September 25, Monday: Having resigned from his vicarage of St. Mary’s, Oxford after finding that he had begun to question the true catholicity of the Church of England, the Reverend John Henry Newman preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore.

Henry Thoreau was written to by Margaret Fuller. Dear Henry, You are not, I know, deeply interested in the chapter of little etiquettes, yet I think out of kindness you will be willing to read a text therein & act conformably in my behalf— As I read the text on the subject of [v]isits or [v]isitations, our hosts martyr themselves every way for us, their guests, while we are with them, in time, temper, & purse, but we are expected to get to them and get away from them as we can. Then I ought to have paid for the carriage which came to take me away[,] though I went in another. But I did not see the man when I got down to the landing[, — I] do not know what is the due, but [E.] Hoar told me the enclosed was enough[,] will you pay it for me wherever it belongs & pardon the care- lessness that gives you this trouble? Immediately after my return I passed two days at Concord, a visit all too short, yet pleasant. The cottages of the Irish laborers look pretty just now but their railroad looks foreign to Concord. Mr Emerson has written a fine poem, you will see it in the Dial. Ellery will not go to the West, at least not this year[.] He regrets your absence, you, he says, are the man to be with in the Woods. I remember my visit to Staten Island HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Page 2 with great pleasure[,] & find your hist[o]ries and the grand pictures you showed me are very full in my mind[.] I have not yet [dreamt] of the fort, but I intend to some leisure night. With best regards to Mr & Mrs Emerson, whose hospitality I hold in grateful remembrance, yours S.M. Fuller. 25th[.] Septr/43

Address: Mr Henry Thoreau Care W. Emerson Esq 61 Wall St N. York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 6, Friday: The Liberator.

Nathaniel Hawthorne went for a hike in the bucolic Concord countryside:

I took a solitary walk to Walden Pond. It was a cool, north-west windy day, with heavy clouds rolling and tumbling about the sky, but still a prevalence of genial autumn sunshine. The fields are still green, and the great masses of the woods have not yet assumed their many-colored garments; but here and there, are solitary oaks of a deep, substantial red, or maples of a more brilliant hue, or chestnuts, either yellow or of a tenderer green than in summer. Some trees seem to return to their hue of May or early July, before they put on their brighter autumnal tints. In some places, along the borders of low and moist land, a whole range of trees were clothed in the perfect gorgeousness of autumn, of all shades of brilliant color, looking like the palette on which Nature was arranging the tints wherewith to paint a picture. These hues appeared to be thrown together without a design; and yet there was perfect harmony among them, and a softness and delicacy made up of a thousand different brightnesses. Walden Pond was clear and beautiful, as usual. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI (Did he see what Cindy Kassab saw, that is depicted in her painting?)

In the course of his excursion the author discovered something of great interest and relevance, that even some Irish day-laborers have a life and loved ones and need to have somewhere for their families to lay their heads (see next page). According to the author’s AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS, he got lost on his way home to the Old Manse:

According to my invariable custom, I mistook my way, and emerging upon a road, I turned my back, instead of my face, toward Concord, and walked on very diligently, till a guide-board informed me of my mistake. I then turned about, and was shortly overtaken by an old yeoman in a chaise, who kindly offered me a ride, and shortly set me down in the village.

This has now all been replayed for us, on the last page of Part II: TRAVELING IN STYLE of the Los Angeles Times Magazine for October 16, 1994. The anonymous article, allegedly or ostensibly dealing with early literary appreciation of the aesthetics of hiking through the woods to “Walden Pond,” is facing an advertisement of a cruise from La-La Land to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán51, and Cabo San Lucas on the good ship Nordic Prince, and a cruise to Catalina and then Ensenada on its sister ship Viking Serenade, and headlines the idea that Thoreau Didn’t Invent This Celebrated Body of Water.

51. Minus, of course, the Spanish acute accent in the Times newspaper, which does not truck with foreigners or their languages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

In a small and secluded dell, that opens upon the most beautiful cove of the whole lake, there is a little hamlet of huts or shanties, inhabited by the Irish people who are at work upon the rail-road. There are three or four of these habitations, the very rudest, I should imagine, that civilized men ever made for themselves, constructed of rough boards, with protruding ends. Against some of them the earth is heaped up to the roof, or nearly so; and when the grass has had time to sprout upon them, they will look like small natural hillocks, or a species of ant-hill, or something in which Nature has a larger share than man. These huts are placed beneath the trees, (oaks, walnuts, and white pines) wherever the trunks give them space to stand; and by thus adapting themselves to natural interstices instead of making new ones, they do not break or disturb the solitude and seclusion of the place. Voices are heard, and the shouts and laughter of the children, who play about like the sunbeams that come down through the branches. Women are washing beneath the trees, and long lines of whitened clothes are extended from tree to tree, fluttering and gambolling in the breeze. A pig, in a stye even more extemporary than the shanties, is grunting, and poking his snout through the clefts of his habitation. The household pots and kettles are seen at the doors, and a glance within shows the rough benches that serve for chairs, and the bed upon the floor. The visiter’s nose takes note of the fragrance of a pipe. And yet, with all these homely items, the repose and sanctity of the old wood do not seem to be destroyed or prophaned; she overshadows these poor people, and assimilates them, somehow or other, to the character of her natural inhabitants. Their presence did not shock me, any more than if I had merely discovered a squirrel’s nest in a tree. To be sure, it is a torment to see the great, high, ugly embankment of the railroad, which is here protruding itself into the lake, or along its margin, in close vicinity to this picturesque little hamlet. I have seldom seen anything more beautiful than the cove, on the border of which the huts are situated; and the more I looked, the lovelier it grew. The trees overshadowed it deeply; but on the one side there was some brilliant shrubbery which seemed to light up the whole picture with the effect of a sweet and melancholy smile. I felt as if spirits were there –or as if these shrubs had a spiritual life– in short, the impression was undefinable; and after gazing and musing a good while, I retraced my steps through the Irish hamlet, and plodded on along a wood-path. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Years Before He Moved There, Another Noted Writer Enjoyed Its Charms.

Following such an egregious headline, the article in the L.A. Times inserts anonymous remarks in italic type:

Sometimes the footsteps of the famous overlap. When Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in 1845 at Walden Pond, near Concord, Mass., the pond itself and the surrounding woods were already well-known to his contemporaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land on which the pond stood, and Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer and editor Margaret Fuller and other literary lights of the time frequented the area. In the edited excerpt below, Hawthorne (1804-1864) –who had not yet written THE SCARLET LETTER, THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES, THE MARBLE FAUN and the other books by which he is remembered– describes a stroll through the autumn-bright woods and a visit to the pond in the early 1840s. The most surprising aspect of the account, which was written in 1843, is the author’s discovery of a small settlement of environmentally sensitive Irish railroad workers living at the edge of the pond.

Well, one shouldn’t come down too hard on the efforts of some newspaper peckerwood, who is obviously merely attempting to draw a paycheck by devising some sort of “news-hook” for a freebie citation from public- domain 19th Century sources, intended merely as another page-filler between the pretty travel ads. –But who, in the first place, is it, specifically, by name, who has had this idea that is here headlined, that Thoreau did “Invent” Walden Pond, that “Celebrated Body of Water”? And why precisely is it, that we should now be temporizing about the First Literary Appreciation of a body of water that has existed in that precise spot since the melting of the buried blocks of ice left behind by the latest glacial era, something like 18 millennia ago? And how is it that this news maven has created the perception that before Thoreau went out to Walden Pond to build his shanty in late March of the following spring season, it was “literary lights of the time” such as Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller who had “frequented the area”? Presumably this newsie is unaware that Henry Thoreau was “frequenting” that pond and those woods as a little child as much as two decades before Hawthorne had ever even visited Concord:

WALDEN: When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

and presumably this newsie is likewise unaware that it was the adult surveyor of woodlots Thoreau who had in fact recommended to Emerson that he purchase these several woodlots with some frontage on Walden Pond,52 and is likewise unaware that Thoreau had had his little homemade boat Red Jacket on Walden Pond for some years and had, long before, taken literary light Fuller for a row on this pond in this boat, and is likewise oblivious to the fact that Thoreau had written about his experiences at Walden Pond many, many times in his journal before the Hawthornes ever considered moving to Concord for the cheap rent at the vacant Old Manse,53 and writing about his daily experiences in his own unpublished journal, not to speak of the fact that at the juncture at which Hawthorne witnessed these oh-so-picturesque shacks for the first time, these families of “railroad workers” which they had sheltered from the elements were needing –quite unbeknownst to the self-centered Hawthorne– to abandon their habitations and shoulder what of their scant possessions they could carry upon their backs, and trudge on down the American tracks which they had helped to construct and beneath which some of them in fact lay buried — because the heavy work in this area had been completed and they were all by that time without steady work and, if they had elected to remain there in bucolic Walden Woods next to bucolic Walden Pond, beyond the Concord Alms House and Poor Farm to which they were of course not eligible to have recourse, they would have eventually starved or frozen (whichever came first). Perhaps the newshawks are also innocent of an understanding that, as Thoreau most carefully described in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, one of these shanties Hawthorne saw, the one pertaining to the departing James Collins family, would be purchased by Thoreau for its construction materials to use in the creation of his own anti-desperation shanty, on the hill-edge down on Bay Henry, etc., etc.

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley

Such analyses seem entirely to avoid the fact that one object of Thoreau’s constructing this shanty was to demonstrate that it was possible, with care, to construct a healthful and clean and comfortable abode at an expense that anyone might afford, and thus to furnish these impoverished refugees of the potato famine with an inspirational model for imitation.54 And if “the surrounding woods were already well-known to his [Henry Thoreau’s] contemporaries” then we are left with an interesting “how-cum” about Hawthorne getting 52. Not, incidentally, “the land on which the pond stood,” a phrase which is quite remarkable not only as an impoverished simplification but also as an impoverished metaphor. In point of fact, the place on the pond where Thoreau kept his Red Jacket, and engaged in his morning baptisms, and dipped his drinking water, was on the adjacent woodlot belonging to Cyrus Hubbard rather than on Emerson’s woodlot. One reason for locating the shanty so far back from the shoreline would have been to position it within one of the surviving clumps of pine trees, the terrain not having been at that time so packed with trees as it now is, but another reason would have been to keep it within the margins of the Emerson property. And anyway, Emerson did not begin to purchase these woodlots with money from his dead wife’s estate until about a year after this initial visit by Nathaniel Hawthorne, so here again our hapless news flack has gotten his or her chronology back-assward. 53. Not all of which he bothered to pay, by the way. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI himself so turned around and lost in these surrounding woods at the end of this quoted piece from his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS that, as the newspaper confesses, he had to ask for directions and had to be offered a lift back home to civilization! Just precisely how compatible is that with such terminology as “already well- known”? –Face it, most members of the Brahmin overcaste of “literary lights of the time,” with which Thoreau the offspring of a peasant or tradesfamily had to deal, wouldn’t have been able to find their own asses had they been privileged to hunt for them with both hands. Over and above all that, we may marvel at the casualness of the newspaper’s characterization of these desperately poor families of refugees of a foreign famine, forced to attempt to live on this sandy, virtually barren soil among the pines in dark Walden Woods where they could not conceivably have created productive cottage gardens, while their men had labored for like $0.73 the day for 18 hours of exhausting and quite dangerous rude labor, as, now get this, “environmentally sensitive.” Come on, newspaper people, “environmentally sensitive,” that’s for proper WASPs whose lives are not at constant risk, people who suppose that they can save the planet by sorting out their green empties from their clear empties — people like the ones who purchase your cruise tickets on the Viking Serenade and the Nordic Prince and the Love Boat! While one is at this sort of historical redactionism one might as well characterize the nigger-hating, nigger-baiting “Plug Ugly” Irish mob actions of the Boston urban hub of this period as having been, in actuality, mere prototype protests against the wickedness of chattel slavery! As a retort to this sort of newspaper-PC rewriting of history, a retort which might also be able to pass muster as an attempt at good humor, we might mention that among these “environmentally sensitive” Irishmen it was little Johnny Riordan of Concord’s Riordan Family who was the most environmentally sensitive of all — because in the New England turn of seasons it was getting cold and his little toes were turning blue.55 If one perceives anything at all about “sensitivity” in the quoted passage from Hawthorne’s literary notebook, it is not sensitivity but insensitivity which one perceives — originally, we can here perceive very starkly that author’s notorious insensitivity to the problems of others, and, now, we are

54. In fact Waldo Emerson eventually sold Thoreau’s empty shanty to one of them, his drunken Irish gardener Hugh Whelan, to shelter this man’s family. 55. Refer to Thoreau’s poem about Johnny’s plight during the early winter of 1850 and to his carrying a cloak to Johnny in the late winter of 1851-1852: “I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish.” Thoreau’s good attitude of compassion and involvement contrasts sufficiently with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attitude of aestheticism and disengagement to remind one of the following distinction which Simone Weil drew during WWII in her New York notebook:

Natural piety consists in helping someone in misfortune so as not to be obliged to think about him any more, or for the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself. It is a form of cruelty which is contrary only in its outward effects to cruelty in the ordinary sense. Such, no doubt, was the clemency of Caesar. Compassion consists in paying attention to an afflicted man and identifying oneself with him in thought. It then follows that one feeds him automatically if he is hungry, just as one feeds oneself. Bread given in this way is the effect and the sign of compassion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI given an opportunity to perceive this news person’s utter insensitivity to Hawthorne’s having chosen to depict the plight of these refugees as merely picturesque.56

And in fair days as well as foul we walked up the country — until from Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side — and when we had passed its fountain-head the wild Amonoosuck whose puny channel we crossed at a stride guiding us to its distant source among the mountains until without its guidance we reached the summit of agiocochook. But why should we take the reader who may have been tenderly nurtured — through that rude country — where the crags are steep and the inns none of the best, and many a rude blast would have to be encountered on the mountain side. (FD 82-83)

We don’t know precisely how many people have starved to death or, weakened by starvation, succumbed to diarrhea and fever or to cholera in Ireland during the ensuing period, but we do know that the first great die- off would occur during the winter of 1846-1847. A table prepared after the fact by Census Commissioners,

presented here, in all probability under-estimates the mortality because of the manner in which they collected 56. Professor Walter Roy Harding considered that Thoreau, in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, wrote disparagingly of the Irish, although, as he got to know them personally, he changed his mind about them and became their defender. He commented that why Thoreau did not then excise his disparaging remarks is not known. So the question would be, did Thoreau in fact write disparagingly of the fugitives from this ecological disaster, the Irish Potato Famine? Or was Harding quite mistaken here, misconstruing for derogation what in fact was mere frank description? And, was the impact of this episode in our human history the direct result of the ecological disaster, the late blight, or was it instead the direct result of a mean and contemptible English social policy — and was Thoreau aware of and contemptuous of this political causation? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI data: for a family all of whose members succumbed zero deaths would be tabulated. Of the total number of deaths, which would be between 500,000 and 1,500,000, the percentage of that total which would occur in each year probably worked out to something like this (the figures shown for 1849 are the result of a cholera epidemic in Connacht, Leinster, and Munster, as well as of the general starvation):

Mortality, expressed as %ages of the 1841 Population Year %

1842 5.1%

1843 5.2%

1844 5.6%

1845 6.4%

1846 9.1%

1847 18.5%

1848 15.4%

1849 17.9%

1850 12.2%

November 6, Tuesday: Until April 1844, Margaret Fuller would be supporting herself (and other members of her family, I think) through offering two-hour “Conversations” for 25-40 women at a time, in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s parlor on West Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI November 25, Saturday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –HOUSE DOCUMENT, 28 Cong. 1 sess. I. No. 2, pp. 484-5.

After a concert, Margaret Fuller wrote into her journal a fan letter to Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, addressing him as “My only friend.” She told him she wanted a son of her own and asked to be wife, mistress, and daughter to him. Husband, Lover, Father

Wife Mistress Daughter

(We do not know, of course, that she actually posted such a mash letter.) However, could she, perchance, have been unaware that her ideal hero, besides being deaf as a doorknob, had also been, at 5 foot 4 inches, which was two inches shorter than Napoleon, been somewhat height challenged?

If, while he was working, he did not go out during the forenoon, in order to compose himself, he would stand at the washbasin … and pour great pitchersful of water over his hands, at the same time howling or, for a change, growling out the whole gamut of the scale, ascending and descending; then, before long, he would pace the room, his eyes rolling or fixed in a stare, jot down a few notes and again return to his water pouring and howling.... Beethoven was everywhere unwelcome as a lodger.

She would of course be spared hearing from her Viennese gentleman by return post collect, as he had been a practicing decomposer for some 16 years. (Ironically, later, while Waldo Emerson was contemplating Margaret’s sad drowning, one of the things he mused was that “some Beethoven should play her dirge.”)

My only friend, How shall I thank thee for again tonight breaking the chains of my Sorrowful slumber. I did not expect it. For months now I have been in a low state of existence. Nothing profited me; nothing budded or blossomed in my garden. I was not sad; the arrow did not rankle in my heart as sometimes it does, but it lay there a cold dull substance whose foreign pressure seemed to prevent pulsation from its harmony, life from its abundance. My eyes are always clear, dear friend. I always see that the universe is rich, if I am poor. I see the insignificance of my sorrows. In my will, I am not a captive, in my intellect not a slave. It is not my fault that the palsy of my affections benumbs my whole life. I would disregard it if I could. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI And here indeed, my lot is accursed, yes, my friend let me curse it. The curse like the ill is but for the time. I know what the Eternal justice promises. But in this one sphere it is sad. Thou didst say thou hadst no friend but thy art, –but that one is enough– I have no art in which to vent the swell of a soul as deep as thine, Beethoven, and of kindred frame. Thou wilt not think me presumptuous in this saying as another might. I have always known that thou wouldst welcome, wouldst know me, as no other who ever lived upon the earth since its first creation would. Thou wouldst forgive me, Master, that I have not been true to my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side “the pangs of despised love.” —Thou didst the same But thou didst borrow from those errors the inspiration of thy genius; why is it not thus with me? Is it because as a woman I am bound by a physical law which prevents the soul from manifesting itself. Sometimes the moon seems mockingly to say so, — to say that I too shall not shine, unless I can find a sun. O cold and barren moon, tell a different tale, and give me a son of mine own. But thou, Oh blessed Master, dost answer all my questions, and make it my privilege to be. Like a humble wife to the sage or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand, can receive thee wholly, like a mistress I arm thee for the fight, like a young daughter I tenderly bind thy wounds. Thou art to me beyond compare, for thou art all I want. No heavenly sweetness of Jesus, no many leaved Raphael, no golden Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee. The infinite Shakespeare, the stern Angelo, Dante bitter sweet like thee, are no longer dear in thy presence. And besides these names, there are none others that could vibrate in thy crystal sphere. —Thou hast all of them and that ample surge of life beside that great winged being which they only dreamed of. There is none greater than Shakespeare, for he is a god, but his creations are successive, thy Fiat comprehends them all. Beethoven, my heart beats. I live again, for I feel that I am worthy audience for thee, and that my being would be reason enough for thine. I met thy mood and mine last summer in nature on those wide impassioned plains flower and crag bestrown. There the tide of emotion had rolled over and left the vision of its smiles and sobs as I saw tonight from thee. Oh, if thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself. I am lost in this world where I sometimes meet angels but of a different star from mine. Forgive me that I love them who cannot love me. Even so does thy spirit call upon, plead with all spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in. My triumphs are but for the moment, thine eternal. Master! I have this summer envied the oriole which had even a swinging nest in the high bough, I have envied the least flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the wind. But I envy none when I am with thee. Tonight I had no wish for thee: it was long since we had met. I did not expect to feel again. I was so very cold; tears had fallen; but they were Hamlet tears of speculation. Thy touch made me again all human. O save and give me to myself and thee. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1844

Margaret Fuller recollected Francis Abbott some 13 years after he had drowned near his log cabin below Niagara Falls while bathing, observing that “there is something ludicrous in being the hermit of a show-place.” (Come on, Margaret — what’s the point in being a hermit if you can’t get the tourists to look at you?)

May 18, Saturday: An announcement of regret for the closing of THE DIAL appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune, noting that that journal had been “sustained for three years by the free-will contributions of” Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Charles Lane, Charles A. Dana, Henry Thoreau, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “and others of the deepest thinkers and most advanced minds of our country.”57

Here then are the accumulated issues of this publication, from midyear 1840 to midyear 1844: THE DIAL, 1840 THE DIAL, 1841 THE DIAL, 1842 THE DIAL, 1843 THE DIAL, 1844

June 5, Wednesday: Publication of Margaret Fuller’s SUMMER ON THE LAKES IN 1843 (an astute observer of the quirks of human psychology, she for instance describes one of our intimate scenarios as “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded”). SUMMER ON THE LAKES IN 1843

57. There would be a successor magazine, and one of the first principles of this successor magazine would be that no contribution would ever be accepted from Thoreau — his participation would be ruled out categorically from the get-go. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Summer: James Boyle’s book SOCIAL REFORM, heavily informed not only by Fourierism but also by perfectionism and nonresistance, was published. For this new “Divine Order of society” he was using the name “Association,” but the book was not an advocacy of the practical mix of sentiments which had created the Association of Industry and Education of which he was then a member as this association had never explicitly embraced any of the principles, or even the mindset, of Fourierism. His message was being well received at Brook Farm — but not at home. The Hutchinson Family Singers, returning to their family farm in Milford NH from their visit to Northampton, decided that for a trial period of one year they would convert their farm into a collective similar to the NAIE (rather than one similar to the Divine order of Fourierist society championed by Boyle and being implemented at Brook Farm). COMMUNITARIANISM

According to page 80 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sick ambivalences and manly defenses are readily to be discerned: In the summer of 1844, while the Hawthornes were still at the Old Manse, Margaret Fuller, who was friends with them both, came to visit, and it was then that Nathaniel became most intimate with her. Throughout the month of July, they went boating at dusk on the Concord, took moonlit walks through the woods, and conversed at length on a variety of subjects. (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was occupied with the new baby, Una Hawthorne.) And, surprisingly, given his reserve and shyness, it was Hawthorne who initiated many of their hours alone together. After Fuller moved to New York City that fall and thence to Europe and Rome, she and Hawthorne never saw one another again; however, ten years after her death, Hawthorne in a long and famous passage in his Italian notebook ridiculed her husband and called her “a great humbug” with a “defective and evil nature.” This outburst seems inexplicable, given Hawthorne’s previous friendliness, but it does make sense if one sees it as motivated by guilt and anger about his attraction to her. As Paula Blanshard has pointed out, “There is no possible way that anyone can accuse Margaret of being evil — if he is thinking of Margaret herself. But Hawthorne was not; he was thinking of what she represented to him.” During the summer of 1849, when Fuller and her fellow republicans fought their losing battle against the invading French, capturing the attention and admiration of the American public, Hawthorne certainly noticed, and when he wrote THE SCARLET LETTER several months later, he then too had in mind what Fuller represented: a female revolutionary trying to overthrow the world’s most prominent politico-religious leader, a freethinking temptress who had almost subverted his right-minded thoughts and feelings.

July 9, Tuesday: Margaret Fuller arrived in Concord. Greta had just been born to Ellery Channing and Ellen Fuller Channing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July 12, Friday: The Liberator again announced the event that was to take place in Concord on the 1st of August, with “F. Douglass” listed along with others as a speaker in Concord on that day. (He would also be so listed in the issues of July 19th and July 26th; then, in the August 9th issue of The Liberator that would describe the event after it had occurred, he would be listed as “Frederick Douglass.”)

[This is significant data, because elsewhere I have read that Douglass had been scheduled to speak at a mass rally in Hingham, Massachusetts on August 1st, with the Reverends John Pierpont and James Freeman Clarke, rather than in Concord, but that that rally in Hingham had had to be postponed for one day, evidently at the last moment, on account of rain. This conflict in information needs to be resolved.]

On Henry Thoreau’s 27th birthday Captain J.N. Taylor demonstrated a new appliance — a “fog horn.”

Waldo Emerson read his “Life” oration to Margaret Fuller. She reacted badly to it:

Nothing but Truth in the Universe, no love, and no various realities.

September: Margaret Fuller returned to Concord, and walked again with Nathaniel Hawthorne in the moonlight. (Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s reaction to WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY would turn out to be negative. Not only was Margaret verbalizing about some country matters that were never meant to be spoken of in decent society, not only was she presumptuous in attempting to speak for all women, but also “I suspect a wife only can know how to speak with sufficient respect of man,” and Sophia definitely was the wife, and Margaret definitely was not the wife.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Fall: Ellery Channing obtained a position on the staff of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune but, before reporting for work, he spent mid-November in the Catskills, three days of which vacation he spent with Caroline Sturgis and Margaret Fuller who were also in the Catskills, at Fishkill on the Hudson River. Fuller was living with Sturgis for six weeks while revising her “Great Lawsuit” paper from THE DIAL for publication as WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. While working at the Tribune, Ellery chummed around with Giles Waldo and William Tappan,58 but declined an invitation to visit the William Emersons at their home on Staten Island.

December: Mary Cheney Greeley urged Horace Greeley to offer Margaret Fuller a job, and a bedroom in their home on the East River. Fuller became literary critic for the New-York Tribune and began a schedule of three columns a week.

58.This William would have been what to the rich New York abolitionists Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan?? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1845

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s THE BELFRY OF BRUGES AND OTHER POEMS. Margaret Fuller’s comment in the New-York Tribune was:

Mr. Longfellow has been accused [by Edgar Allan Poe] of plagiarism. We have been surprised that anyone should have been anxious to fasten special charges of this kind upon him, when we had supposed it so obvious that the greater part of his mental stores were derived from the work of others.

THE BELFRY OF BRUGES CARILLON In the ancient town of Bruges, In the quaint old Flemish city, As the evening shades descended, Low and loud and sweetly blended, Low at times and loud at times, And changing like a poet’s rhymes, Rang the beautiful wild chimes From the Belfry in the market Of the ancient town of Bruges. Then, with deep sonorous clangor Calmly answering their sweet anger, When the wrangling bells had ended, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Slowly struck the clock eleven, And, from out the silent heaven, Silence on the town descended. Silence, silence everywhere, On the earth and in the air, Save that footsteps here and there Of some burgher home returning, By the street lamps faintly burning, For a moment woke the echoes Of the ancient town of Bruges. But amid my broken slumbers Still I heard those magic numbers, As they loud proclaimed the flight And stolen marches of the night; Till their chimes in sweet collision Mingled with each wandering vision, Mingled with the fortune-telling Gypsy-bands of dreams and fancies, Which amid the waste expanses Of the silent land of trances Have their solitary dwelling; All else seemed asleep in Bruges, In the quaint old Flemish city. And I thought how like these chimes Are the poet’s airy rhymes, All his rhymes and roundelays, His conceits, and songs, and ditties, From the belfry of his brain, Scattered downward, though in vain, On the roofs and stones of cities! For by night the drowsy ear Under its curtains cannot hear, And by day men go their ways, Hearing the music as they pass, But deeming it no more, alas! Than the hollow sound of brass. Yet perchance a sleepless wight, Lodging at some humble inn In the narrow lanes of life, When the dusk and hush of night Shut out the incessant din Of daylight and its toil and strife, May listen with a calm delight To the poet’s melodies, Till he hears, or dreams he hears, Intermingled with the song, Thoughts that he has cherished long; Hears amid the chime and singing The bells of his own village ringing, And wakes, and finds his slumberous eyes Wet with most delicious tears. Thus dreamed I, as by night I lay In Bruges, at the Fleur-de-Ble, Listening with a wild delight To the chimes that, through the night Bang their changes from the Belfry Of that quaint old Flemish city. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

THE BELFRY OF BRUGES In the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry old and brown; Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o’er the town. As the summer morn was breaking, on that lofty tower I stood, And the world threw off the darkness, like the weeds of widowhood. Thick with towns and hamlets studded, and with streams and vapors gray, Like a shield embossed with silver, round and vast the landscape lay. At my feet the city slumbered. From its chimneys, here and there, Wreaths of snow-white smoke, ascending, vanished, ghost-like, into air. Not a sound rose from the city at that early morning hour, But I heard a heart of iron beating in the ancient tower. From their nests beneath the rafters sang the swallows wild and high; And the world, beneath me sleeping, seemed more distant than the sky. Then most musical and solemn, bringing back the olden times, With their strange, unearthly changes rang the melancholy chimes, Like the psalms from some old cloister, when the nuns sing in the choir; And the great bell tolled among them, like the chanting of a friar. Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain; They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again; All the Foresters of Flanders,--mighty Baldwin Bras de Fer, Lyderick du Bucq and Cressy Philip, Guy de Dampierre. I beheld the pageants splendid that adorned those days of old; Stately dames, like queens attended, knights who bore the Fleece of Gold Lombard and Venetian merchants with deep-laden argosies; Ministers from twenty nations; more than royal pomp and ease. I beheld proud Maximilian, kneeling humbly on the ground; I beheld the gentle Mary, hunting with her hawk and hound; And her lighted bridal-chamber, where a duke slept with the queen, And the armed guard around them, and the sword unsheathed between. I beheld the Flemish weavers, with Namur and Juliers bold, Marching homeward from the bloody battle of the Spurs of Gold; Saw the light at Minnewater, saw the White Hoods moving west, Saw great Artevelde victorious scale the Golden Dragon’s nest. And again the whiskered Spaniard all the land with terror smote; And again the wild alarum sounded from the tocsin’s throat; Till the bell of Ghent responded o’er lagoon and dike of sand, "I am Roland! I am Roland! there is victory in the land!" Then the sound of drums aroused me. The awakened city’s roar Chased the phantoms I had summoned back into their graves once more. Hours had passed away like minutes; and, before I was aware, Lo! the shadow of the belfry crossed the sun-illumined square. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Margaret Fuller’s WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was published by Horace Greeley’s publishing house: “There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.”

Although this book received, in general, bad reviews –for the reviewers, male, were threatened by her forthrightness– the 1st edition pictured above still sold out within the week. The publishers deducted their 59 expenses and charges and mailed the author $85.00 in full payment. In this year Margaret fell in love with

59. It is interesting, is it not, that WALDEN is never criticized, as Margaret’s writings were criticized by James Russell Lowell, for being “dotted as thick as a peacock's tail with I's”? –For in fact the printer of WALDEN quite exhausted the capital letter “I” from his type case and had to print WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS section by section, breaking down the used book plates to restock his type case. Why, it is almost as if a double standard was in effect! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI a young immigrant Jewish businessman, James Nathan, and wrote some fascinating love letters. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 10, Tuesday: In Concord, the Middlesex House, which had been created out of an old country house, burned (but would be rebuilt). This illustration, since it contains telephone wires, is assuredly the new structure rather than the old structure (which has been described as a converted country house):60

I [John Shepard Keyes] was busy with a full bar of the lawyers at the calling of the docket the Tuesday following when an alarm of fire caused the court to break up, and the old Middlesex Hotel was burnt to the ground. It caught from a defective flue, and in an hour was entirely consumed, no other buildings were burnt tho in much danger, and the prisoners in jail were removed as it was within 30 or 40 ft of the hotel. A good story was told and I think truly of my old law teacher E Millen Esq who rushed up to his room at the first alarm seized a valise and brought it safely out when on looking at it & finding it not his own with a lawyers care and prudence carried it back to the room and bore away his own, leaving that to its fate. I believe it was rescued with much of the furniture but the old hall, bar room dining room and parlor that had seen so much, and heard more of the good old times gone by, were wiped out. It made quite a hole in Concord, and although rebuilt after a year or more the new one never had the business or the success of the old. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

60. This hotel stood on the corner of the Mill Dam and Monument Square, opposite the Wright Tavern (where the pay telephones are now). A hotel had existed on the site prior to 1789, when John Richardson traded his house for the hotel then held by Middlesex County to house jailers and county court officials. The hotel was a center of town and county life in the period when the county courts were held in Concord and prior to the arrival of the railroad in the early 1840s. Rebuilt in 1846, the hotel would go through a succession of owners and proprietors, including Ebenezer Thompson, Thomas D. Wesson, Herman Newton, Samuel A. Hartshorn, George Heywood and James W. Jacobs. It would close in 1882, remain vacant for nearly two decades, be sold in 1900 (to Stedman Buttrick, Edward Waldo Emerson, Richard F. Barrett, and Prescott Keyes), then sold to the Town of Concord, and finally demolished. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Margaret Fuller reviewed the NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE for the New-York Tribune. This specimen of her Sex objectified the author cold-bloodedly and perfunctorily as a “specimen” of “the Black Race,” and added her voice to the white voices presuming that Frederick Douglass himself had authored the written form of this self-presentation: The book is prefaced by two communications — one from William Lloyd Garrison, and one from Wendell Phillips. That from the former is in his usual over-emphatic style. His motives and his course have been noble and generous; we look upon him with high respect; but he has indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the temper of his mind. Like a man who has been in the habit of screaming himself hoarse to make the deaf hear, he can no longer pitch his voice on a key agreeable to common ears. ...that prevalent fallacy which substitutes a creed for faith, a ritual for a life.... Unspeakably affecting is the fact that he never saw his mother at all by daylight. “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Our national birthday, Friday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 41st birthday, and the flag was gaining another star as the State of Florida was entering the Union as our 27th state, making the score in this land of the free and home of the brave to amount to 14 states for human slavery versus 13 states agin it:

Ordinance of the Convention of Texas.

In Washington DC, the cornerstone of Jackson Hall was being laid and a good time was being enjoyed by all these American patriots who were equating patriotism with inebriation, but on the grounds south of the Executive Mansion, some drunken celebrant fired off a dozen rockets into the crowd, killing James Knowles and Georgiana Ferguson and injuring several others — collateral damage due to friendly fire.

In Ithaca, New York, a celebration cannon, evidently overcharged with powder, blew apart, killing three. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Ex-president John Tyler delivered an oration at William and Mary College.

In Nashville, Tennessee, the corner-stone of the State House was laid. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

What to the slave is the 4th of July? On this day and the next Frederick Douglass was lecturing in Athol, Massachusetts. Henry Thoreau began to sleep in the open frame of the new shanty “as soon as it was boarded and roofed…” not only on the anniversary of independence, but also on the day on which the US took the Texas territory from Mexico. Had he remained in Concord that day, he would have been subjected not only to offensive parades with flag-waving, but also to much offensive pro-war oratory. TIMELINE OF WALDEN EMERSON’S SHANTY

WALDEN: When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

We need not presume that he intended the date to have any metaphorical significance, as in the idea that moving to the shanty was his Declaration of Independence from human society. On this day of Thoreau’s removal, an article appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune calling for a return to “the narrow, thorny path where Integrity leads.” This article was authored in full awareness of the course Thoreau was following in Concord, for this sentiment had been penned by Margaret Fuller.

Years later, on May 1, 1850 to be exact, Thoreau recollected an incident of this day, that “The forenoon that I moved to my house –a poor old lame fellow who had formerly frozen his feet –hobbled off the road –came & stood before my door with one hand on each door post looking into the house & asked for a drink of water. I knew that rum or something like it was the only drink he loved but I gave him a dish of warm pond water which was all I had, nevertheless, which to my astonishment he drank, being used to drinking.”

Thoreau lived HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“At Walden, July, 1845, to fall of 1847, then at R.W.E.’s to fall of 1848, or while he was in Europe.”

At about this time, more or less, a number of people’s acquaintance’s lives were changing: for instance, Giles Waldo, whom Thoreau had chummed around with in New-York, was sailing to become vice consul at Lahaina in the Sandwich Islands, and George Partridge Bradford was abandoning the private school he had attempted to set up in Waldo Emerson’s barn to begin a private school in Roxbury MA.

Thoreau wrote the following sometime after he moved to his new shanty at Walden Pond, about the drumming of the ruffed grouse:

After July 4: {one-fifth page blank} When I behold an infant I am impressed with a sense of antiquity, and reminded of the sphinx or Sybil. It seems older than Nestor or Jove himself, and wears the wrinkles of Saturn. Why should the present impose upon us so much! I sit now upon a stump whose rings number centuries of growth– If I look around me I see that the very soil is composed of just such stumps — ancestors to this. I thrust this stick many aeons deep into the surface — and with my heel scratch a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years– If I listen I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of Egypt — or a distant partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] drumming on a log — as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. CURRENT YOUTUBE VIDEO I raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. –Why, what we call new is not skin deep — the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the fertile ground we walk upon but the leaves that flutter over our head The newest is but the oldest made visible to our eyes. We dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface and call it new, and the plants which spring from it.

After July 4: Night and day — year on year, / High & low — far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. 1842, 1845, 1848: Night and day, year on year, / High and low, far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds; / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. (WEEK 389) (Johnson 388-9) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

July 9, Wednesday: On the night of July 9th, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ellery Channing used the Pond Lily to help others search for the body of a suicide, a Miss Martha Emmeline Hunt about 19 years of age who had been superintendent of one of the district schools, with 60 pupils.61 She had left her bonnet and shoes and

Not far from this spot, lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the oozy river- side, and generally half-full of water. It served the angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild-ducks. Setting this crazy barque afloat, I seated myself in the stern, with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows, with the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships, with a hay- rake. “It puts me in mind of my young days,” remarked Silas, “when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for horn-pouts and eels. Heigh-ho! — well! — life and death together make sad work for us all. Then, I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o’ sorrowful.”

handkerchief at a spot on the bank of the river some ways below the bridge, a half a mile across a pasture from

61. During his summer vacation in Concord in 1853, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway was boarding with some Misses Hunt at a pleasant cottage on Ponkawtasset Hill and they informed him that they had been Martha’s cousins, and were concerned that George William Curtis, in his HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS, “had suggested that Martha’s suicide was due to the contrast between her transcendental ideals and the coarseness of her home.” Conway continued, in his late-life autobiography, that “They described the family of their cousin as educated people. One of these sisters walked with me to the river and pointed out all the places connected with the tragedy, and some years later another cousin drowned herself there.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI her parents’ home, early that morning, and to have walked to and fro on the bank for several hours.

This was a sexual opportunity not to be missed, and every male in Concord who had heard of the matter had thronged to the river bank (but apparently Henry Thoreau was out in his cabin on the pond, behaving himself). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI In the Pond Lily, the young man with the long pole

drew her towards the boat, grasped her arm or hand; and I steered the boat to the bank, all the while looking at this dead girl, whose limbs were swaying in the water, close at the boat’s side. The fellow evidently had the same sort of feeling in his success as if he had caught a particularly fine fish; though mingled, no doubt, with horror. For my own part, I felt my voice tremble a little, when I spoke, at the shock of the discovery; and at seeing the body come to the surface, dimly in the starlight. When close to the bank, some of the men stepped into the water and drew out the body; and then, by their lanterns, I could see how rigid it was. There was nothing flexible about it; she did not droop over the arms of those who supported her, with her hair hanging down, as a painter would have represented her, but was all as stiff as marble. And it was evident that her wet garments covered limbs perfectly inflexible. They took her out of the water, and deposited her under an oak-tree; and by the time we had got ashore, they were examining her by the light of two or three lanterns.... As soon as she was taken out of the water, the blood began to stream from her nose. Something seemed to have injured her eye, too; perhaps it was the pole, when it first struck the body. The complexion was a dark red, almost purple; the hands were white, with the same rigidity in their clench as in all the rest of the body.... If she could have foreseen, while she stood, at 5 oclock that morning, on the bank of the river, how her maiden corpse would have looked, eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain — it would surely have saved her from this deed.

My personal interpretation of what these eager male hookers were up to, on the river that night, is that, when their pole finally hooked the corpse in an eye socket, and it was hauled to the surface, what Nathaniel got a good look at, and perhaps a feel of, was his ideal of the perfectly passive female body. The realization of this sexual ideal of True Womanhood proved to be much too much for him:

I never saw or imagined a spectacle of such perfect horror.

David Buttrick fainted, but an old carpenter commented that he would as lief handle dead bodies as living ones, and the men gathered around and twisted and stomped on the girl’s limbs locked in rigor mortis in a prolonged pretense that they were forcing her to assume a proper posture for the dead. The family told the hookers who had just been thus pawing the body that the poor girl had attempted to drown herself before, by walking into the river up to her chin, but that a sister had gotten her to come back out of the water. Hawthorne would use 10 paragraphs of his journal of this day in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, as an account of the recovery of the body of the suicide “Zenobia”62 who had drowned as an “Arcadian affectation,” omitting the unromantic 62. Margaret Fuller was held by authorities in the 19th Century to have evinced a death wish, for, staring across the gap of raging surf at the dead bodies of her husband and her baby stretched upon the beach, drowned one after the other in the attempt to get to shore, she could not force herself to leap into the ocean, and was still on the ship clutching the mast when it broke up in the waves. And, she had been a school superintendent, just like this Concord River suicide Martha Hunt! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI description of the continuous flow of blood from the nose (a description which I also omitted, above). Hawthorne also changed the grapple wound from the eye socket to the “breast.”63

Since a “young brother of the deceased, apparently about twelve or fourteen years old” was on the bank watching this, we may presume that the hooking party was being witnessed by Daniel Otis Hunt, who had been born in 1831.

When they got the makeshift bier back to the Hunt farmhouses on Punkatasset Hill, Mrs. Maria Pratt and others laid the body out for its interment.

Here is a puzzle. Where is the body of Martha Emmeline Hunt buried? Was there a burial service? (If this event had occurred in England, we know from the act of July 4, 1823 what would have needed to have happened to such a corpse: the body of the suicide could be interred in a churchyard or public burial place only if such interment occurred within 24 hours of the coroner’s inquest and certificate, took place after 9PM and before midnight, and was bereft of any accompanying Christian religious observance. We know, further, that in the case of an English suicide, any goods and chattels of the deceased would be forfeit to the Crown. We need to research and discover how American law bore on this circumstance, and what happened specifically in Concord.)

Here then is Hawthorne’s entry in his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS, as rendered into poetry by Robert Peters:

63. Were Margaret’s breasts that fascinating, in spite of her twisted spine? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

The Drowned Girl I We caused the boat to float once or twice past the spot where the bonnet was found. The poles or the rake caught in bunches of water-weed, which in the star-light, looked like garments. All this time persons on the bank were anxiously waiting. II ‘What’s this?’ cried he. I suppose the same electric shock went through everybody in the boat. ‘Yes, I’ve got her!’ III I felt my voice tremble at the first shock of seeing the body come to the surface, dimly in the star-light. IV I could see how rigid she was. She did not droop over the arms of those who supported her, with her hair hanging down, but was all stiff, as marble. They examined her by the light of two or three lanterns. Her arms had stiffened and were bent before her. She was the very image of death-agony. V They deposited her under an oak-tree. When the men tried to compose her figure, her arms would return to that same position. One of the men put his foot upon her arm, for the purpose of reducing it by her side; but, in a moment, it rose again. Blood began to stream from her nose. Something had injured her eye, too. Perhaps it was the pole, when it first struck the body. The complexion was a dark red, almost purple. The hands were white, with the same rigidity in their clench as in all the rest of the body. Two of the men got water and washed away the blood from her face. But it flowed and flowed and continued to flow.

Peters, Robert Louis. HAWTHORNE: POEMS ADAPTED FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS. Fairfax CA: Poet-Skin / Red Hill Press, 1977.

Hawthorne also had a few choice words to say about his rowing companion on this expedition, Ellery: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI “What a gump!...On the whole, he is but little better than an idiot. He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood; and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, about Ellery Channing HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1846

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sarah Margaret Fuller,” in Godey’s Lady’s Book for this year: pages 72-75.

WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI James Russell Lowell returned to his family home, Elmwood, on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge.

Lowell published the first essay of the nine in THE BIGELOW PAPERS. Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:

His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

RURAL WIT In this year an octogenarian gave a press conference and revealed that he had personal knowledge of why it was that we Americans were referring to ourselves as “Brother Jonathan.” George Washington, he said, used to comment to his counselor, Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, “Let us consult Brother Jonathan,” when what the founding father meant (in our contemporary idiom) was “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.” Of course, an alert press would have asked questions, since by counting backward they could have noticed that this octogenarian would have been, in Revolutionary times, when he claimed to have been rendering services as “an active participant in the scenes of the Revolution,” a mere prepubescent — and especially since, 61 years after the death of Trumbull and 47 years after the death of Washington, it was only this one person who had any knowledge of this derivation for the popular figure “Brother Jonathan”!64 FAKELORE

64. But maybe the idea of an interview with an octogenarian was entirely concocted by this “gullible” newsie (we may well take notice of the fact that our newspaper correspondents had, as of 1846, not yet developed any tradition for the “news interview”). FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Walt Whitman read Margaret Fuller’s newspaper essay “American Literature” and it made a lasting impression upon him. He would refer to it several times, quoting a portion of it from memory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI A portrait of Margaret was painted by Thomas Hicks:

February: Having gotten his wife pregnant again, Ellery Channing decided not to be a Massachusetts farmer and not to listen to an infant crying, and began to solicit help from his friends because he needed for his personal development as a poet to travel in Europe and inspect masterpieces of art. He manage to raise the sum of $300.00, which he considered to be adequate since he planned to travel steerage class at a cost of $25.00 each way across the Atlantic. Margaret Fuller commented reasonably on “the unnatural selfishness of a man who, having brought a woman into this situation of suffering peril and care, proposes to leave her without even knowing whether she lives or dies under it,” but Ellery explained to her what “a bugbear in the house” he was “during the first year of a child’s life.”

Charles Lane wrote Bronson Alcott in Concord telling him of a Valentines Day party in Brooklyn, New York at which the guest list had included such sweethearts as Albert Brisbane, Christopher Pearse Cranch, George William Curtis, William Henry Furness, Margaret Fuller, and Edgar Allan Poe. Fuller had acted as postmistress and the guests had fabricated Valentine cards to post to one another. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

At St. Helena, 13 ships were destroyed and the sea wall and wharf damaged by 3 days of heavy rollers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 17, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell published the initial of the nine essays that would be collected as THE BIGLOW PAPERS.

Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:

RURAL WIT HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI August 1, Saturday: Margaret Fuller embarked on the steamer Cambria for England and Europe, to be foreign correspondent for the New-York Herald Tribune at $10.00 per dispatch (her traveling companions were Marcus and Rebecca Buffum Spring).65

On the island of Norderney, where Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann had gone for a vacation, Clara suffered what was probably a miscarriage.

A Mormon battalion led by Colonel James Allen arrived at Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory.

As reported in the Concord Freeman, the Woman’s Anti-Slavery Society of Concord held in Walden Woods its annual commemoration of the 1834 emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies by William Wilberforce. According to the paper, the group included the anti-paganist Reverend William Henry Channing of Boston:

Rev. W.H. Channing of Boston..., Mr. Lewis Hayden, formerly a slave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Esq. and Rev. Mr. Skinner, the Universalist clergyman of this place. Rev. Mr. Channing, in his address, if we are correctly informed, went for the formation of a new Union and a new Constitution, and dissolution of all fellowship with slaveholding!

ABOLITIONISM In all likelihood, Henry Thoreau’s recent night in the local lockup for refusing to pay his poll tax was not a topic of conversation at this celebration in and near Thoreau’s (Emerson’s) shanty. We note that there is a comment in WALDEN that reflects the subject of this meeting at the pond: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign PEOPLE OF form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen WALDEN and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, –what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE JOSEPH ADDISON “CATO, A TRAGEDY”

65. After the Springs returned to America, they and Fuller would continue to be dear friends and would keep up a correspondence. Presumably it was through the Springs that Walt Whitman kept informed of Fuller’s activities: “I never met Margaret Fuller, but I knew much about her those years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Although we have no direct evidence that Thoreau was present, the consensus opinion of Thoreau scholars is that, most definitely, he would have been present for this occasion.

August 23, Sunday: Medora Leigh got married with Jean-Louis Taillefer.

Felix Mendelssohn, soloists, orchestra, and press all boarded a train from London to Birmingham for the premiere of “Elijah.”

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune her first impressions of England — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD: Ambleside, Westmoreland, 23d August, 1846. I take the first interval of rest and stillness to be filled up by some lines for the Tribune. Only three weeks have passed since leaving New York, but I have already had nine days of wonder in England, and, having learned a good deal, suppose I may have something to tell. Long before receiving this, you know that we were fortunate in the shortest voyage ever made across the Atlantic,66 — only ten days and sixteen hours from Boston to Liverpool. The weather and all circumstances were propitious; and, if some of us were weak of head enough to suffer from the smell and jar of the machinery, or other ills by which the sea is wont to avenge itself on the arrogance of its vanquishers, we found no pity. The stewardess observed that she thought “any one tempted God Almighty who complained on a voyage where they did not even have to put guards to the dishes”! As many contradictory counsels were given us with regard to going in one of the steamers in preference to a sailing vessel, I will mention here, for the benefit of those who have not yet tried one, that he must be fastidious indeed who could complain of the Cambria. The advantage of a quick passage and certainty as to the time of arrival, would, with us, have outweighed many ills; but, apart from this, we found more space than we expected and as much as we needed for a very tolerable degree of convenience in our sleeping-rooms, better ventilation than Americans in general can be persuaded to accept, general cleanliness, and good attendance. In the evening, when the wind was favorable, and the sails set, so that the vessel looked like a great winged creature darting across the apparently measureless expanse, the effect was very grand, but ah! for such a spectacle one pays too dear; I far prefer looking out upon “the blue and foaming sea” from a firm green shore. Our ship’s company numbered several pleasant members, and that desire prevailed in each to contribute to the satisfaction of all, which, if carried out through the voyage of life, would make this earth as happy as it is a lovely abode. At Halifax we took in the Governor of Nova Scotia, returning from his very unpopular administration. His lady was with, him, a daughter of William the Fourth and the celebrated Mrs. Jordan. The English on board, and the Americans, following their lead, as usual, seemed to attach much importance to her left-handed alliance with one of the dullest families that ever sat upon a throne, (and that is a bold word, too,) none to her descent from one whom Nature had endowed with her most splendid regalia, — genius that fascinated the attention of all kinds and classes of men, 66. True at the time these Letters were written. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI grace and winning qualities that no heart could resist. Was the cestus buried with her, that no sense of its pre-eminent value lingered, as far as I could perceive, in the thoughts of any except myself? We had a foretaste of the delights of living under an aristocratical government at the Custom-House, where our baggage was detained, and we waiting for it weary hours, because of the preference given to the mass of household stuff carried back by this same Lord and Lady Falkland. Captain Judkins of the Cambria, an able and prompt commander, is the man who insisted upon Douglass being admitted to equal rights upon his deck with the insolent slave-holders, and assumed a tone toward their assumptions, which, if the Northern States had had the firmness, good sense, and honor to use, would have had the same effect, and put our country in a very different position from that she occupies at present. He mentioned with pride that he understood the New York Herald called him “the Nigger Captain,” and seemed as willing to accept the distinction as Colonel McKenney is to wear as his last title that of “the Indian’s friend.” At the first sight of the famous Liverpool Docks, extending miles on each side of our landing, we felt ourselves in a slower, solider, and not on that account less truly active, state of things than at home. That impression is confirmed. There is not as we travel that rushing, tearing, and swearing, that snatching of baggage, that prodigality of shoe-leather and lungs, which attend the course of the traveller in the United States; but we do not lose our “goods,” we do not miss our car. The dinner, if ordered in time, is cooked properly, and served punctually, and at the end of the day more that is permanent seems to have come of it than on the full-drive system. But more of this, and with a better grace, at a later day. The day after our arrival we went to Manchester. There we went over the magnificent warehouse of —— Phillips, in itself a Bazaar ample to furnish provision for all the wants and fancies of thousands. In the evening we went to the Mechanics’ Institute, and saw the boys and young men in their classes. I have since visited the Mechanics’ Institute at Liverpool, where more than seventeen hundred pupils are received, and with more thorough educational arrangements; but the excellent spirit, the desire for growth in wisdom and enlightened benevolence, is the same in both. For a very small fee, the mechanic, clerk, or apprentice, and the women of their families, can receive various good and well-arranged instruction, not only in common branches of an English education, but in mathematics, composition, the French and German, languages, the practice and theory of the Fine Arts, and they are ardent in availing themselves of instruction in the higher branches. I found large classes, not only in architectural drawing, which may be supposed to be followed with a view to professional objects, but landscape also, and as large in German as in French. They can attend many good lectures and concerts without additional charge, for a due place is here assigned to music as to its influence on the whole mind. The large and well-furnished libraries are in constant requisition, and the books in most constant demand are not those of amusement, but of a solid and permanent interest and value. Only for the last year in Manchester, and for two in Liverpool, have these advantages been HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI extended to girls; but now that part of the subject is looked upon as it ought to be, and begins to be treated more and more as it must and will be wherever true civilization is making its way. One of the handsomest houses in Liverpool has been purchased for the girls’ school, and room and good arrangement been afforded for their work and their play. Among other things they are taught, as they ought to be in all American schools, to cut out and make dresses. I had the pleasure of seeing quotations made from our Boston “Dial,” in the address in which the Director of the Liverpool Institute, a very benevolent and intelligent man, explained to his disciples and others its objects, and which concludes thus: — “But this subject of self-improvement is inexhaustible. If traced to its results in action, it is, in fact, ‘The Whole Duty of Man.’ What of detail it involves and implies, I know that you will, each and all, think out for yourselves. Beautifully has it been said: ‘Is not the difference between spiritual and material things just this, — that in the one case we must watch details, in the other, keep alive the high resolve, and the details will take care of themselves? Keep the sacred central fire burning, and throughout the system, in each of its acts, will be warmth and glow enough.’67 “For myself, if I be asked what my purpose is in relation to you, I would briefly reply, It is that I may help, be it ever so feebly, to train up a race of young men, who shall escape vice by rising above it; who shall love truth because it is truth, not because it brings them wealth or honor; who shall regard life as a solemn thing, involving too weighty responsibilities to be wasted in idle or frivolous pursuits; who shall recognize in their daily labors, not merely a tribute to the “hard necessity of daily bread,” but a field for the development of their better nature by the discharge of duty; who shall judge in all things for themselves, bowing the knee to no sectarian or party watchwords of any kind; and who, while they think for themselves, shall feel for others, and regard their talents, their attainments, their opportunities, their possessions, as blessings held in trust for the good of their fellow-men.” I found that The Dial had been read with earnest interest by some of the best minds in these especially practical regions, that it had been welcomed as a representative of some sincere and honorable life in America, and thought the fittest to be quoted under this motto: — “What are noble deeds but noble thoughts realized?” Among other signs of the times we bought Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, and, opening it, found extracts from the writings of our countrymen, Elihu Burritt and Charles Sumner, on the subject of Peace, occupying a leading place in the “Collect,” for the month, of this little hand-book, more likely, in an era like ours, to influence the conduct of the day than would an illuminated breviary. Now that peace is secured for the present between our two countries, the spirit is not forgotten that quelled the storm. Greeted on every side with expressions of feeling about the blessings of peace, the madness and wickedness of war, that would be deemed romantic in our darker land, I have 67. The Dial, Vol. I. p. 188, October, 1840, “Musings of a Recluse.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI answered to the speakers, “But you are mightily pleased, and illuminate for your victories in China and Ireland, do you not?” and they, unprovoked by the taunt, would mildly reply, “We do not, but it is too true that a large part of the nation fail to bring home the true nature and bearing of those events, and apply principle to conduct with as much justice as they do in the case of a nation nearer to them by kindred and position. But we are sure that feeling is growing purer on the subject day by day, and that there will soon be a large majority against war on any occasion or for any object.” I heard a most interesting letter read from a tradesman in one of the country towns, whose daughters are self-elected instructors of the people in the way of cutting out from books and pamphlets fragments on the great subjects of the day, which they send about in packages, or paste on walls and doors. He said that one such passage, pasted on a door, he had seen read with eager interest by hundreds to whom such thoughts were, probably, quite new, and with some of whom it could scarcely fail to be as a little seed of a large harvest. Another good omen I found in written tracts by Joseph Barker, a working-man of the town of Wortley, published through his own printing- press. How great, how imperious the need of such men, of such deeds, we felt more than ever, while compelled to turn a deaf ear to the squalid and shameless beggars of Liverpool, or talking by night in the streets of Manchester to the girls from the Mills, who were strolling bareheaded, with coarse, rude, and reckless air, through the streets, or seeing through the windows of the gin-palaces the women seated drinking, too dull to carouse. The homes of England! their sweetness is melting into fable; only the new Spirit in its holiest power can restore to those homes their boasted security of “each man’s castle,” for Woman, the warder, is driven into the street, and has let fall the keys in her sad plight. Yet darkest hour of night is nearest dawn, and there seems reason to believe that

“There’s a good time coming.” Blest be those who aid, who doubt not that “Smallest helps, if rightly given, Make the impulse stronger; ’Twill be strong enough one day.”

Other things we saw in Liverpool, — the Royal Institute, with the statue of Roscoe by Chantrey, and in its collection from the works of the early Italian artists, and otherwise, bearing traces of that liberality and culture by which the man, happy enough to possess them, and at the same time engaged with his fellow-citizens in practical life, can do so much more to enlighten and form them, than prince or noble possibly can with far larger pecuniary means. We saw the statue of Huskisson in the Cemetery. It is fine as a portrait statue, but as a work of art wants firmness and grandeur. I say it is fine as a portrait statue, though we were told it is not like the original; but it is a good conception of an individuality which might exist, if it does not yet. It is by Gibson, who received his early education in Liverpool. I saw there, too, the body of an infant borne to the grave by women; for it is a beautiful custom, here, that those who have fulfilled all other tender offices to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI little being should hold to it the same relation to the very last. From Liverpool we went to Chester, one of the oldest cities in England, a Roman station once, and abode of the “Twentieth Legion,” “the Victorious.” Tiles bearing this inscription, heads of Jupiter, and other marks of their occupation, have, not long ago, been detected beneath the sod. The town also bears the marks of Welsh invasion and domestic struggles. The shape of a cross in which it is laid out, its walls and towers, its four arched gateways, its ramparts and ruined, towers, mantled with ivy, its old houses with Biblical inscriptions, its cathedral, — in which tall trees have grown up amid the arches, a fresh garden-plot, with flowers, bright green and red, taken place of the altar, and a crowd of revelling swallows supplanted the sallow choirs of a former priesthood, — present a tout-ensemble highly romantic in itself, and charming, indeed, to Transatlantic eyes. Yet not to all eyes would it have had charms, for one American traveller, our companion on the voyage, gravely assured us that we should find the “castles and that sort of thing all humbug,” and that, if we wished to enjoy them, it would “be best to sit at home and read some handsome work on the subject.” At the hotel in Liverpool and that in Manchester I had found no bath, and asking for one at Chester, the chambermaid said, with earnest good-will, that “they had none, but she thought she could get me a note from her master to the Infirmary (!!) if I would go there.” Luckily I did not generalize quite as rapidly as travellers in America usually do, and put in the note-book, — “Mem.: None but the sick ever bathe in England”; for in the next establishment we tried, I found the plentiful provision for a clean and healthy day, which I had read would be met everywhere in this country. All else I must defer to my next, as the mail is soon to close. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

August 27, Thursday: Hannah Sprague was born to Isaac Sprague and Hannah Colbath Sprague.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune her travels from Chester to the Lake Country of England, meeting William Wordsworth at Rydal Mount (some 300 such uninvited tourists were appearing at this cottage each year and it was usually the case that as they passed through one or another attendant would politely bring their names to the poet’s attention) — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD: Ambleside. Westmoreland, 27th August, 1846. I forgot to mention, in writing of Chester, an object which gave me pleasure. I mentioned, that the wall which enclosed the old town was two miles in circumference; far beyond this stretches the modern part of Chester, and the old gateways now overarch the middle of long streets. This wall is now a walk for the inhabitants, commanding a wide prospect, and three persons could walk abreast on its smooth flags. We passed one of its old picturesque towers, from whose top Charles the First, poor, weak, unhappy king, looked down and saw his troops defeated by the Parliamentary army on the adjacent plain. A little farther on, one of these picturesque towers is turned to the use of a Museum, whose stock, though scanty, I examined with singular pleasure, for it had been made up by truly filial contributions from, all who had derived benefit from Chester, from the Marquis HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of Westminster —whose magnificent abode, Eton Hall, lies not far off— down to the merchant’s clerk, who had furnished it in his leisure hours with a geological chart, the soldier and sailor, who sent back shells, insects, and petrifactions from their distant wanderings, and a boy of thirteen, who had made, in wood, a model of its cathedral, and even furnished it with a bell to ring out the evening chimes. Many women had been busy in filling these magazines for the instruction and the pleasure of their fellow-townsmen. Lady ——, the wife of the captain of the garrison, grateful for the gratuitous admission of the soldiers once a month, —a privilege of which the keeper of the Museum (a woman also, who took an intelligent pleasure in her task) assured me that they were eager to avail themselves,— had given a fine collection of butterflies, and a ship. An untiring diligence had been shown in adding whatever might stimulate or gratify imperfectly educated minds. I like to see women perceive that there are other ways of doing good besides making clothes for the poor or teaching Sunday-school; these are well, if well directed, but there are many other ways, some as sure and surer, and which benefit the giver no less than the receiver. I was waked from sleep at the Chester Inn by a loud dispute between the chambermaid and an unhappy elderly gentleman, who insisted that he had engaged the room in which I was, had returned to sleep in it, and consequently must do so. To her assurances that the lady was long since in possession, he was deaf; but the lock, fortunately for me, proved a stronger defence. With all a chambermaid’s morality, the maiden boasted to me, “He said he had engaged 44, and would not believe me when I assured him it was 46; indeed, how could he? I did not believe myself.” To my assurance that, if I had known the room, was his, I should not have wished for it, but preferred taking a worse, I found her a polite but incredulous listener. Passing from Liverpool to Lancaster by railroad, that convenient but most unprofitable and stupid way of travelling, we there took the canal-boat to Kendal, and passed pleasantly through a country of that soft, that refined and cultivated loveliness, which, however much we have heard of it, finds the American eye — accustomed to so much wildness, so much rudeness, such a corrosive action of man upon nature — wholly unprepared. I feel all the time as if in a sweet dream, and dread to be presently awakened by some rude jar or glare; but none comes, and here in Westmoreland — but wait a moment, before we speak of that. In the canal-boat we found two well-bred English gentlemen, and two well-informed German gentlemen, with whom we had some agreeable talk. With one of the former was a beautiful youth, about eighteen, whom I supposed, at the first glance, to be a type of that pure East-Indian race whose beauty I had never seen represented before except in pictures; and he made a picture, from which I could scarcely take my eyes a moment, and from it could as ill endure to part. He was dressed in a broadcloth robe richly embroidered, leaving his throat and the upper part of his neck bare, except that he wore a heavy gold chain. A rich shawl was thrown gracefully around him; the sleeves of his robe were loose, with white sleeves below. He wore a black satin cap. The whole effect of this dress was very fine yet simple, setting off to the utmost advantage the distinguished beauty of his features, in which there was a mingling of national pride, voluptuous sweetness in that unconscious state of reverie when HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI it affects us as it does in the flower, and intelligence in its newly awakened purity. As he turned his head, his profile was like one I used to have of Love asleep, while Psyche leans over him with the lamp; but his front face, with the full, summery look of the eye, was unlike that. He was a Bengalese, living in England for his education, as several others are at present. He spoke English well, and conversed on several subjects, literary and political, with grace, fluency, and delicacy of thought. Passing from Kendal to Ambleside, we found a charming abode furnished us by the care of a friend in one of the stone cottages of this region, almost the only one not ivy-wreathed, but commanding a beautiful view of the mountains, and truly an English home in its neatness, quiet, and delicate, noiseless attention to the wants of all within its walls. Here we have passed eight happy days, varied by many drives, boating excursions on Grasmere and Winandermere, and the society of several agreeable persons. As the Lake district at this season draws together all kinds of people, and a great variety beside come from, all quarters to inhabit the charming dwellings that adorn its hill-sides and shores, I met and saw a good deal of the representatives of various classes, at once. I found here two landed proprietors from other parts of England, both “travelled English,” one owning a property in Greece, where he frequently resides, both warmly engaged in Reform measures, anti-Corn-Law, anti-Capital-Punishment, — one of them an earnest student of Emerson’s Essays. Both of them had wives, who kept pace with their projects and their thoughts, active and intelligent women, true ladies, skilful in drawing and music; all the better wives for the development of every power. One of them told me, with a glow of pride, that it was not long since her husband had been “cut” by all his neighbors among the gentry for the part he took against the Corn Laws; but, she added, he was now a favorite with them all. Verily, faith will remove mountains, if only you do join with it any fair portion of the dove and serpent attributes. I found here, too, a wealthy manufacturer, who had written many valuable pamphlets on popular subjects. He said: “Now that the progress of public opinion was beginning to make the Church and the Army narrower fields for the younger sons of ‘noble’ families, they sometimes wish to enter into trade; but, beside the aversion which had been instilled into them for many centuries, they had rarely patience and energy for the apprenticeship requisite to give the needed knowledge of the world and habits of labor.” Of Cobden he said: “He is inferior in acquirements to very many of his class, as he is self-educated and had everything to learn after he was grown up; but in clear insight there is none like him.” A man of very little education, whom I met a day or two after in the stage-coach, observed to me: “Bright is far the more eloquent of the two, but Cobden is more felt, just because his speeches are so plain, so merely matter-of-fact and to the point.” We became acquainted also with Dr. Gregory, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh, a very enlightened and benevolent man, who in many ways both instructed and benefited us. He is the friend of Liebig, and one of his chief representatives here. We also met a fine specimen of the noble, intelligent Scotchwoman, such as Walter Scott and Burns knew how to prize. Seventy-six years have passed over her head, only to prove in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI her the truth of my theory, that we need never grow old. She was “brought up” in the animated and intellectual circle of Edinburgh, in youth an apt disciple, in her prime a bright ornament of that society. She had been an only child, a cherished wife, an adored mother, unspoiled by love in any of these relations, because that love was founded on knowledge. In childhood she had warmly sympathized in the spirit that animated the American Revolution, and Washington had been her hero; later, the interest of her husband in every struggle for freedom had cherished her own; she had known in the course of her long life many eminent men, knew minutely the history of efforts in that direction, and sympathized now in the triumph of the people over the Corn Laws, as she had in the American victories, with as much ardor as when a girl, though with a wiser mind. Her eye was full of light, her manner and gesture of dignity; her voice rich, sonorous, and finely modulated; her tide of talk marked by candor, justice, and showing in every sentence her ripe experience and her noble, genial nature. Dear to memory will be the sight of her in the beautiful seclusion of her home among the mountains, a picturesque, flower-wreathed dwelling, where affection, tranquillity, and wisdom were the gods of the hearth, to whom was offered no vain oblation. Grant us more such women, Time! Grant to men the power to reverence, to seek for such! Our visit to Mr. Wordsworth was very pleasant. He also is seventy-six, but his is a florid, fair old age. He walked with us to all his haunts about the house. Its situation is beautiful, and the “Rydalian Laurels” are magnificent. Still I saw abodes among the hills that I should have preferred for Wordsworth, more wild and still, more romantic; the fresh and lovely Rydal Mount seems merely the retirement of a gentleman, rather than the haunt of a poet. He showed his benignity of disposition in several little things, especially in his attentions to a young boy we had with us. This boy had left the Circus, exhibiting its feats of horsemanship in Ambleside “for that day only,” at his own desire to see Wordsworth, and I feared he would be disappointed, as I know I should have been at his age, if, when called to see a poet, I had found no Apollo, flaming with youthful glory, laurel-crowned and lyre in hand, but, instead, a reverend old man clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along the level garden-path; however, he was not disappointed, but seemed in timid reverence to recognize the spirit that had dictated “Laodamia” and “Dion,” — and Wordsworth, in his turn, seemed to feel and prize a congenial nature in this child. Taking us into the house, he showed us the picture of his sister, repeating with much expression some lines of hers, and those so famous of his about her, beginning, “Five years,” &c.; also his own picture, by Inman, of whom he spoke with esteem. Mr. Wordsworth is fond of the hollyhock, a partiality scarcely deserved by the flower, but which marks the simplicity of his tastes. He had made a long avenue of them of all colors, from the crimson-brown to rose, straw-color, and white, and pleased himself with having made proselytes to a liking for them among his neighbors. I never have seen such magnificent fuchsias as at Ambleside, and there was one to be seen in every cottage-yard. They are no longer here under the shelter of the green-house, as with us, and as they used to be in England. The plant, from its grace and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI finished elegance, being a great favorite of mine, I should like to see it as frequently and of as luxuriant a growth at home, and asked their mode of culture, which I here mark down, for the benefit of all who may be interested. Make a bed of bog-earth and sand, put down slips of the fuchsia, and give them a great deal of water, — this is all they need. People have them out here in winter, but perhaps they would not bear the cold of our Januaries. Mr. Wordsworth spoke with, more liberality than we expected of the recent measures about the Corn Laws, saying that “the principle was certainly right, though as to whether existing interests had been as carefully attended to as was just, he was not prepared to say.” His neighbors were pleased to hear of his speaking thus mildly, and hailed it as a sign that he was opening his mind to more light on these subjects. They lament that his habits of seclusion keep him much ignorant of the real wants of England and the world. Living in this region, which is cultivated by small proprietors, where there is little poverty, vice, or misery, he hears not the voice which cries so loudly from other parts of England, and will not be stilled by sweet poetic suasion or philosophy, for it is the cry of men in the jaws of destruction. It was pleasant to find the reverence inspired by this great and pure mind warmest nearest home. Our landlady, in heaping praises upon him, added, constantly, “And Mrs. Wordsworth, too.” “Do the people here,” said I, “value Mr. Wordsworth most because he is a celebrated writer?” “Truly, madam,” said she, “I think it is because he is so kind a neighbor.” “True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.” Dr. Arnold, too, — who lived, as his family still live, here, — diffused the same ennobling and animating spirit among those who knew him in private, as through the sphere of his public labors. Miss Martineau has here a charming residence; it has been finished only a few months, but all about it is in unexpectedly fair order, and promises much beauty after a year or two of growth. Here we found her restored to full health and activity, looking, indeed, far better than she did when in the United States. It was pleasant to see her in this home, presented to her by the gratitude of England for her course of energetic and benevolent effort, and adorned by tributes of affection and esteem from many quarters. From the testimony of those who were with her in and since her illness, her recovery would seem to be of as magical quickness and sure progress as has been represented. At the house of Miss Martineau I saw Milman, the author, I must not say poet, — a specimen of the polished, scholarly man of the world. We passed one most delightful day in a visit to Langdale, — the scene of “The Excursion,” — and to Dungeon-Ghyll Force. I am finishing my letter at Carlisle on my way to Scotland, and will give a slight sketch of that excursion, and one which occupied another day, from Keswick to Buttermere and Crummock Water, in my next. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

September 20, Sunday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune about the poetry-tour sites she was visiting in the British Isles — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Edinburgh, 20th September, 1846. I have too long delayed writing up my journal. — Many interesting observations slip from recollection if one waits so many days: yet, while travelling, it is almost impossible to find an hour when something of value to be seen will not be lost while writing. I said, in closing my last, that I would write a little more about Westmoreland; but so much, has happened since, that I must now dismiss that region with all possible brevity. The first day of which I wished to speak was passed in visiting Langdale, the scene of Wordsworth’s “Excursion.” Our party of eight went in two of the vehicles called cars or droskas, — open carriages, each drawn by one horse. They are rather fatiguing to ride in, but good to see from. In steep and stony places all alight, and the driver leads the horse: so many of these there are, that we were four or five hours in going ten miles, including the pauses when we wished to look. The scenes through which we passed are, indeed, of the most wild and noble character. The wildness is not savage, but very calm. Without recurring to details, I recognized the tone and atmosphere of that noble poem, which was to me, at a feverish period in my life, as pure waters, free breezes, and cold blue sky, bringing a sense of eternity that gave an aspect of composure to the rudest volcanic wrecks of time. We dined at a farm-house of the vale, with its stone floors, old carved cabinet (the pride of a house of this sort), and ready provision of oaten cakes. We then ascended a near hill to the waterfall called Dungeon-Ghyll Force, also a subject touched by Wordsworth’s Muse. You wind along a path for a long time, hearing the sound of the falling water, but do not see it till, descending by a ladder the side of the ravine, you come to its very foot. You find yourself then in a deep chasm, bridged over by a narrow arch of rock; the water falls at the farther end in a narrow column. Looking up, you see the sky through a fissure so narrow as to make it look very pure and distant. One of our party, passing in, stood some time at the foot of the waterfall, and added much to its effect, as his height gave a measure by which to appreciate that of surrounding objects, and his look, by that light so pale and statuesque, seemed to inform the place with the presence of its genius. Our circuit homeward from this grand scene led us through some lovely places, and to an outlook upon the most beautiful part of Westmoreland. Passing over to Keswick we saw Derwentwater, and near it the Fall of Lodore. It was from Keswick that we made the excursion of a day through Borrowdale to Buttermere and Crummock Water, which I meant to speak of, but find it impossible at this moment. The mind does not now furnish congenial colors with which to represent the vision of that day: it must still wait in the mind and bide its time, again to emerge to outer air. At Keswick we went to see a model of the Lake country which gives an excellent idea of the relative positions of all objects. Its maker had given six years to the necessary surveys and drawings. He said that he had first become acquainted with the country from his taste for fishing, but had learned to love its beauty, till the thought arose of making this model; that while engaged in it, he visited almost every spot amid the hills, and commonly saw both sunrise and sunset upon them; that he was happy all the time, but almost too happy when he saw one section of his model HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI coming out quite right, and felt sure at last that he should be quite successful in representing to others the home of his thoughts. I looked upon him as indeed an enviable man, to have a profession so congenial with his feelings, in which he had been so naturally led to do what would be useful and pleasant for others. Passing from Keswick through a pleasant and cultivated country, we paused at “fair Carlisle,” not voluntarily, but because we could not get the means of proceeding farther that day. So, as it was one in which “The sun shone fair on Carlisle wall,” we visited its Cathedral and Castle, and trod, for the first time, in some of the footsteps of the unfortunate Queen of Scots. Passing next day the Border, we found the mosses all drained, and the very existence of sometime moss-troopers would have seemed problematical, but for the remains of Gilnockie, — the tower of Johnnie Armstrong, so pathetically recalled in one of the finest of the Scottish ballads. Its size, as well as that of other keeps, towers, and castles, whose ruins are reverentially preserved in Scotland, gives a lively sense of the time when population was so scanty, and individual manhood grew to such force. Ten men in Gilnockie were stronger then in proportion to the whole, and probably had in them more of intelligence, resource, and genuine manly power, than ten regiments now of red-coats drilled to act out manoeuvres they do not understand, and use artillery which needs of them no more than the match to go off and do its hideous message. Farther on we saw Branxholm, and the water in crossing which the Goblin Page was obliged to resume his proper shape and fly, crying, “Lost, lost, lost!” Verily these things seem more like home than one’s own nursery, whose toys and furniture could not in actual presence engage the thoughts like these pictures, made familiar as household words by the most generous, kindly genius that ever blessed this earth. On the coach with us was a gentleman coming from London to make his yearly visit to the neighborhood of Burns, in which he was born. “I can now,” said he, “go but once a year; when a boy, I never let a week pass without visiting the house of Burns.” He afterward observed, as every step woke us to fresh recollections of Walter Scott, that Scott, with all his vast range of talent, knowledge, and activity, was a poet of the past only, and in his inmost heart wedded to the habits of a feudal aristocracy, while Burns is the poet of the present and the future, the man of the people, and throughout a genuine man. This is true enough; but for my part I cannot endure a comparison which by a breath of coolness depreciates either. Both were wanted; each acted the important part assigned him by destiny with a wonderful thoroughness and completeness. Scott breathed the breath just fleeting from the forms of ancient Scottish heroism and poesy into new, — he made for us the bridge by which we have gone into the old Ossianic hall and caught the meaning just as it was about to pass from us for ever. Burns is full of the noble, genuine democracy which seeks not to destroy royalty, but to make all men kings, as he himself was, in nature and in action. They belong to the same world; they are pillars of the same church, though they uphold its starry roof from opposite sides. Burns was much the rarer man; precisely because he had most of common nature on a grand scale; his humor, his passion, his sweetness, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI are all his own; they need no picturesque or romantic accessories to give them due relief: looked at by all lights they are the same. Since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns; — but there was a serpent in his field also! Yet but for his fault we could never have seen brought out the brave and patriotic modesty with which he owned it. Shame on him who could bear to think of fault in this rich jewel, unless reminded by such confession. We passed Abbotsford without stopping, intending to go there on our return. Last year five hundred Americans inscribed their names in its porter’s book. A raw-boned Scotsman, who gathered his weary length into our coach on his return from a pilgrimage thither, did us the favor to inform us that “Sir Walter was a vara intelligent mon,” and the guide-book mentions “the American Washington” as “a worthy old patriot.” Lord safe us, cummers, what news be there! This letter, meant to go by the Great Britain, many interruptions force me to close, unflavored by one whiff from the smoke of Auld Reekie. More and better matter shall my next contain, for here and in the Highlands I have passed three not unproductive weeks, of which more anon. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

September 22, Tuesday: The Kearny Code for the Government of the Territory of New Mexico. READ THE FULL TEXT

Bill of Rights for the Territory of New Mexico. READ THE FULL TEXT

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune about the notables of Edinburgh she was meeting — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD: Edinburgh, September 22d, 1846. The beautiful and stately aspect of this city has been the theme of admiration so general that I can only echo it. We have seen it to the greatest advantage both from Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat, and our lodgings in Princess Street allow us a fine view of the Castle, always impressive, but peculiarly so in the moonlit evenings of our first week here, when a veil of mist added to its apparent size, and at the same time gave it the air with which Martin, in his illustrations of “Paradise Lost,” has invested the palace which “rose like an exhalation.” On this our second visit, after an absence of near a fortnight in the Highlands, we are at a hotel nearly facing the new monument to Scott, and the tallest buildings of the Old Town. From my windows I see the famous Kirk, the spot where the old Tolbooth was, and can almost distinguish that where Porteous was done to death, and other objects described in the most dramatic part of “The Heart of Mid-Lothian.” In one of these tall houses Hume wrote part of his History of England, and on this spot still nearer was the home of Allan Ramsay. A thousand other HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI interesting and pregnant associations present themselves every time I look out of the window. In the open square between us and the Old Town is to be the terminus of the railroad, but as the building will be masked with trees, it is thought it will not mar the beauty of the place; yet Scott could hardly have looked without regret upon an object that marks so distinctly the conquest of the New over the Old, and, appropriately enough, his statue has its back turned that way. The effect of the monument to Scott is pleasing, though without strict unity of thought or original beauty of design. The statue is too much hid within the monument, and wants that majesty of repose in the attitude and drapery which a sitting figure should have, and which might well accompany the massive head of Scott. Still the monument is an ornament and an honor to the city. This is now the fourth that has been erected within two years to commemorate the triumphs of genius. Monuments that have risen from the same idea, and in such quick succession, to Schiller, to Goethe, to Beethoven, and to Scott, signalize the character of the new era still more happily than does the railroad coming up almost to the foot of Edinburgh Castle. The statue of Burns has been removed from the monument erected in his honor, to one of the public libraries, as being there more accessible to the public. It is, however, entirely unworthy its subject, giving the idea of a smaller and younger person, while we think of Burns as of a man in the prime of manhood, one who not only promised, but was, and with a sunny glow and breadth, of character of which this stone effigy presents no sign. A Scottish gentleman told me the following story, which would afford the finest subject for a painter capable of representing the glowing eye and natural kingliness of Burns, in contrast to the poor, mean puppets he reproved. Burns, still only in the dawn of his celebrity, was invited to dine with one of the neighboring so-called gentry (unhappily quite void of true gentle blood). On arriving he found his plate set in the servants’ room!! After dinner he was invited into a room where guests were assembled, and, a chair being placed for him at the lower end of the board, a glass of wine was offered, and he was requested to sing one of his songs for the entertainment of the company. He drank off the wine, and thundered forth in reply his grand song, “For a’ that and a’ that,” with which it will do no harm to refresh the memories of our readers, for we doubt there may be, even in Republican America, those who need the reproof as much, and with far less excuse, than had that Scottish company. “Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head, and a’ that? The coward slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that, Our toils obscure, and a’ that, The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that. “What tho’ on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin gray, and a’ that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man’s a man for a’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that, Their tinsel show, and a’ that, The honest man, though, e’er sae poor Is king o’ men for a’ that. “Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord, Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that; Tho’ hundreds worship at his word, He’s but a coof for a’ that; For a’ that, and a’ that, His ribbon, star, and a’ that, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The man of independent mind, He looks and laughs at a’ that. “A prince can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a’ that; But an honest man’s aboon his might Guid faith, he maunna fa’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that, Their dignities, and a’ that, The pith o’ sense and pride o’ worth Are higher ranks than a’ that. “Then let us pray that, come it may, As come it will for a’ that, That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth, May bear the gree, and a’ that; For a’ that, and a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That man to man, the wide warld o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” And, having finished this prophecy and prayer, Nature’s nobleman left his churlish entertainers to hide their diminished heads in the home they had disgraced. We have seen all the stock lions. The Regalia people still crowd to see, though the old natural feelings from which they so long lay hidden seem almost extinct. Scotland grows English day by day. The libraries of the Advocates, Writers to the Signet, &c., are fine establishments. The University and schools are now in vacation; we are compelled by unwise postponement of our journey to see both Edinburgh and London at the worst possible season. We should have been here in April, there in June. There is always enough to see, but now we find a majority of the most interesting persons absent, and a stagnation in the intellectual movements of the place. We had, however, the good fortune to find Dr. Andrew Combe, who, though a great invalid, was able and disposed for conversation at this time. I was impressed with great and affectionate respect by the benign and even temper of his mind, his extensive and accurate knowledge, accompanied, as such should naturally be, by a large and intelligent liberality. Of our country he spoke very wisely and hopefully, though among other stories with which we, as Americans, are put to the blush here, there is none worse than that of the conduct of some of our publishers toward him. One of these stories I had heard in New York, but supposed it to be exaggerated till I had it from the best authority. It is of one of our leading houses who were publishing on their own account and had stereotyped one of his works from an early edition. When this work had passed through other editions and he had for years been busy in reforming and amending it, he applied to this house to republish from the later and better edition. They refused. In vain he urged that it was not only for his own reputation as an author that he was anxious, but for the good of the great country through which writings on such, important subjects were to be circulated, that they might have the benefit of his labors and best knowledge. Such arguments on the stupid and mercenary tempers of those addressed fell harmless as on a buffalo’s hide might a gold-tipped arrow. The book, they thought, answered THEIR purpose sufficiently, for IT SELLS. Other purpose for a book they knew none. And as to the natural rights of an author over the fruits of his mind, the distilled essence of a life consumed in the severities of mental labor, they had never heard of such a thing. His work was in the market, and he had no more to do with it, that they could see, than the silkworm with the lining of one of their coats. Mr. Greeley, the more I look at this subject, the more I must maintain, in opposition to your views, that the publisher cannot, if a mere tradesman, be a man of honor. It is impossible HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in the nature of things. He must have some idea of the nature and value of literary labor, or he is wholly unfit to deal with its products. He cannot get along by occasional recourse to paid critics or readers; he must himself have some idea what he is about. One partner, at least, in the firm, must be a man of culture. All must understand enough to appreciate their position, and know that he who, for his sordid aims, circulates poisonous trash amid a great and growing people, and makes it almost impossible for those whom Heaven has appointed as its instructors to do their office, are the worst of traitors, and to be condemned at the bar of nations under a sentence no less severe than false statesmen and false priests. This matter should and must be looked to more conscientiously. Dr. Combe, repelled by all this indifference to conscience and natural equity in the firm who had taken possession of his work, applied to others. But here he found himself at once opposed by the invisible barrier that makes this sort of tyranny so strong and so pernicious. “It was the understanding among the trade that they were not to interfere with one another; indeed, they could have no chance,” &c., &c. When at last he did get the work republished in another part of the country less favorable for his purposes, the bargain made as to the pecuniary part of the transaction was in various ways so evaded, that, up to this time, he has received no compensation from that widely-circulated work, except a lock of Spurzheim’s hair!! I was pleased to hear the true view expressed by one of the Messrs. Chambers. These brothers have worked their way up to wealth and influence by daily labor and many steps. One of them is more the business man, the other the literary curator of their Journal. Of this Journal they issue regularly eighty thousand copies, and it is doing an excellent work, by awakening among the people a desire for knowledge, and, to a considerable extent, furnishing them with good materials. I went over their fine establishment, where I found more than a hundred and fifty persons, in good part women, employed, all in well-aired, well- lighted rooms, seemingly healthy and content. Connected with the establishment is a Savings Bank, and evening instruction in writing, singing, and arithmetic. There was also a reading-room, and the same valuable and liberal provision we had found attached to some of the Manchester warehouses. Such accessories dignify and gladden all kinds of labor, and show somewhat of the true spirit of human brotherhood in the employer. Mr. Chambers said he trusted they should never look on publishing chiefly as business, or a lucrative and respectable employment, but as the means of mental and moral benefit to their countrymen. To one so wearied and disgusted as I have been by vulgar and base avowals on such subjects, it was very refreshing to hear this from the lips of a successful publisher. Dr. Combe spoke with high praise of Mr. Hurlbart’s book, “Human Rights and their Political Guaranties,” which was published at the Tribune office. He observed that it was the work of a real thinker, and extremely well written. It is to be republished here. Dr. Combe said that it must make its way slowly, as it could interest those only who were willing to read thoughtfully; but its success was sure at last. He also spoke with, great interest and respect of Mrs. Farnham, of whose character and the influence she has exerted on the female prisoners at Sing Sing he had heard some account. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI A person of a quite different character and celebrity is De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater, and who lately has delighted us again with the papers in Blackwood headed “Suspiria de Profundis.” I had the satisfaction, not easily attainable now, of seeing him for some hours, and in the mood of conversation. As one belonging to the Wordsworth, and Coleridge constellation, (he too is now seventy-six years of age,) the thoughts and knowledge of Mr. De Quincey lie in the past; and oftentimes he spoke of matters now become trite to one of a later culture. But to all that fell from his lips, his eloquence, subtile and forcible as the wind, full and gently falling as the evening dew, lent a peculiar charm. He is an admirable narrator, not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not absolutely required to give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon. I admired, too, his urbanity, so opposite to the rapid, slang, Vivian-Greyish style current in the literary conversation of the day. “Sixty years since,” men had time to do things better and more gracefully than now. With Dr. Chalmers we passed a couple of hours. He is old now, but still full of vigor and fire. We had an opportunity of hearing a fine burst of indignant eloquence from him. “I shall blush to my very bones,” said he, “if the Chaarrch” — (sound these two rr’s with as much burr as possible and you will get at an idea of his mode of pronouncing that unweariable word) — ”if the Chaarrch yields to the storm.” He alluded to the outcry now raised against the Free Church by the Abolitionists, whose motto is, “Send back the money,” i.e. money taken from the American slaveholders. Dr. Chalmers felt that, if they did not yield from conviction, they must not to assault. His manner of speaking on this subject gave me an idea of the nature of his eloquence. He seldom preaches now. A fine picture was presented by the opposition of figure and lineaments between a young Indian, son of the celebrated Dwarkanauth Tagore, who happened to be there that morning, and Dr. Chalmers, as they were conversing together. The swarthy, half-timid, yet elegant face and form of the Indian made a fine contrast with the florid, portly, yet intellectually luminous appearance of the Doctor; half shepherd, half orator, he looked a Shepherd King opposed to some Arabian story-teller. I saw others in Edinburgh of a later date who haply gave more valuable as well as fresher revelations of the spirit, and whose names may be by and by more celebrated than those I have cited; but for the present this must suffice. It would take a week, if I wrote half I saw or thought in Edinburgh, and I must close for to-day. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 30, Wednesday: At 9PM in his Charleston dental office, a tooth was successfully extracted by dentist William Thomas Green Morton while his patient the music teacher and city merchant Eben H. Frost was under sulfuric diethyl ether.

WALDEN: The village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain, –otherwise it would often be painful to hear,– without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, which I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune about her having gotten lost in the Ben Lomond terrain — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD: Birmingham, September 30th, 1846. I was obliged to stop writing at Edinburgh before the better half of my tale was told, and must now begin there again, to speak of an excursion into the Highlands, which occupied about a fortnight. We left Edinburgh, by coach for Perth, and arrived there about three in the afternoon. I have reason to be very glad that I visit this island before the reign of the stage-coach is quite over. I have been constantly on the top of the coach, even one day of drenching rain, and enjoy it highly. Nothing can be more inspiring than this swift, steady progress over such smooth roads, and placed so high as to overlook the country freely, with the lively flourish of the horn preluding every pause. Travelling by railroad is, in my opinion, the most stupid process on earth; it is sleep without the refreshment of sleep, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI for the noise of the train makes it impossible either to read, talk, or sleep to advantage. But here the advantages are immense; you can fly through this dull trance from one beautiful place to another, and stay at each during the time that would otherwise be spent on the road. Already the artists, who are obliged to find their home in London, rejoice that all England is thrown open to them for sketching-ground, since they can now avail themselves of a day’s leisure at a great distance, and with choice of position, whereas formerly they were obliged to confine themselves to a few “green, and bowery” spots in the neighborhood of the metropolis. But while in the car, it is to me that worst of purgatories, the purgatory of dulness. Well, on the coach we went to Perth, and passed through Kinross, and saw Loch Leven, and the island where Queen Mary passed those sorrowful months, before her romantic escape under care of the Douglas. As this unhappy, lovely woman stands for a type in history, death, time, and distance do not destroy her attractive power. Like Cleopatra, she has still her adorers; nay, some are born to her in each new generation of men. Lately she has for her chevalier the Russian Prince Labanoff, who has spent fourteen years in studying upon all that related to her, and thinks now that he can make out a story and a picture about the mysteries of her short reign, which shall satisfy the desire of her lovers to find her as pure and just as she was charming. I have only seen of his array of evidence so much, as may be found in the pages of Chambers’s Journal, but that much does not disturb the original view I have taken of the case; which is, that from a princess educated under the Medici and Guise influence, engaged in the meshes of secret intrigue to favor the Roman Catholic faith, her tacit acquiescence, at least, in the murder of Darnley, after all his injurious conduct toward her, was just what was to be expected. From a poor, beautiful young woman, longing to enjoy life, exposed both by her position and her natural fascinations to the utmost bewilderment of flattery, whether prompted by interest or passion, her other acts of folly are most natural, and let all who feel inclined harshly to condemn her remember to “Gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman.” Surely, in all the stern pages of life’s account-book there is none on which a more terrible price is exacted for every precious endowment. Her rank and reign only made her powerless to do good, and exposed her to danger; her talents only served to irritate her foes and disappoint her friends. This most charming of women was the destruction of her lovers: married three times, she had never any happiness as a wife, but in both the connections of her choice found that she had either never possessed or could not retain, even for a few weeks, the love of the men she had chosen, so that Darnley was willing to risk her life and that of his unborn child to wreak his wrath upon Rizzio, and after a few weeks with Bothwell she was heard “calling aloud for a knife to kill herself with.” A mother twice, and of a son and daughter, both the children were brought forth in loneliness and sorrow, and separated from her early, her son educated to hate her, her daughter at once immured in a convent. Add the eighteen years of her imprisonment, and the fact that this foolish, prodigal world, when there was in it one woman fitted by her grace and loveliness to charm all eyes and enliven all fancies, suffered her to be shut up to water with her tears her dull embroidery HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI during all the full rose-blossom of her life, and you will hardly get beyond this story for a tragedy, not noble, but pallid and forlorn. Such were the bootless, best thoughts I had while looking at the dull blood-stain and blocked-up secret stair of Holyrood, at the ruins of Loch Leven castle, and afterward at Abbotsford, where the picture of Queen Mary’s head, as it lay on the pillow when severed from the block, hung opposite to a fine caricature of “Queen Elizabeth dancing high and disposedly.” In this last the face is like a mask, so frightful is the expression of cold craft, irritated, vanity, and the malice of a lonely breast in contrast with the attitude and elaborate frippery of the dress. The ambassador looks on dismayed; the little page can scarcely control the laughter which swells his boyish cheeks. Such can win the world which, better hearts (and such Mary’s was, even if it had a large black speck in it) are most like to lose. That was a most lovely day on which we entered Perth, and saw in full sunshine its beautiful meadows, among them the North- Inch, the famous battle-ground commemorated in “The Fair Maid of Perth,” adorned with graceful trees like those of the New England country towns. In the afternoon we visited the modern Kinfauns, the stately home of Lord Grey. The drive to it is most beautiful, on the one side the Park, with noble heights that skirt it, on the other through a belt of trees was seen the river and the sweep of that fair and cultivated country. The house is a fine one, and furnished with taste, the library large, and some good works in marble. Among the family pictures one arrested my attention, — the face of a girl full of the most pathetic sensibility, and with no restraint of convention upon its ardent, gentle expression. She died young. Returning, we were saddened, as almost always on leaving any such place, by seeing such swarms of dirty women and dirtier children at the doors of the cottages almost close by the gate of the avenue. To the horrors and sorrows of the streets in such places as Liverpool, Glasgow, and, above all, London, one has to grow insensible or die daily; but here in the sweet, fresh, green country, where there seems to be room for everybody, it is impossible to forget the frightful inequalities between the lot of man and man, or believe that God can smile upon a state of things such as we find existent here. Can any man who has seen these things dare blame the Associationists for their attempt to find prevention against such misery and wickedness in our land? Rather will not every man of tolerable intelligence and good feeling commend, say rather revere, every earnest attempt in that direction, nor dare interfere with any, unless he has a better to offer in its place? Next morning we passed on to Crieff, in whose neighborhood we visited Drummond Castle, the abode, or rather one of the abodes, of Lord Willoughby D’Eresby. It has a noble park, through which you pass by an avenue of two miles long. The old keep is still ascended to get the fine view of the surrounding country; and during Queen Victoria’s visit, her Guards were quartered there. But what took my fancy most was the old-fashioned garden, full of old shrubs and new flowers, with its formal parterres in the shape of the family arms, and its clipped yew and box trees. It was fresh from a shower, and now glittering and fragrant in bright sunshine. This afternoon we pursued our way, passing through the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI plantations of Ochtertyre, a far more charming place to my taste than Drummond Castle, freer and more various in its features. Five or six of these fine places lie in the neighborhood of Crieff, and the traveller may give two or three days to visiting them with a rich reward of delight. But we were pressing on to be with the lakes and mountains rather, and that night brought us to St. Fillan’s, where we saw the moon shining on Loch Earn. All this region, and that of Loch Katrine and the Trosachs, which we reached next day, Scott has described exactly in “The Lady of the Lake”; nor is it possible to appreciate that poem, without going thither, neither to describe the scene better than he has done after you have seen it. I was somewhat disappointed in the pass of the Trosachs itself; it is very grand, but the grand part lasts so little while. The opening view of Loch Katrine, however, surpassed, expectation. It was late in the afternoon when we launched our little boat there for Ellen’s isle. The boatmen recite, though not con molto espressione, the parts of the poem which describe these localities. Observing that they spoke of the personages, too, with the same air of confidence, we asked if they were sure that all this really happened. They replied, “Certainly; it had been told from father to son through so many generations.” Such is the power of genius to interpolate what it will into the regular log-book of Time’s voyage. Leaving Loch Katrine the following day, we entered Rob Roy’s country, and saw on the way the house where Helen MacGregor was born, and Rob Roy’s sword, which is shown in a house by the way- side. We came in a row-boat up Loch Katrine, though both on that and Loch Lomond you may go in a hateful little steamer with a squeaking fiddle to play Rob Roy MacGregor O. I walked almost all the way through the pass from Loch Katrine to Loch Lomond; it was a distance of six miles; but you feel as if you could walk sixty in that pure, exhilarating air. At Inversnaid we took boat again to go down Loch Lomond to the little inn of Rowardennan, from which the ascent is made of Ben Lomond, the greatest elevation in these parts. The boatmen are fine, athletic men; one of those with us this evening, a handsome young man of two or three and twenty, sang to us some Gaelic songs. The first, a very wild and plaintive air, was the expostulation of a girl whose lover has deserted her and married another. It seems he is ashamed, and will not even look at her when they meet upon the road. She implores him, if he has not forgotten all that scene of bygone love, at least to lift up his eyes and give her one friendly glance. The sad crooning burden of the stanzas in which she repeats this request was very touching. When the boatman had finished, he hung his head and seemed ashamed of feeling the song too much; then, when we asked for another, he said he would sing another about a girl that was happy. This one was in three parts. First, a tuneful address from a maiden to her absent lover; second, his reply, assuring her of his fidelity and tenderness; third, a strain which expresses their joy when reunited. I thought this boatman had sympathies which would prevent his tormenting any poor women, and perhaps make some one happy, and this was a pleasant thought, since probably in the Highlands, as elsewhere, “Maidens lend an ear too oft To the careless wooer; Maidens’ hearts are always soft; Would that men’s were truer!” I don’t know that I quote the words correctly, but that is the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI sum and substance of a masculine report on these matters. The first day at Rowardennan not being propitious for ascending the mountain, we went down the lake to sup, and got very tired in various ways, so that we rose very late next morning. Their we found a day of ten thousand for our purpose; but unhappily a large party had come with the sun and engaged all the horses, so that, if we went, it must be on foot. This was something of an enterprise for me, as the ascent is four miles, and toward the summit quite fatiguing; however, in the pride of newly gained health and strength, I was ready, and set forth with Mr. S. alone. We took no guide, — and the people of the house did not advise it, as they ought. They told us afterward they thought the day was so clear that there was no probability of danger, and they were afraid of seeming mercenary about it. It was, however, wrong, as they knew what we did not, that even the shepherds, if a mist comes on, can be lost in these hills; that a party of gentlemen were so a few weeks before, and only by accident found their way to a house on the other side; and that a child which had been lost was not found for five days, long after its death. We, however, nothing doubting, set forth, ascending slowly, and often stopping to enjoy the points of view, which are many, for Ben Lomond consists of a congeries of hills, above which towers the true Ben, or highest peak, as the head of a many-limbed body. On reaching the peak, the night was one of beauty and grandeur such as imagination never painted. You see around you no plain ground, but on every side constellations or groups of hills exquisitely dressed in the soft purple of the heather, amid which gleam the lakes, like eyes that tell the secrets of the earth and drink in those of the heavens. Peak beyond peak caught from the shifting light all the colors of the prism, and on the farthest, angel companies seemed hovering in their glorious white robes. Words are idle on such subjects; what can I say, but that it was a noble vision, that satisfied the eye and stirred the imagination in all its secret pulses? Had that been, as afterward seemed likely, the last act of my life, there could not have been a finer decoration painted on the curtain which was to drop upon it. About four o’clock we began our descent. Near the summit the traces of the path are not distinct, and I said to Mr. S., after a while, that we had lost it. He said, he thought that was of no consequence, we could find oar way down. I thought however it was, as the ground was full of springs that were bridged over in the pathway. He accordingly went to look for it, and I stood still because so tired that I did not like to waste any labor. Soon he called to me that he had found it, and I followed in the direction where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, and saw him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, and called him many times. It seems he on his side did the same, but the brow of some hill was between us, and we neither saw nor heard one another. I then thought I would make the best of my way down, and I should find him upon my arrival. But in doing so I found the justice of my apprehension about the springs, as, so soon as I got to the foot of the hills, I would sink up to my knees in bog, and have to go up the hills again, seeking better crossing-places. Thus I lost much time; nevertheless, in the twilight I saw at HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI last the lake and the inn of Rowardennan on its shore. Between me and it lay direct a high heathery hill, which I afterward found is called “The Tongue,” because hemmed in on three sides by a watercourse. It looked as if, could I only get to the bottom of that, I should be on comparatively level ground. I then attempted to descend in the watercourse, but, finding that impracticable, climbed on the hill again and let myself down by the heather, for it was very steep and full of deep holes. With great fatigue I got to the bottom, but when about to cross the watercourse there, it looked so deep in the dim twilight that I felt afraid. I got down as far as I could by the root of a tree, and threw down a stone; it sounded very hollow, and made me afraid to jump. The shepherds told me afterward, if I had, I should probably have killed myself, it was so deep and the bed of the torrent full of sharp stones. I then tried to ascend the hill again, for there was no other way to get off it, but soon sunk down utterly exhausted. When able to get up again and look about me, it was completely dark. I saw far below me a light, that looked about as big as a pin’s head, which I knew to be from the inn at Rowardennan, but heard no sound except the rush of the waterfall, and the sighing of the night-wind. For the first few minutes after I perceived I had got to my night’s lodging, such as it was, the prospect seemed appalling. I was very lightly clad, — my feet and dress were very wet, — I had only a little shawl to throw round me, and a cold autumn wind had already come, and the night-mist was to fall on me, all fevered and exhausted as I was. I thought I should not live through the night, or, if I did, live always a miserable invalid. There was no chance to keep myself warm by walking, for, now it was dark, it would be too dangerous to stir. My only chance, however, lay in motion, and my only help in myself, and so convinced was I of this, that I did keep in motion the whole of that long night, imprisoned as I was on such a little perch of that great mountain. How long it seemed under such circumstances only those can guess who may have been similarly circumstanced. The mental experience of the time, most precious and profound, — for it was indeed a season lonely, dangerous, and helpless enough for the birth of thoughts beyond what the common sunlight will ever call to being, — may be told in another place and time. For about two hours I saw the stars, and very cheery and companionable they looked; but then the mist fell, and I saw nothing more, except such apparitions as visited Ossian on the hill-side when he went out by night and struck the bosky shield and called to him the spirits of the heroes and the white-armed maids with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came those visionary shapes; floating slowly and gracefully, their white robes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they had been engaged, and come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of death. What they might have told me, who knows, if I had but resigned myself more passively to that cold, spirit-like breathing! At last the moon rose. I could not see her, but the silver light filled the mist. Then I knew it was two o’clock, and that, having weathered out so much of the night, I might the rest; and the hours hardly seemed long to me more. It may give an idea of the extent of the mountain to say that, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI though I called every now and then with all my force, in case by chance some aid might be near, and though no less than twenty men with their dogs were looking for me, I never heard a sound except the rush of the waterfall and the sighing of the night- wind, and once or twice the startling of the grouse in the heather. It was sublime indeed, — a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene realities. At last came the signs of day, the gradual clearing and breaking up; some faint sounds, from I know not what. The little flies, too, arose from their bed amid the purple heather, and bit me; truly they were very welcome to do so. But what was my disappointment to find the mist so thick, that I could see neither lake nor inn, nor anything to guide me. I had to go by guess, and, as it happened, my Yankee method served me well. I ascended the hill, crossed the torrent in the waterfall, first drinking some of the water, which was as good at that time as ambrosia. I crossed in that place because the waterfall made steps, as it were, to the next hill; to be sure they were covered with water, but I was already entirely wet with the mist, so that it did not matter. I then kept on scrambling, as it happened, in the right direction, till, about seven, some of the shepherds found me. The moment they came, all my feverish strength departed, though, if unaided, I dare say it would have kept me up during the day; and they carried me home, where my arrival relieved my friends of distress far greater than I had undergone, for I had had my grand solitude, my Ossianic visions, and the pleasure of sustaining myself while they had only doubt amounting to anguish and a fruitless search through the night. Entirely contrary to my expectations, I only suffered for this a few days, and was able to take a parting look at my prison, as I went down the lake, with feelings of complacency. It was a majestic-looking hill, that Tongue, with the deep ravines on either side, and the richest robe of heather I have seen anywhere. Mr. S. gave all the men who were looking for me a dinner in the barn, and he and Mrs. S. ministered to them, and they talked of Burns, really the national writer, and known by them, apparently, as none other is, and of hair-breadth escapes by flood and fell. Afterwards they were all brought up to see me, and it was pleasing indeed to observe the good breeding and good, feeling with which they deported themselves on the occasion. Indeed, this adventure created quite an intimate feeling between us and the people there. I had been much pleased, with them before, in attending one of their dances, on account of the genuine independence and politeness of their conduct. They were willing and pleased to dance their Highland flings and strathspeys for our amusement, and did it as naturally and as freely as they would have offered the stranger the best chair. All the rest must wait a while. I cannot economize time to keep up my record in any proportion with what happens, nor can I get out of Scotland on this page, as I had intended, without utterly slighting many gifts and graces.68 ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

68. Walt Whitman clipped from the newspaper Margaret’s account of getting lost on Ben Lomond. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Early October: With the potato harvesting season underway in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant Lord Bessborough confessed to the Prime Minister of England

“I verily believe that by Christmas there will not be a sound potato in the country.”

Margaret Fuller was visiting Thomas Carlyle. During her stay in London she commented, evidently not at all anent the potatoes of Ireland, “I accept the universe.” Carlyle made light of the comment, clearly not at all anent the potatoes of Ireland of the scarcity of which he would emphatically have approved — for it was considered bad form in the 19th Century for a mere woman to accept the universe, it was as distressing as the FEMINISM idea of a cheerleader69 taking on the football team since it was the masculine role to embrace, the feminine to renounce. IRISH POTATO FAMINE HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Fuller would come away from her encounter with this illuminated one with an understandable reaction: “the worst of hearing Carlyle is that you cannot interrupt him.” During her visit, the harangue which she had attempted to interrupt had been one in which Carlyle was carrying on about his pet idea that “if people would not behave well,” we ought simply to “put collars round their necks. Find a hero, and let them be his slaves.”70

Public Works Enrollment

October 1846 114,000

January 1847 570,000

March 1847 750,000

November: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Paris about the wrap-up of her trip through the British Isles (after her death this would be reprinted in AT HOME AND ABROAD): Paris, November, 1846. I am very sorry to leave such a wide gap between my letters, but I was inevitably prevented from finishing one that was begun for the steamer of the 4th of November. I then hoped to prepare one after my arrival here in time for the Hibernia, but a severe cold, caught on the way, unfitted me for writing. It is now necessary to retrace my steps a long way, or lose sight of several things it has seemed desirable to mention to friends in America, though I shall make out my narrative more briefly than if nearer the time of action. If I mistake not, my last closed just as I was looking back on the hill where I had passed the night in all the miserable chill and amid the ghostly apparitions of a Scotch mist, but which looked in the morning truly beautiful, and (had I not known it too well to be deceived) alluring, in its mantle of rich pink heath, the tallest and most full of blossoms we anywhere saw, and with, the waterfall making music by its side, and sparkling in the morning sun. Passing from Tarbet, we entered the grand and beautiful pass of Glencoe, — sublime with purple shadows with bright lights between, and in one place showing an exquisitely silent and lonely little lake. The wildness of the scene was heightened by the black Highland cattle feeding here and there. They looked much at home, too, in the park at Inverary, where I saw them next day. In Inverary I was disappointed. I found, indeed, the position of every object the same as indicated in the “Legend of Montrose,” but the expression of the whole seemed unlike what I had fancied. The present abode of the Argyle family is a modern structure, and boasts very few vestiges of the old romantic 69. Carlyle seems to have overlooked, however, that Fuller was merely negating the thesis of Ivan in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, “I do not accept the world.” Of course, it was unmanly for Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski to have announced this through a male character, as unmanly as it would have been for him to have failed to have embraced a lady in distress, since it was the 19th Century gentleman’s role to seize every opportunity. We may also note that when, in Philadelphia PA in 1852 at the first Women’s Rights Convention, Sarah Moore Grimké proposed Fuller’s “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion” as the motto of the movement, she was proposing a motto very similar to this “I accept the universe” sentiment. Those who have incautiously repeated Carlyle’s defensive mutter seem to have neglected to notice that it is a very serious matter, in Christendom, for us to criticize an attitude of acceptance. And in particular we who are influenced by the life of Thoreau should be wary of criticizing an amor fati. 70. Compare this with the beloved “conservative” radio commentator Paul Harvey’s pet idea in our own time in our own nation, that what we ought to do with our criminals is get them off their asses and out of our prison systems by simply chaining them behind our garbage trucks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI history attached to the name. The park and look-out upon the lake are beautiful, but except from the brief pleasure derived from these, the old cross from Iona that stands in the market- place, and the drone of the bagpipe which lulled me to sleep at night playing some melancholy air, there was nothing to make me feel that it was “a far cry to Lochawe,” but, on the contrary, I seemed in the very midst of the prosaic, the civilized world. Leaving Inverary, we left that day the Highlands too, passing through. Hell Glen, a very wild and grand defile. Taking boat then on Loch Levy, we passed down the Clyde, stopping an hour or two on our way at Dumbarton. Nature herself foresaw the era of picture when she made and placed this rock: there is every preparation for the artist’s stealing a little piece from her treasures to hang on the walls of a room. Here I saw the sword of “Wallace wight,” shown by a son of the nineteenth century, who said that this hero lived about fifty years ago, and who did not know the height of this rock, in a cranny of which he lived, or at least ate and slept and “donned his clothes.” From the top of the rock I saw sunset on the beautiful Clyde, animated that day by an endless procession of steamers, little skiffs, and boats. In one of the former, the Cardiff Castle, we embarked as the last light of day was fading, and that evening found ourselves in Glasgow. I understand there is an intellectual society of high merit in Glasgow, but we were there only a few hours, and did not see any one. Certainly the place, as it may be judged of merely from the general aspect of the population and such objects as may be seen in the streets, more resembles an Inferno than any other we have yet visited. The people are more crowded together, and the stamp of squalid, stolid misery and degradation more obvious and appalling. The English and Scotch do not take kindly to poverty, like those of sunnier climes; it makes them fierce or stupid, and, life presenting no other cheap pleasure, they take refuge in drinking. I saw here in Glasgow persons, especially women, dressed in dirty, wretched tatters, worse than none, and with an expression of listless, unexpecting woe upon their faces, far more tragic than the inscription over the gate of Dante’s Inferno. To one species of misery suffered here to the last extent, I shall advert in speaking of London. But from all these sorrowful tokens I by no means inferred the falsehood of the information, that here was to be found a circle rich in intellect and in aspiration. The manufacturing and commercial towns, burning focuses of grief and vice, are also the centres of intellectual life, as in forcing-beds the rarest flowers and fruits are developed by use of impure and repulsive materials. Where evil comes to an extreme, Heaven seems busy in providing means for the remedy. Glaring throughout Scotland and England is the necessity for the devoutest application of intellect and love to the cure of ills that cry aloud, and, without such application, erelong help must be sought by other means than words. Yet there is every reason to hope that those who ought to help are seriously, though, slowly, becoming alive to the imperative nature of this duty; so we must not cease to hope, even in the streets of Glasgow, and the gin-palaces of Manchester, and the dreariest recesses of London. From Glasgow we passed to Stirling, like Dumbarton endeared to the mind which cherishes the memory of its childhood more by HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI association with Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs, than with “Snowdon’s knight and Scotland’s king.” We reached the town too late to see the castle before the next morning, and I took up at the inn “The Scottish Chiefs,” in which I had not read a word since ten or twelve years old. We are in the habit now of laughing when this book is named, as if it were a representative of what is most absurdly stilted or bombastic, but now, in reading, my maturer mind was differently impressed from what I expected, and the infatuation with which childhood and early youth regard this book and its companion, “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” was justified. The characters and dialogue are, indeed, out of nature, but the sentiment that animates them is pure, true, and no less healthy than noble. Here is bad drawing, bad drama, but good music, to which the unspoiled heart will always echo, even when the intellect has learned to demand a better organ for its communication. The castle of Stirling is as rich as any place in romantic associations. We were shown its dungeons and its Court of Lions, where, says tradition, wild animals, kept in the grated cells adjacent, were brought out on festival occasions to furnish entertainment for the court. So, while lords and ladies gay danced and sang above, prisoners pined and wild beasts starved below. This, at first blush, looks like a very barbarous state of things, but, on reflection, one does not find that we have outgrown it in our present so-called state of refined civilization, only the present way of expressing the same facts is a little different. Still lords and ladies dance and sing, unknowing or uncaring that the laborers who minister to their luxuries starve or are turned into wild beasts. Man need not boast his condition, methinks, till he can weave his costly tapestry without the side that is kept under looking thus sadly. The tournament ground is still kept green and in beautiful order, near Stirling castle, as a memento of the olden time, and as we passed away down the beautiful Firth, a turn of the river gave us a very advantageous view of it. So gay it looked, so festive in the bright sunshine, one almost seemed to see the graceful forms of knight and noble pricking their good steeds to the encounter, or the stalwart Douglas, vindicating his claim to be indeed a chief by conquest in the rougher sports of the yeomanry. Passing along the Firth to Edinburgh, we again passed two or three days in that beautiful city, which I could not be content to leave so imperfectly seen, if I had not some hope of revisiting it when the bright lights that adorn it are concentred there. In summer almost every one is absent. I was very fortunate to see as many interesting persons as I did. On this second visit I saw James Simpson, a well-known philanthropist, and leader in the cause of popular education. Infant schools have been an especial care of his, and America as well as Scotland has received the benefit of his thoughts on this subject. His last good work has been to induce the erection of public baths in Edinburgh, and the working people of that place, already deeply in his debt for the lectures he has been unwearied in delivering for their benefit, have signified their gratitude by presenting him with a beautiful model of a fountain in silver as an ornament to his study. Never was there a place where such a measure would be more important; if cleanliness be akin to godliness, Edinburgh stands at great disadvantage in her HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI devotions. The impure air, the terrific dirt which surround the working people, must make all progress in higher culture impossible; and I saw nothing which seemed to me so likely to have results of incalculable good, as this practical measure of the Simpsons in support of the precept, “Wash and be clean every whit.” We returned into England by the way of Melrose, not content to leave Scotland without making our pilgrimage to Abbotsford. The universal feeling, however, has made this pilgrimage so common that there is nothing left for me to say; yet, though I had read a hundred descriptions, everything seemed new as I went over this epitome of the mind and life of Scott. As what constitutes the great man is more commonly some extraordinary combination and balance of qualities, than the highest development of any one, so you cannot but here be struck anew by the singular combination in Scott’s mind of love for the picturesque and romantic with the plainest common sense, — a delight in heroic excess with the prudential habit of order. Here the most pleasing order pervades emblems of what men commonly esteem disorder and excess. Amid the exquisite beauty of the ruins of Dryburgh, I saw with regret that Scott’s body rests in almost the only spot that is not green, and cannot well be made so, for the light does not reach it. That is not a fit couch for him who dressed so many dim and time-worn relics with living green. Always cheerful and beneficent, Scott seemed to the common eye in like measure prosperous and happy, up to the last years, and the chair in which, under the pressure of the sorrows which led to his death, he was propped up to write when brain and eye and hand refused their aid, the product remaining only as a guide to the speculator as to the workings of the mind in case of insanity or approaching imbecility, would by most persons be viewed as the only saddening relic of his career. Yet when I recall some passages in the Lady of the Lake, and the Address to his Harp, I cannot doubt that Scott had the full share of bitter in his cup, and feel the tender hope that we do about other gentle and generous guardians and benefactors of our youth, that in a nobler career they are now fulfilling still higher duties with serener mind. Doubtless too they are trusting in us that we will try to fill their places with kindly deeds, ardent thoughts, nor leave the world, in their absence, “A dim, vast vale of tears, Vacant and desolate.” Paris, 1846. We crossed the moorland in a heavy rain, and reached Newcastle late at night. Next day we descended into a coal-mine; it was quite an odd sensation to be taken off one’s feet and dropped down into darkness by the bucket. The stables under ground had a pleasant Gil-Blas air, though the poor horses cannot like it much; generally they see the light of day no more after they have once been let down into these gloomy recesses, but pass their days in dragging cars along the rails of the narrow passages, and their nights in eating hay and dreaming of grass!! When we went down, we meant to go along the gallery to the place where the miners were then at work, but found this was a walk of a mile and a half, and, beside the weariness of picking one’s steps slowly along by the light of a tallow candle, too wet and dirty an enterprise to be undertaken by way of amusement; so, after proceeding half a mile or so, we begged to be restored to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI our accustomed level, and reached it with minds slightly edified and face and hands much blackened. Passing thence we saw York with its Minster, that dream of beauty realized. From, its roof I saw two rainbows, overarching that lovely country. Through its aisles I heard grand music pealing. But how sorrowfully bare is the interior of such a cathedral, despoiled of the statues, the paintings, and the garlands that belong to the Catholic religion! The eye aches for them. Such a church is ruined by Protestantism; its admirable exterior seems that of a sepulchre; there is no correspondent life within. Within the citadel, a tower half ruined and ivy-clad, is life that has been growing up while the exterior bulwarks of the old feudal time crumbled to ruin. George Fox, while a prisoner at York for obedience to the dictates of his conscience, planted here a walnut, and the tall tree that grew from it still “bears testimony” to his living presence on that spot. The tree is old, but still bears nuts; one of them was taken away by my companions, and may perhaps be the parent of a tree somewhere in America, that shall shade those who inherit the spirit, if they do not attach importance to the etiquettes, of Quakerism. In Sheffield I saw the sooty servitors tending their furnaces. I saw them, also on Saturday night, after their work was done, going to receive its poor wages, looking pallid and dull, as if they had spent on tempering the steel that vital force that should have tempered themselves to manhood. We saw, also, Chatsworth, with its park and mock wilderness, and immense conservatory, and really splendid fountains and wealth of marbles. It is a fine expression of modern luxury and splendor, but did not interest me; I found little there of true beauty or grandeur. Warwick Castle is a place entirely to my mind, a real representative of the English aristocracy in the day of its nobler life. The grandeur of the pile itself, and its beauty of position, introduce you fitly to the noble company with which the genius of Vandyke has peopled its walls. But a short time was allowed to look upon these nobles, warriors, statesmen, and ladies, who gaze upon us in turn with such a majesty of historic association, yet was I very well satisfied. It is not difficult to see men through the eyes of Vandyke. His way of viewing character seems superficial, though commanding; he sees the man in his action on the crowd, not in his hidden life; he does not, like some painters, amaze and engross us by his revelations as to the secret springs of conduct. I know not by what hallucination I forebore to look at the picture I most desired to see, — that of Lucy, Countess of Carlisle. I was looking at something else, and when the fat, pompous butler announced her, I did not recognize her name from his mouth. Afterward it flashed across me, that I had really been standing before her and forgotten to look. But repentance was too late; I had passed the castle gate to return no more. Pretty Leamington and Stratford are hackneyed ground. Of the latter I only observed what, if I knew, I had forgotten, that the room where Shakespeare was born has been an object of devotion only for forty years. England has learned much of her appreciation of Shakespeare from the Germans. In the days of innocence, I fondly supposed that every one who could understand English, and was not a cannibal, adored Shakespeare and read him on Sundays always for an hour or more, and on week days a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI considerable portion of the time. But I have lived to know some hundreds of persons in my native land, without finding ten who had any direct acquaintance with their greatest benefactor, and I dare say in England as large an experience would not end more honorably to its subjects. So vast a treasure is left untouched, while men are complaining of being poor, because they have not toothpicks exactly to their mind. At Stratford I handled, too, the poker used to such good purpose by Geoffrey Crayon. The muse had fled, the fire was out, and the poker rusty, yet a pleasant influence lingered even in that cold little room, and seemed to lend a transient glow to the poker under the influence of sympathy. In Birmingham I heard two discourses from one of the rising lights of England, George Dawson, a young man of whom I had earlier heard much in praise. He is a friend of the people, in the sense of brotherhood, not of a social convenience or patronage; in literature catholic; in matters of religion antisectarian, seeking truth in aspiration and love. He is eloquent, with good method in his discourse, fire and dignity when wanted, with a frequent homeliness in enforcement and illustration which offends the etiquettes of England, but fits him the better for the class he has to address. His powers are uncommon and unfettered in their play; his aim is worthy. He is fulfilling and will fulfil an important task as an educator of the people, if all be not marred by a taint of self-love and arrogance now obvious in his discourse. This taint is not surprising in one so young, who has done so much, and in order to do it has been compelled to great self-confidence and light heed of the authority of other minds, and who is surrounded almost exclusively by admirers; neither is it, at present, a large speck; it may be quite purged from him by the influence of nobler motives and the rise of his ideal standard; but, on the other hand, should it spread, all must be vitiated. Let us hope the best, for he is one that could ill be spared from the band who have taken up the cause of Progress in England. In this connection I may as well speak of James Martineau, whom I heard in Liverpool, and W.J. Fox, whom I heard in London. Mr. Martineau looks like the over-intellectual, the partially developed man, and his speech confirms this impression. He is sometimes conservative, sometimes reformer, not in the sense of eclecticism, but because his powers and views do not find a true harmony. On the conservative side he is scholarly, acute, — on the other, pathetic, pictorial, generous. He is no prophet and no sage, yet a man full of fine affections and thoughts, always suggestive, sometimes satisfactory; he is well adapted to the wants of that class, a large one in the present day, who love the new wine, but do not feel that they can afford to throw away all their old bottles. Mr. Fox is the reverse of all this: he is homogeneous in his materials and harmonious in the results he produces. He has great persuasive power; it is the persuasive power of a mind warmly engaged in seeking truth for itself. He sometimes carries homeward convictions with great energy, driving in the thought as with golden nails. A glow of kindly human sympathy enlivens his argument, and the whole presents thought in a well- proportioned, animated body. But I am told he is far superior in speech on political or social problems, than on such as I heard him discuss. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI I was reminded, in hearing all three, of men similarly engaged in our country, W.H. Charming and Theodore Parker. None of them compare in the symmetrical arrangement of extempore discourse, or in pure eloquence and communication of spiritual beauty, with Charming, nor in fulness and sustained flow with Parker, but, in power of practical and homely adaptation of their thought to common wants, they are superior to the former, and all have more variety, finer perceptions, and are more powerful in single passages, than Parker. And now my pen has run to 1st October, and still I have such notabilities as fell to my lot to observe while in London, and these that are thronging upon me here in Paris to record for you. I am sadly in arrears, but ‘t is comfort to think that such meats as I have to serve up are as good cold as hot. At any rate, it is just impossible to do any better, and I shall comfort myself, as often before, with the triplet which I heard in childhood from a sage (if only sages wear wigs!): — “As said the great Prince Fernando, What can a man do, More than he can do?” ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

November 11, Wednesday: Frédéric François Chopin arrived in Paris from Nohant alone. His relationship with George Sand was at an end, for all intents and purposes.

Austria annexes Kraków.

November 14, Saturday: “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe was published in the New England Weekly Review (it had already published earlier this month in Godey’s Lady’s Book).

November 15, Sunday: Quadrille nach Motiven der Oper Die Belagerung von Rochelle op.31 by Johann Strauss was performed for the initial time, in Dommayer’s Casino, Heitzing.

November 16, Monday: US forces captured Saltillo in Coahuila.

On her 2d visit to Thomas Carlyle’s home, Margaret Fuller had met an Italian revolutionary in exile, Giuseppe Mazzini.

December: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Paris her reminiscences of the world of London (after her death this would be reprinted in AT HOME AND ABROAD): Paris, December, 1846. I sit down here in Paris to narrate some recollections of London. The distance in space and time is not great, yet I seem in wholly a different world. Here in the region of wax-lights, mirrors, bright wood fires, shrugs, vivacious ejaculations, wreathed smiles, and adroit courtesies, it is hard to remember John Bull, with his coal-smoke, hands in pockets, except when extended for ungracious demand of the perpetual half-crown, or to pay for the all but perpetual mug of beer. John, seen on that side, is HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI certainly the most churlish of clowns, and the most clownish of churls. But then there are so many other sides! When a gentleman, he is so truly the gentleman, when a man, so truly the man of honor! His graces, when he has any, grow up from his inmost heart. Not that he is free from humbug; on the contrary, he is prone to the most solemn humbug, generally of the philanthrophic or otherwise moral kind. But he is always awkward beneath the mask, and can never impose upon anybody — but himself. Nature meant him to be noble, generous, sincere, and has furnished him with no faculties to make himself agreeable in any other way or mode of being. ‘Tis not so with your Frenchman, who can cheat you pleasantly, and move with grace in the devious and slippery path. You would be almost sorry to see him quite disinterested and straightforward, so much of agreeable talent and naughty wit would thus lie hid for want of use. But John, O John, we must admire, esteem, or be disgusted with thee. As to climate, there is not much to choose at this time of year. In London, for six weeks, we never saw the sun for coal-smoke and fog. In Paris we have not been blessed with its cheering rays above three or four days in the same length of time, and are, beside, tormented with an oily and tenacious mud beneath the feet, which makes it almost impossible to walk. This year, indeed, is an uncommonly severe one at Paris; but then, if they have their share of dark, cold days, it must be admitted that they do all they can to enliven them. But to dwell first on London, — London, in itself a world. We arrived at a time which the well-bred Englishman considers as no time at all, — quite out of “the season,” when Parliament is in session, and London thronged with the equipages of her aristocracy, her titled wealthy nobles. I was listened to with a smile of contempt when I declared that the stock shows of London would yield me amusement and employment more than sufficient for the time I had to stay. But I found that, with my way of viewing things, it would be to me an inexhaustible studio, and that, if life were only long enough, I would live there for years obscure in some corner, from which I could issue forth day by day to watch unobserved the vast stream of life, or to decipher the hieroglyphics which ages have been inscribing on the walls of this vast palace (I may not call it a temple), which human effort has reared for means, not yet used efficaciously, of human culture. And though I wish to return to London in “the season,” when that city is an adequate representative of the state of things in England, I am glad I did not at first see all that pomp and parade of wealth and luxury in contrast with the misery, squalid, agonizing, ruffianly, which stares one in the face in every street of London, and hoots at the gates of her palaces more ominous a note than ever was that of owl or raven in the portentous times when empires and races have crumbled and fallen from inward decay. It is impossible, however, to take a near view of the treasures created by English genius, accumulated by English industry, without a prayer, daily more fervent, that the needful changes in the condition of this people may be effected by peaceful revolution, which shall destroy nothing except the shocking inhumanity of exclusiveness, which now prevents their being used, for the benefit of all. May their present possessors look HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to it in time! A few already are earnest in a good spirit. For myself, much as I pitied the poor, abandoned, hopeless wretches that swarm in the roads and streets of England, I pity far more the English noble, with this difficult problem before him, and such need of a speedy solution. Sad is his life, if a conscientious man; sadder still, if not. Poverty in England has terrors of which I never dreamed at home. I felt that it would be terrible to be poor there, but far more so to be the possessor of that for which so many thousands are perishing. And the middle class, too, cannot here enjoy that serenity which the sages have described as naturally their peculiar blessing. Too close, too dark throng the evils they cannot obviate, the sorrows they cannot relieve. To a man of good heart, each day must bring purgatory which he knows not how to bear, yet to which he fears to become insensible. From these clouds of the Present, it is pleasant to turn the thoughts to some objects which have cast a light upon the Past, and which, by the virtue of their very nature, prescribe hope for the Future. I have mentioned with satisfaction seeing some persons who illustrated the past dynasty in the progress of thought here: Wordsworth, Dr. Chalmers, De Quincey, Andrew Combe. With a still higher pleasure, because to one of my own sex, whom I have honored almost above any, I went to pay my court to Joanna Baillie. I found on her brow, not indeed a coronal of gold, but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts have received. I prize Joanna Baillie and Madame Roland as the best specimens which have been hitherto offered of women of a Roman strength and singleness of mind, adorned by the various culture and capable of the various action opened to them by the progress of the Christian Idea. They are not sentimental; they do not sigh and write of withered flowers of fond affection, and woman’s heart born to be misunderstood by the object or objects of her fond, inevitable choice. Love (the passion), when spoken of at all by them, seems a thing noble, religious, worthy to be felt. They do not write of it always; they did not think of it always; they saw other things in this great, rich, suffering world. In superior delicacy of touch, they show the woman, but the hand is firm; nor was all their speech, one continued utterance of mere personal experience. It contained things which are good, intellectually, universally. I regret that the writings of Joanna Baillie are not more known in the United States. The Plays on the Passions are faulty in their plan, — all attempts at comic, even at truly dramatic effect, fail; but there are masterly sketches of character, vigorous expressions of wise thought, deep, fervent ejaculations of an aspiring soul! We found her in her little calm retreat at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character and their mutual relation she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline. Although no autograph collector, I asked for theirs, and when the elder gave hers as “sister to Joanna Baillie,” it drew a tear from my eye, — a good tear, a genuine pearl, — fit homage to that fairest product of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the soul of man, humble, disinterested tenderness. Hampstead has still a good deal of romantic beauty. I was told it was the favorite sketching-ground of London artists, till the railroads gave them easy means of spending a few hours to advantage farther off. But, indeed, there is a wonderful deal of natural beauty lying in untouched sweetness near London. Near one of our cities it would all have been grabbed up the first thing. But we, too, are beginning to grow wiser. At Richmond I went to see another lady of more than threescore years’ celebrity, more than fourscore in age, Miss Berry the friend of Horace Walpole, and for her charms of manner and conversation long and still a reigning power. She has still the vivacity, the careless nature, or refined art, that made her please so much in earlier days, — still is girlish, and gracefully so. Verily, with her was no sign of labor or sorrow. From the older turning to the young, I must speak with pleasure of several girls I know in London, who are devoting themselves to painting as a profession. They have really wise and worthy views of the artist’s avocation; if they remain true to them, they will enjoy a free, serene existence, unprofaned by undue care or sentimental sorrow. Among these, Margaret Gillies has attained some celebrity; she may be known to some in America by engravings in the “People’s Journal” from her pictures; but, if I remember right, these are coarse things, and give no just notion of her pictures, which are distinguished for elegance and refinement; a little mannerized, but she is improving in that respect. The “People’s Journal” comes nearer being a fair sign of the times than any other publication of England, apparently, if we except Punch. As for the Times, on which you all use your scissors so industriously, it is managed with vast ability, no doubt, but the blood would tingle many a time to the fingers’ ends of the body politic, before that solemn organ which claims to represent the heart would dare to beat in unison. Still it would require all the wise management of the Times, or wisdom enough to do without it, and a wide range and diversity of talent, indeed, almost sweeping the circle, to make a People’s Journal for England. The present is only a bud of the future flower. Mary and William Howitt are its main support. I saw them several times at their cheerful and elegant home. In Mary Howitt I found the same engaging traits of character we are led to expect from her books for children. Her husband is full of the same agreeable information, communicated in the same lively yet precise manner we find in his books; it was like talking with old friends, except that now the eloquence of the eye was added. At their house I became acquainted with Dr. Southwood Smith, the well- known philanthropist. He is at present engaged on the construction of good tenements calculated to improve the condition of the working people. His plans look promising, and should they succeed, you shall have a detailed account of them. On visiting him, we saw an object which I had often heard celebrated, and had thought would be revolting, but found, on the contrary, an agreeable sight; this is the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham. It was at Bentham’s request that the skeleton, dressed in the same dress he habitually wore, stuffed out to an exact resemblance of life, and with a portrait mark in wax, the best I ever saw, sits there, as assistant to Dr. Smith in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI entertainment of his guests and companion of his studies. The figure leans a little forward, resting the hands on a, stout stick which Bentham always carried, and had named “Dapple”; the attitude is quite easy, the expression of the whole quite mild, winning, yet highly individual. It is a pleasing mark of that unity of aim and tendency to be expected throughout the life of such a mind, that Bentham, while quite a young man, had made a will, in which, to oppose in the most convincing manner the prejudice against dissection of the human subject, he had given his body after death to be used in service of the cause of science. “I have not yet been able,” said the will, “to do much service to my fellow-men by my life, but perhaps I may in this manner by my death.” Many years after, reading a pamphlet by Dr. Smith on the same subject, he was much pleased with it, became his friend, and bequeathed his body to his care and use, with directions that the skeleton should finally be disposed of in the way I have described. The countenance of Dr. Smith has an expression of expansive, sweet, almost childlike goodness. Miss Gillies has made a charming picture of him, with a favorite little granddaughter nestling in his arms. Another marked figure that I encountered on this great showboard was Cooper, the author of “The Purgatory of Luicides,” a very remarkable poem, of which, had there been leisure before my departure, I should have made a review, and given copious extracts in the Tribune. Cooper is as strong a man, and probably a milder one, than when in the prison where that poem was written. The earnestness in seeking freedom and happiness for all men, which drew upon him that penalty, seems unabated; he is a very significant type of the new era, and also an agent in bringing it near. One of the poets of the people, also, I saw, — the sweetest singer of them all, — Thom. “A Chieftain unknown to the Queen” is again exacting a cruel tribute from him. I wish much that some of those of New York who have taken an interest in him would provide there a nook in which he might find refuge and solace for the evening of his days, to sing or to work as likes him best, and where he could bring up two fine boys to happier prospects than the parent land will afford them. Could and would America but take from other lands more of the talent, as well as the bone and sinew, she would be rich. But the stroke of the clock warns me to stop now, and begin tomorrow with fresher eye and hand on some interesting topics. My sketches are slight; still they cannot be made without time, and I find none to be had in this Europe except late at night. I believe it is what all the inhabitants use, but I am too sleepy a genius to carry the practice far. Again I must begin to write late in the evening. I am told it is the custom of the literati in these large cities to work in the night. It is easy to see that it must be almost impossible to do otherwise; yet not only is the practice very bad for the health, and one that brings on premature old age, but I cannot think this night-work will prove as firm in texture and as fair of hue as what is done by sunlight. Give me a lonely chamber, a window from which through the foliage you can catch glimpses of a beautiful prospect, and the mind finds itself tuned to action. But London, London! I have yet some brief notes to make on London. We had scarcely any sunlight by which to see pictures, and I postponed all visits to private collections, except one, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in the hope of being in England next time in the long summer days. In the National Gallery I saw little except the Murillos; they were so beautiful, that with me, who had no true conception of his kind of genius before, they took away the desire to look into anything else at the same time. They did not affect me much either, except with a sense of content in this genius, so rich and full and strong. It was a cup of sunny wine that refreshed but brought no intoxicating visions. There is something very noble in the genius of Spain, there is such an intensity and singleness; it seems to me it has not half shown itself, and must have an important part to play yet in the drama of this planet. At the Dulwich Gallery I saw the Flower Girl of Murillo, an enchanting picture, the memory of which must always “Cast a light upon the day, A light that will not pass away, A sweet forewarning.” Who can despair when he thinks of a form like that, so full of life and bliss! Nature, that made such human forms to match the butterfly and the bee on June mornings when the lime-trees are in blossom, has surely enough of happiness in store to satisfy us all, somewhere, some time. It was pleasant, indeed, to see the treasures of those galleries, of the British Museum, and of so charming a place as Hampton Court, open to everybody. In the National Gallery one finds a throng of nursery-maids, and men just come from their work; true, they make a great deal of noise thronging to and fro on the uncarpeted floors in their thick boots, and noise from which, when penetrated by the atmosphere of Art, men in the thickest boots would know how to refrain; still I felt that the sight of such objects must be gradually doing them a great deal of good. The British Museum would, in itself, be an education for a man who should go there once a week, and think and read at his leisure moments about what he saw. Hampton Court I saw in the gloom, and rain, and my chief recollections are of the magnificent yew-trees beneath whose shelter — the work of ages — I took refuge from the pelting shower. The expectations cherished from childhood about the Cartoons were all baffled; there was no light by which they could be seen. But I must hope to visit Hampton Court again in the time of roses. The Zoölogical Gardens are another pleasure of the million, since, although something is paid there, it is so little that almost all can afford it. To me, it is a vast pleasure to see animals where they can show out their habits or instincts, and to see them assembled from, all climates and countries, amid verdure and with room enough, as they are here, is a true poem. They have a fine lion, the first I ever saw that realized the idea we have of the king of the animal world; but the groan and roar of this one were equally royal. The eagles were fine, but rather disgraced themselves. It is a trait of English piety, which would, no doubt, find its defenders among ourselves, not to feed the animals on Sunday, that their keepers may have rest; at least this was the explanation given us by one of these men of the state of ravenous hunger in which we found them on the Monday. I half hope he was jesting with us. Certain it is that the eagles were wild with famine, and even the grandest of them, who had eyed us at first as if we were not fit to live in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI same zone with him, when the meat came round, after a short struggle to maintain his dignity, joined in wild shriek and scramble with the rest. Sir John Soane’s Museum I visited, containing the sarcophagus described by Dr. Waagen, Hogarth’s pictures, a fine Canaletto, and a manuscript of Tasso. It fills the house once the residence of his body, still of his mind. It is not a mind with which I have sympathy; I found there no law of harmony, and it annoyed me to see things all jumbled together as if in an old curiosity- shop. Nevertheless it was a generous bequest, and much may perhaps be found there of value to him who takes time to seek. The Gardens at Kew delighted me, thereabouts all was so green, and still one could indulge at leisure in the humorous and fantastic associations that cluster around the name of Kew, like the curls of a “big wig” round the serene and sleepy face of its wearer. Here are fourteen green-houses: in one you find all the palms; in another, the productions of the regions of snow; in another, those squibs and humorsome utterances of Nature, the cactuses, — ay! there I saw the great-grandfather of all the cactuses, a hoary, solemn plant, declared to be a thousand years old, disdaining to say if it is not really much, older; in yet another, the most exquisitely minute plants, delicate as the tracery of frostwork, too delicate for the bowers of fairies, such at least as visit the gross brains of earthly poets. The Reform Club was the only one of those splendid establishments that I visited. Certainly the force of comfort can no farther go, nor can anything be better contrived to make dressing, eating, news-getting, and even sleeping (for there are bedrooms as well as dressing-rooms for those who will), as comfortable as can be imagined. Yet to me this palace of so many “single gentlemen rolled into one” seemed stupidly comfortable, in the absence of that elegant arrangement and vivacious atmosphere which only women can inspire. In the kitchen, indeed, I met them, and on that account it seemed the pleasantest part of the building, — though even there they are but the servants of servants. There reigned supreme a genius in his way, who has published a work on Cookery, and around him his pupils, — young men who pay a handsome yearly fee for novitiate under his instruction. I was not sorry, however, to see men predominant in the cooking department, as I hope to see that and washing transferred to their care in the progress of things, since they are “the stronger sex.” The arrangements of this kitchen were very fine, combining great convenience with neatness, and even elegance. Fourier himself might have taken pleasure in them. Thence we passed into the private apartments of the artist, and found them full of pictures by his wife, an artist in another walk. One or two of them had been engraved. She was an Englishwoman. A whimsical little excursion we made on occasion of the anniversary of the wedding-day of two of my friends. They had often enjoyed reading the account of John Gilpin’s in America, and now thought that, as they were in England and near enough, they would celebrate theirs also at “the Bell at Edmonton.” I accompanied them with “a little foot-page,” to eke out the train, pretty and graceful and playful enough for the train of a princess. But our excursion turned out somewhat of a failure, in an opposite way to Gilpin’s. Whereas he went too fast, we went too slow. First we took coach and went through Cheapside HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to take omnibus at (strange misnomer!) the Flower-Pot. But Gilpin could never have had his race through Cheapside as it is in its present crowded state; we were obliged to proceed at a funeral pace. We missed the omnibus, and when we took the next one it went with the slowness of a “family horse” in the old chaise of a New England deacon, and, after all, only took us half-way. At the half-way house a carriage was to be sought. The lady who let it, and all her grooms, were to be allowed time to recover from their consternation at so unusual a move as strangers taking a carriage to dine at the little inn at Edmonton, now a mere alehouse, before we could be allowed to proceed. The English stand lost in amaze at “Yankee notions,” with their quick come and go, and it is impossible to make them “go ahead” in the zigzag chain-lightning path, unless you push them. A rather old part of the plan had been a pilgrimage to the grave of Lamb, with a collateral view to the rural beauties of Edmonton, but night had fallen on all such hopes two hours at least before we reached the Bell. There, indeed, we found them somewhat more alert to comprehend our wishes; they laughed when we spoke of Gilpin, showed us a print of the race and the window where Mrs. Gilpin must have stood, — balcony, alas! there was none; allowed us to make our own fire, and provided us a wedding dinner of tough meat and stale bread. Nevertheless we danced, dined, paid (I believe), and celebrated the wedding quite to our satisfaction, though in the space of half an hour, as we knew friends were even at that moment expecting us to tea at some miles’ distance. But it is always pleasant in this world of routine to act out a freak. “Such a one,” said an English gentleman, “one of us would rarely have dreamed of, much, less acted.” “Why, was it not pleasant?” “Oh, very! but so out of the way!” Returning, we passed the house where Freiligrath finds a temporary home, earning the bread, of himself and his family in a commercial house. England houses the exile, but not without house-tax, window-tax, and head-tax. Where is the Arcadia that dares invite all genius to her arms, and change her golden wheat for their green laurels and immortal flowers? Arcadia? — would the name were America! And now returns naturally to my mind one of the most interesting things I have seen here or elsewhere, — the school for poor Italian boys, sustained and taught by a few of their exiled compatriots, and especially by the mind and efforts of Mazzini. The name of Joseph Mazzini is well known to those among us who take an interest in the cause of human freedom, who, not content with the peace and ease bought for themselves by the devotion and sacrifices of their fathers, look with anxious interest on the suffering nations who are preparing for a similar struggle. Those who are not, like the brutes that perish, content with the enjoyment of mere national advantages, indifferent to the idea they represent, cannot forget that the human family is one, “And beats with one great heart.” They know that there can be no genuine happiness, no salvation for any, unless the same can be secured for all. To this universal interest in all nations and places where man, understanding his inheritance, strives to throw off an arbitrary rule and establish a state of things where he shall be governed as becomes a man, by his own conscience and intelligence, — where he may speak the truth as it rises in his mind, and indulge his HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI natural emotions in purity, — is added an especial interest in Italy, the mother of our language and our laws, our greatest benefactress in the gifts of genius, the garden of the world, in which our best thoughts have delighted to expatiate, but over whose bowers now hangs a perpetual veil of sadness, and whose noblest plants are doomed to removal, — for, if they cannot bear their ripe and perfect fruit in another climate, they are not permitted to lift their heads to heaven in their own. Some of these generous refugees our country has received kindly, if not with a fervent kindness; and the word Correggio is still in my ears as I heard it spoken in New York by one whose heart long oppression could not paralyze. Speranza some of the Italian youth now inscribe on their banners, encouraged by some traits of apparent promise in the new Pope. However, their only true hope is in themselves, in their own courage, and in that wisdom winch may only be learned through many disappointments as to how to employ it so that it may destroy tyranny, not themselves. Mazzini, one of these noble refugees, is not only one of the heroic, the courageous, and the faithful, — Italy boasts many such, — but he is also one of the wise; — one of those who, disappointed in the outward results of their undertakings, can yet “bate no jot of heart and hope,” but must “steer right onward “; for it was no superficial enthusiasm, no impatient energies, that impelled him, but an understanding of what must be the designs of Heaven with regard to man, since God is Love, is Justice. He is one who can live fervently, but steadily, gently, every day, every hour, as well as on great, occasions, cheered by the light of hope; for, with Schiller, he is sure that “those who live for their faith shall behold it living.” He is one of those same beings who, measuring all things by the ideal standard, have yet no time to mourn over failure or imperfection; there is too much to be done to obviate it. Thus Mazzini, excluded from publication in his native language, has acquired the mastery both of French and English, and through his expressions in either shine the thoughts which animated his earlier effort with mild and steady radiance. The misfortunes of his country have only widened the sphere of his instructions, and made him an exponent of the better era to Europe at large. Those who wish to form an idea of his mind could not do better than to read his sketches of the Italian Martyrs in the “People’s Journal.” They will find there, on one of the most difficult occasions, an ardent friend speaking of his martyred friends with, the purity of impulse, warmth of sympathy, largeness and steadiness of view, and fineness of discrimination which must belong to a legislator for a CHRISTIAN commonwealth. But though I have read these expressions with great delight, this school was one to me still more forcible of the same ideas. Here these poor boys, picked up from the streets, are redeemed from bondage and gross ignorance by the most patient and constant devotion of time and effort. What love and sincerity this demands from minds capable of great thoughts, large plans, and rapid progress, only their peers can comprehend, yet exceeding great shall he the reward; and as among the fishermen, and poor people of Judæa were picked up those who have become to modern Europe a leaven that leavens the whole mass, so may these poor Italian boys yet become more efficacious as missionaries to their people than would an Orphic poet at this period. These youths have very commonly good faces, and eyes HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI from which that Italian fire that has done so much to warm the world glows out. We saw the distribution of prizes to the school, heard addresses from Mazzini, Pistracci, Mariotti (once a resident in our country), and an English gentleman who takes a great interest in the work, and then adjourned to an adjacent room, where a supper was provided for the boys and other guests, among whom we saw some of the exiled Poles. The whole evening gave a true and deep pleasure, though tinged with sadness. We saw a planting of the kingdom of Heaven, though now no larger than a grain of mustard-seed, and though perhaps none of those who watch the spot may live to see the birds singing in its branches. I have not yet spoken of one of our benefactors, Mr. Carlyle, whom I saw several times. I approached him with more reverence after a little experience of England and Scotland had taught me to appreciate the strength and height of that wall of shams and conventions which he more than any man, or thousand men, — indeed, he almost alone, — has begun to throw down. Wherever there was fresh thought, generous hope, the thought of Carlyle has begun the work. He has torn off the veils from hideous facts; he has burnt away foolish illusions; he has awakened thousands to know what it is to be a man, — that we must live, and not merely pretend to others that we live. He has touched the rocks and they have given forth musical answer; little more was wanting to begin to construct the city. But that little was wanting, and the work of construction is left to those that come after him: nay, all attempts of the kind he is the readiest to deride, fearing new shams worse than the old, unable to trust the general action of a thought, and finding no heroic man, no natural king, to represent it and challenge his confidence. Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, — only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men (happily not one invariable or inevitable) that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction, which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; on the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought; but it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror, — it is his nature and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near. He seemed to me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, but only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet, which, serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which as with a knitting-needle he catches up the stitches if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd; he sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morganas, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about, but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. He puts out his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove’s bird; yet he is not calm and grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not of gentle blood enough for that either. He is not exactly like anything but himself, and therefore you cannot see him without the most hearty refreshment and good-will, for he is original, rich, and strong enough to afford a thousand, faults; one expects some wild land in a rich kingdom. His talk, like his books, is full of pictures, his critical strokes masterly; allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject; I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him, the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for good. At all events, he seems to be what Destiny intended, and represents fully a certain side; so we make no remonstrance as to his being and proceeding for himself, though we sometimes must for us. I had meant some remarks on some fine pictures, and the little I saw of the theatre in England; but these topics must wait till my next, where they may connect themselves naturally enough with what I have to say of Paris. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1847

Frederic Hudson’s JOURNALISM IN THE UNITED STATES (Harper, 1873) would indicate that according to an auditor at the time, “the Tribune in 1847 had a total circulation of 28,115: 11,455 daily, 15,700 weekly, and 960 semiweekly.” Margaret Fuller had written her brother in 1845 claiming that she “addressed 50,000 readers” although in actuality this New-York paper would have had little more than half that readership. In 1846 Waldo Emerson had reported to Thomas Carlyle that Horace Greeley’s Tribune’s circulation was about 30,000. As of 1852 the Tribune was claiming that it had tripled its circulation of 1847 by reaching an “aggregate” number of 83,000. The weekly edition was being said to have some 200,000 readers — would that have been 200,000 individual subscriptions, or would that have been a figure calculated on the presumption that each of a smaller number of subscriptions were in fact being perused by an extended family?

January 5, Monday: A delayed undated letter of 1846 from Margaret Fuller\ was published as a column in the New- York Tribune, on the causes of progress.

Per the diary of Mary Chipman Lawrence, aboard the Addison out of New Bedford: “Early this morning I saw three boats which were stoven towing to the different ships. One happened to be ours. As no one was hurt fitted out another and sent back — At 9 another whale was brought to the ship. This is a very busy time. They are all to work cutting in the whale, some attending the works and day and night finds them all employed.”

February: In Paris, Margaret Fuller met George Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, and Frédéric François Chopin.

February 11, Thursday: Albert Woolson was born in the New York farm hamlet of Antwerp 22 miles northeast of Watertown.

Thomas Alva Edison was born.

On this day, or shortly afterward, Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller about Henry Thoreau’s Concord lecture of the previous night: Mrs. Ripley & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry’s account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Lecture 1171

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II) January 3, Monday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Ktaadn”

71. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Narrative of Event: The records of the Concord Lyceum state, “Concord Feb 17 1847 A lecture was delivered by Henry D Thoreau of Concord. Subject — Same as last week. A. G. Fay Sec[retary]”72 The lecture was the twelfth of the season’s sixteen offerings.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: See lecture 10 for a discussion of Miss Prudence Ward’s favorable comments on this lecture, which she reported, perhaps erroneously, to be a repetition of Thoreau’s lecture of the previous week. Lyceums very rarely allowed repeat performances, and at this time Henry Thoreau almost certainly had a draft of the 2d of his 3 early WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS lectures. But whether Prudence was right or wrong about the duplication, this second lecture attracted “a very full audience,” as Ward reported (quoted in Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 187), and was well received.

Two other letters, one by Waldo Emerson and one by Bronson Alcott, ambiguously refer to one or another of these lecture performances, with a slight favoring of the 17 February possibility. In a 28 February 1847 letter to Margaret Fuller, Emerson comments, “Mrs Ripley [Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley] & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he

72.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all.”73 The Alcott letter, to his daughter Anna Alcott, was penned on a “Wednesday Night” in February 1847, the day of one of the two lectures. In a response to Anna’s query about how she might help her mother and father through the family’s present difficult circumstances, Alcott assures her that self-improvement guided by her own conscience is the path to follow. He concludes with a tantalizingly cryptic endorsement of the lecture she would hear that evening. His apparent familiarity with what Thoreau will say suggests that he either had had private access to the material or had already heard it delivered, either as a private reading or a public lecture. If the latter, his opportunities would have been in Lincoln on 19 January, assuming that Thoreau gave his “History of Myself” lecture then, or in Concord on 10 February, assuming the unusual: that Thoreau did deliver the same lecture on both the 10th and 17th. Alcott’s letter to Anna reads in part:74 Your Note was the first thing I saw this morning, when I came in to make my study fire: and I was glad to find, all I knew, of your earnest desire to help us in these times of trial, confirmed in your own handwriting. You wish me to tell you what you can do to lighten your mother’s cares, and give your father a still deeper enjoyment in yourself, and your sisters .... Life is a lesson we best learn and almost solely too, by living. The Conscience within is the best, and, in the end, the only Counseller .... Tis that first of all duties[,] Self-improvement, to which end life, and the world, and your friends are all given. I think I speak truly when I say that you wish this most of all things .... As for me, and my thoughts — Great is my Peace, if in going at night to my Pillow, I have the sense of having earned my faculties, or limbs even, by thinking One Thought, speaking one word, doing one deed, that my task master approves, or the nearest or remotest Person or Time shall adopt, repeat, or enjoy. — Dear Anna, this from your thoughtful, yet careful-minded Father. For the rest, our friend Henry shall answer and explain in the Lecture you hear this evening.

Description of Topic: Very likely the 2d of Thoreau’s two earliest “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lectures, the text of this lecture is, for the most part, the second fifty-odd pages (paged “1” through “53” using Thoreau’s pagination on the manuscript leaves) of “the text of the first version” of WALDEN recovered by J. Lyndon Shanley.75 The following sentence suggests the sense of immediacy the lecture likely created among Thoreau’s auditors: “I trust that none of my hearers will be so uncharitable as to look into my house now — after hearing this, at the end of an unusually dirty winter, with critical housewife’s eyes, for I intend to celebrate the first bright & unquestionable spring morning by scrubbing my house with sand until it is as white as a lily — or, at any rate, as the washer-woman said of her clothes, as white as a ‘wiolet.’”76 As with the first of his two lectures, Thoreau continued to revise this text and published it seven-and-a-half years later as the second chapter of WALDEN, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” although several paragraphs of the lecture text consist of passages published in the “Reading” and “Sounds” chapters.

73.THE LETTERS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 9 volumes to date, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; 1990), 3:377-78. 74.THE LETTERS OF A. BRONSON ALCOTT, pages 128-29. 75.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, pages 137-57. 76.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 153. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

February 19, Friday: An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on the sights she was seeing in Europe and the public people77 she was meeting was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

According to The Concord Freeman, “Ice King” Frederic Tudor’s work crew was harvesting between 800 and 1,000 tons of ice per day from the surface of Walden Pond.

On one or another morning Waldo Emerson mused about the prospect of profiting from Walden Pond (not very realistically, since no part of the surface of said pond was within the plotlines of his abutting woodlot):

I woke up this morning & find the ice in my pond promised to be a revenue. It was as if somebody had proposed to buy the air that blew over my field.

March 3, Wednesday: In the US Army, Colonel Franklin Pierce was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. WAR ON MEXICO

Continuing along the tragic trajectory of the Donner disaster, Reed left the emigrant camps with 17 travelers, to wit: • Patrick and Margaret Breen and their children John, James F., Peter, Patrick Jr., and Isabella • Mary and Isaac Donner and their half brother Solomon Hook • Elizabeth Graves and her children Nancy, Jonathan, Franklin Ward, Jr., and Elizabeth • Patty and Tommy Reed. An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on her travel experiences from London to Paris was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: READ ABOUT THIS

Paris. When I wrote last I could not finish with London, and there remain yet two or three things I wish to speak of before passing to my impressions of this wonder-full Paris. I visited the model prison at Pentonville; but though in some respects an improvement upon others I have seen, — though there was the appearance of great neatness and order in the arrangements of life, kindness and good judgment in the discipline of the prisoners, — yet there was also an air of bleak forlornness about the place, and it fell far short of what my mind demands of such abodes considered as redemption schools. But as the subject of prisons is now engaging the attention of many of the wisest and best, and the tendency is in what seems to me the true direction, I need not trouble myself to make prude and hasty suggestions; it is a subject to which persons who would be of use should give the earnest devotion of calm and leisurely 77. The term “celebrities” would not be first used, by Emerson, until the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI thought. The same day I went to see an establishment which gave me unmixed pleasure; it is a bathing establishment put at a very low rate to enable the poor to avoid one of thee worst miseries of their lot, and which yet promises to pay. Joined with this is an establishment for washing clothes, where the poor can go and hire, for almost nothing, good tubs, water ready heated, the use of an apparatus for rinsing, drying, and ironing, all so admirably arranged that a poor woman can in three hours get through an amount of washing and ironing that would, under ordinary circumstances, occupy three or four days. Especially the drying closets I contemplated with great satisfaction, and hope to see in our own country the same arrangements throughout the cities, and even in the towns and villages. Hanging out the clothes is a great exposure for women, even when they have a good place for it; but when, as is so common in cities, they must dry them in the house, how much they suffer! In New York, I know, those poor women who take in washing endure a great deal of trouble and toil from this cause; I have suffered myself from being obliged to send back what had cost them so much toil, because it had been, perhaps inevitably, soiled in the drying or ironing, or filled with the smell of their miscellaneous cooking. In London it is much worse. An eminent physician told me he knew of two children whom he considered to have died because their mother, having but one room to live in, was obliged to wash and dry clothes close to their bed when they were ill. The poor people in London naturally do without washing all they can, and beneath that perpetual fall of soot the result may be guessed. All but the very poor in England put out their washing, and this custom ought to be universal in civilized countries, as it can be done much better and quicker by a few regular laundresses than by many families, and “the washing day” is so malignant a foe to the peace and joy of households that it ought to be effaced from the calendar. But as long as we are so miserable as to have any very poor people in this world, they cannot put out their washing, because they cannot earn enough money to pay for it, and, preliminary to something better, washing establishments like this of London are desirable. One arrangement that they have here in Paris will be a good one, even when we cease to have any very poor people, and, please Heaven, also to have any very rich. These are the Crèches, — houses where poor women leave their children to be nursed during the day while they are at work. I must mention that the superintendent of the washing establishment observed, with a legitimate triumph, that it had been built without giving a single dinner or printing a single puff, — an extraordinary thing, indeed, for England! To turn to something a little gayer, — the embroidery on this tattered coat of civilized life, — I went into only two theatres; one the Old Drury, once the scene of great glories, now of execrable music and more execrable acting. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it. At the Sadler’s Wells theatre I saw a play which I had much admired in reading it, but found still better in actual representation; indeed, it seems to me there can be no better acting play: this is “The Patrician’s Daughter,” by J.W. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Marston. The movement is rapid, yet clear and free; the dialogue natural, dignified, and flowing; the characters marked with few, but distinct strokes. Where the tone of discourse rises with manly sentiment or passion, the audience applauded with bursts of generous feeling that gave me great pleasure, for this play is one that, in its scope and meaning, marks the new era in England; it is full of an experience which is inevitable to a man of talent there, and is harbinger of the day when the noblest commoner shall be the only noble possible in England. But how different all this acting to what I find in France! Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer what is good to what is bad, if only a fair opportunity for choice be allowed. When I came here, my first thought was to go and see Mademoiselle Rachel. I was sure that in her I should find a true genius, absolutely the diamond, and so it proved. I went to see her seven or eight times, always in parts that required great force of soul and purity of taste even to conceive them, and only once had reason to find fault with her. On one single occasion I saw her violate the harmony of the character to produce effect at a particular moment; but almost invariably I found her a true artist, worthy Greece, and worthy at many moments to have her conceptions immortalized in marble. Her range even in high tragedy is limited. She can only express the darker passions, and grief in its most desolate aspects. Nature has not gifted her with those softer and more flowery attributes that lend to pathos its utmost tenderness. She does not melt to tears, or calm or elevate the heart by the presence of that tragic beauty that needs all the assaults of Fate to make it show its immortal sweetness. Her noblest aspect is when sometimes she expresses truth in some severe shape, and rises, simple and austere, above the mixed elements around her. On the dark side, she is very great in hatred and revenge. I admired her more in Phedre than in any other part in which I saw her. The guilty love inspired by the hatred of a goddess was expressed in all its symptoms with a force and terrible naturalness that almost suffocated the beholder. After she had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system, the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate, were still more grand. I had heard so much about the power of her eye in one fixed look, and the expression she could concentrate in a single word, that the utmost results could only satisfy my expectations. It is, indeed, something magnificent to see the dark cloud give out such sparks, each one fit to deal a separate death; but it was not that I admired most in her: it was the grandeur, truth, and depth of her conception of each part, and the sustained purity with which she represented it. For the rest, I shall write somewhere a detailed critique upon the parts in which I saw her. It is she who has made me acquainted with the true way of viewing French tragedy. I had no idea of its powers and symmetry till now, and have received from the revelation high pleasure and a crowd of thoughts. The French language from her lips is a divine dialect; it is stripped of its national and personal peculiarities, and becomes HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI what any language must, moulded by such a genius, the pure music of the heart and soul. I never could remember her tone in speaking any word; it was too perfect; you had received the thought quite direct. Yet, had I never heard her speak a word, my mind would, be filled by her attitudes. Nothing more graceful can be conceived, nor could the genius of sculpture surpass her management of the antique drapery. She has no beauty except in the intellectual severity of her outline, and bears marks of age which will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly before long. Still it will be a grandiose, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen common lives. Though the French tragedy is well acted throughout, yet unhappily there is no male actor now with a spark of fire, and these men seem the meanest pigmies by the side of Rachel; — so on the scene, beside the tragedy intended by the author, you see also that common tragedy, a woman of genius who throws away her precious heart, lives and dies for one unworthy of her. In parts this effect is productive of too much pain. I saw Rachel one night with her brother and sister. The sister imitated her so closely that you could not help seeing she had a manner, and an imitable manner. Her brother was in the play her lover, — a wretched automaton, and presenting the most unhappy family likeness to herself. Since then I have hardly cared to go and see her. We could wish with geniuses, as with the Phoenix, to see only one of the family at a time. In the pathetic or sentimental drama Paris boasts another young actress, nearly as distinguished in that walk as Rachel in hers. This is Rose Cheny, whom we saw in her ninety-eighth personation of Clarissa Harlowe, and afterward in Genevieve and the Protégé sans le Savoir, — a little piece written expressly for her by Scribe. The “Miss Clarisse” of the French drama is a feeble and partial reproduction of the heroine of Richardson; indeed, the original in all its force of intellect and character would have been too much for the charming Rose Cheny, but to the purity and lovely tenderness of Clarissa she does full justice. In the other characters she was the true French girl, full of grace and a mixture of naïveté and cunning, sentiment and frivolity, that is winning and piquant, if not satisfying. Only grief seems very strange to those bright eyes; we do not find that they can weep much and bear the light of day, and the inhaling of charcoal seems near at hand to their brightest pleasures. At the other little theatres you see excellent acting, and a sparkle of wit unknown to the world out of France. The little pieces in which all the leading topics of the day are reviewed are full of drolleries that make you laugh at each instant. Poudre-Colon is the only one of these I have seen; in this, among other jokes, Dumas, in the character of Monte-Christo and in a costume half Oriental, half juggler, is made to pass the other theatres in review while seeking candidates for his new one. Dumas appeared in court yesterday, and defended his own cause against the editors who sue him for evading some of his engagements. I was very desirous to hear him speak, and went there in what I was assured would be very good season; but a French audience, who knew the ground better, had slipped in before me, and I returned, as has been too often the case with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI me in Paris, having seen nothing but endless staircases, dreary vestibules, and gens d’armes. The hospitality of le grande nation to the stranger is, in many respects, admirable. Galleries, libraries, cabinets of coins, museums, are opened in the most liberal manner to the stranger, warmed, lighted, ay, and guarded, for him almost all days in the week; treasures of the past are at his service; but when anything is happening in the present, the French run quicker, glide in more adroitly, and get possession of the ground. I find it not the most easy matter to get to places even where there is nothing going on, there is so much tiresome fuss of getting billets from one and another to be gone through; but when something is happening it is still worse. I missed hearing M. Guizot in his speech on the Montpensier marriage, which would have given a very good idea of his manner, and which, like this defence of M. Dumas, was a skilful piece of work as regards evasion of the truth. The good feeling toward England which had been fostered with so much care and toil seems to have been entirely dissipated by the mutual recriminations about this marriage, and the old dislike flames up more fiercely for having been hid awhile beneath the ashes. I saw the little Duchess, the innocent or ignorant cause of all this disturbance, when presented at court. She went round the circle on the arm of the Queen. Though only fourteen, she looks twenty, but has something fresh, engaging, and girlish about her. I fancy it will soon be rubbed out under the drill of the royal household. I attended not only at the presentation, but at the ball given at the Tuileries directly after. These are fine shows, as the suite of apartments is very handsome, brilliantly lighted, and the French ladies surpass all others in the art of dress; indeed, it gave me much, pleasure to see them. Certainly there are many ugly ones, but they are so well dressed, and have such an air of graceful vivacity, that the general effect was that of a flower-garden. As often happens, several American women were among the most distinguished for positive beauty; one from Philadelphia, who is by many persons considered the prettiest ornament of the dress circle at the Italian Opera, was especially marked by the attention of the king. However, these ladies, even if here a long time, do not attain the air and manner of French women; the magnetic atmosphere that envelops them is less brilliant and exhilarating in its attractions. It was pleasant to my eye, which has always been so wearied in our country by the sombre masses of men that overcloud our public assemblies, to see them now in so great variety of costume, color, and decoration. Among the crowd wandered Leverrier, in the costume of Academician, looking as if he had lost, not found, his planet. French savants are more generally men of the world, and even men of fashion, than those of other climates; but, in his case, he seemed not to find it easy to exchange the music of the spheres for the music of fiddles. Speaking of Leverrier leads to another of my disappointments. I went to the Sorbonne to hear him lecture, nothing dreaming that the old pedantic and theological character of those halls was strictly kept up in these days of light. An old guardian of the inner temple, seeing me approach, had his speech all ready, and, manning the entrance, said with a disdainful air, before we had time to utter a word, “Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but Madame must remain here” (i.e. in the court-yard). After some HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI exclamations of surprise, I found an alternative in the Hotel de Clugny, where I passed an hour very delightfully while waiting for my companion. The rich remains of other centuries are there so arranged that they can be seen to the best advantage; many of the works in ivory, china, and carved wood are truly splendid or exquisite. I saw a dagger with jewelled hilt which talked whole poems to my mind. In the various “Adorations of the Magi,” I found constantly one of the wise men black, and with the marked African lineaments. Before I had half finished, my companion came and wished me at least to visit the lecture-rooms of the Sorbonne, now that the talk, too good for female ears, was over. But the guardian again interfered to deny me entrance. “You can go, Madame,” said he, “to the College of France; you can go to this and t’other place, but you cannot enter here.” “What, sir,” said I, “is it your institution alone that remains in a state of barbarism?” “Que voulez vous, Madame?” he replied, and, as he spoke, his little dog began to bark at me, — “Que voulez vous, Madame? c’est la regle,” — “What would you have, Madam? IT IS THE RULE,” — a reply which makes me laugh even now, as I think how the satirical wits of former days might have used it against the bulwarks of learned dulness. I was more fortunate in hearing Arago, and he justified all my expectations. Clear, rapid, full and equal, his discourse is worthy its celebrity, and I felt repaid for the four hours one is obliged to spend in going, in waiting, and in hearing; for the lecture begins at half past one, and you must be there before twelve to get a seat, so constant and animated is his popularity. I have attended, with some interest, two discussions at the Athenée, — one on Suicide, the other on the Crusades. They are amateur affairs, where, as always at such times, one hears much, nonsense and vanity, much making of phrases and sentimental grimace; but there was one excellent speaker, adroit and rapid as only a Frenchman could be. With admirable readiness, skill, and rhetorical polish, he examined the arguments of all the others, and built upon their failures a triumph for himself. His management of the language, too, was masterly, and French is the best of languages for such a purpose, — clear, flexible, full of sparkling points and quick, picturesque turns, with a subtile blandness that makes the dart tickle while it wounds. Truly he pleased the fancy, filled the ear, and carried us pleasantly along over the smooth, swift waters; but then came from the crowd a gentleman, not one of the appointed orators of the evening, but who had really something in his heart to say, — a grave, dark man, with Spanish eyes, and the simple dignity of honor and earnestness in all his gesture and manner. He said in few and unadorned words his say, and the sense of a real presence filled the room, and those charms of rhetoric faded, as vanish the beauties of soap-bubbles from the eyes of astonished childhood. I was present on one good occasion at the Academy the day that M. Rémusat was received there in the place of Royer-Collard. I looked down from one of the tribunes upon the flower of the celebrities of France, that is to say, of the celebrities which are authentic, comme il faut. Among them were many marked faces, many fine heads; but in reading the works of poets we always fancy them about the age of Apollo himself, and I found with pain some of my favorites quite old, and very unlike the company on Parnassus as represented by Raphael. Some, however, were venerable, even noble, to behold. Indeed, the literary dynasty HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of France is growing old, and here, as in England and Germany, there seems likely to occur a serious gap before the inauguration of another, if indeed another is coming. However, it was an imposing sight; there are men of real distinction now in the Academy, and Molière would have a fair chance if he were proposed to-day. Among the audience I saw many ladies of fine expression and manner, as well as one or two precieuses ridicules, a race which is never quite extinct. M. Rémusat, as is the custom on these occasions, painted the portrait of his predecessor; the discourse was brilliant and discriminating in the details, but the orator seemed to me to neglect drawing some obvious inferences which would have given a better point of view for his subject. A séance to me much more impressive find interesting was one which borrowed nothing from dress, decorations, or the presence of titled pomp. I went to call on La Mennais, to whom I had a letter, I found him in a little study; his secretary was writing in a larger room through which I passed. With him was a somewhat citizen-looking, but vivacious, elderly man, whom I was at first sorry to see, having wished for half an hour’s undisturbed visit to the apostle of Democracy. But how quickly were those feelings displaced by joy when he named to me the great national lyrist of France, the unequalled Béranger. I had not expected to see him at all, for he is not one to be seen in any show place; he lives in the hearts of the people, and needs no homage from their eyes. I was very happy in that little study in presence of these two men, whose influence has been so great, so real. To me Béranger has been much; his wit, his pathos, his exquisite lyric grace, have made the most delicate strings vibrate, and I can feel, as well as see, what he is in his nation and his place. I have not personally received anything from La Mennais, as, born under other circumstances, mental facts which he, once the pupil of Rome, has learned by passing through severe ordeals, are at the basis of all my thoughts. But I see well what he has been and is to Europe, and of what great force of nature and spirit. He seems suffering and pale, but in his eyes is the light of the future. These are men who need no flourish of trumpets to announce their coming, — no band of martial music upon their steps, — no obsequious nobles in their train. They are the true kings, the theocratic kings, the judges in Israel. The hearts of men make music at their approach; the mind of the age is the historian of their passage; and only men of destiny like themselves shall be permitted to write their eulogies, or fill their vacant seats. Wherever there is a genius like his own, a germ of the finest fruit still hidden beneath the soil, the “Chante pauvre petit” of Béranger shall strike, like a sunbeam, and give it force to emerge, and wherever there is the true Crusade, — for the spirit, not the tomb of Christ, — shall be felt an echo of the “Que tes armes soient benis jeune soldat” of La Mennais. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI March 31, Wednesday: In beautiful downtown Boston, a temperance meeting was broken up at Faneuil Hall.

The anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, whose SCIENCE OF SOCIETY had in 1852 summarized many anti-state ideas, had been in correspondence with Lysander Spooner and at this point had made a contribution to help Spooner finish THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY.

An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on art, music, and ether was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: It needs not to speak in this cursory manner of the treasures of Art, pictures, sculptures, engravings, and the other riches which France lays open so freely to the stranger in her Musées. Any examination worth writing of such objects, or account of the thoughts they inspire, demands a place by itself, and an ample field in which to expatiate. The American, first introduced to some good pictures by the truly great geniuses of the religious period in Art, must, if capable at all of mental approximation to the life therein embodied, be too deeply affected, too full of thoughts, to be in haste to say anything, and for me, I bide my time. No such great crisis, however, is to be apprehended from acquaintance with the productions of the modern French school. They are, indeed, full of talent and of vigor, but also melodramatic and exaggerated to a degree that seems to give the nightmare passage through the fresh and cheerful day. They sound no depth of soul, and are marked with the signet of a degenerate age. Thus speak I generally. To the pictures of Horace Vernet one cannot but turn a gracious eye, they are so faithful a transcript of the life which circulates around us in the present state of things, and we are willing to see his nobles and generals mounted on such excellent horses. De la Roche gives me pleasure; there is in his pictures a simple and natural poesy; he is a man who has in his own heart a well of good water, whence he draws for himself when the streams are mixed with strange soil and bear offensive marks of the bloody battles of life. The pictures of Leopold Robert I find charming. They are full of vigor and nobleness; they express a nature where all is rich, young, and on a large scale. Those that I have seen are so happily expressive of the thoughts and perceptions of early manhood, I can hardly regret he did not live to enter on another stage of life, the impression now received is so single. The effort of the French school in Art, as also its main tendency in literature, seems to be to turn the mind inside out, in the coarsest acceptation of such a phrase. Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life. But then it is a symbol that Art seeks to present, and not the fact itself. These French painters seem to have no idea of this; they have not studied the method of Nature. With the true artist, as with Nature herself, the more full the representation, the more profound and enchanting is the sense of mystery. We look and look, as on a flower of which we cannot scrutinize the secret life, yet b; looking seem constantly drawn nearer to the soul that causes and governs that life. But in the French pictures suffering is represented by streams of blood, — wickedness by the most ghastly contortions. I saw a movement in the opposite direction in England; it was in Turner’s pictures of the later period. It is well known that HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Turner, so long an idol of the English public, paints now in a manner which has caused the liveliest dissensions in the world of connoisseurs. There are two parties, one of which maintains, not only that the pictures of the late period are not good, but that they are not pictures at all, — that it is impossible to make out the design, or find what Turner is aiming at by those strange blotches of color. The other party declare that these pictures are not only good, but divine, — that whoever looks upon them in the true manner will not fail to find there somewhat ineffably and transcendently admirable, — the soul of Art. Books have been written to defend this side of the question. I had become much interested about this matter, as the fervor of feeling on either side seemed to denote that there was something real and vital going on, and, while time would not permit my visiting other private collections in London and its neighborhood, I insisted on taking it for one of Turner’s pictures. It was at the house of one of his devoutest disciples, who has arranged everything in the rooms to harmonize with them. There were a great many of the earlier period; these seemed to me charming, but superficial, views of Nature. They were of a character that he who runs may read, — obvious, simple, graceful. The later pictures were quite a different matter; mysterious-looking things, — hieroglyphics of picture, rather than picture itself. Sometimes you saw a range of red dots, which, after long looking, dawned on you as the roofs of houses, — shining streaks turned out to be most alluring rivulets, if traced with patience and a devout eye. Above all, they charmed the eye and the thought. Still, these pictures, it seems to me, cannot be considered fine works of Art, more than the mystical writing common to a certain class of minds in the United States can be called good writing. A great work of Art demands a great thought, or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. Neither in Art nor literature more than in life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well dressed. But in a transition state, whether of Art or literature, deeper thoughts are imperfectly expressed, because they cannot yet be held and treated masterly. This seems to be the case with Turner. He has got beyond the English gentleman’s conventional view of Nature, which implies a little sentiment and a very cultivated taste; he has become awake to what is elemental, normal, in Nature, — such, for instance, as one sees in the working of water on the seashore. He tries to represent these primitive forms. In the drawings of Piranesi, in the pictures of Rembrandt, one sees this grand language exhibited more truly. It is not picture, but certain primitive and leading effects of light and shadow, or lines and contours, that captivate the attention. I saw a picture of Rembrandt’s at the Louvre, whose subject I do not know and have never cared to inquire. I cannot analyze the group, but I understand and feel the thought it embodies. At something similar Turner seems aiming; an aim so opposed to the practical and outward tendency of the English mind, that, as a matter of course, the majority find themselves mystified, and thereby angered, but for the same reason answering to so deep and seldom satisfied a want in the minds of the minority, as to secure the most ardent sympathy where any at all can be elicited. Upon this topic of the primitive forms and operations of nature, I am reminded of something interesting I was looking at yesterday. These are botanical models in wax, with microscopic HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI dissections, by an artist from Florence, a pupil of Calamajo, the Director of the Wax-Model Museum there. I saw collections of ten different genera, embracing from fifty to sixty species, of Fungi, Mosses, and Lichens, detected and displayed in all the beautiful secrets of their lives; many of them, as observed by Dr. Leveillé of Paris. The artist told me that a fisherman, introduced to such acquaintance with the marvels of love and beauty which we trample under foot or burn in the chimney each careless day, exclaimed, “‘Tis the good God who protects us on the sea that made all these”; and a similar recognition, a correspondent feeling, will not be easily evaded by the most callous observer. This artist has supplied many of these models to the magnificent collection of the Jardin des Plantes, to Edinburgh, and to Bologna, and would furnish them, to our museums at a much cheaper rate than they can elsewhere be obtained. I wish the Universities of Cambridge, New York, and other leading institutions of our country, might avail themselves of the opportunity. In Paris I have not been very fortunate in hearing the best music. At the different Opera-Houses, the orchestra is always good, but the vocalization, though far superior to what I have heard at home, falls so far short of my ideas and hopes that — except to the Italian Opera — I have not been often. The Opera Comique I visited only once; it was tolerably well, and no more, and, for myself, I find the tolerable intolerable in music. At the Grand Opera I heard Robert le Diable and Guillaume Tell almost with ennui; the decorations and dresses are magnificent, the instrumental performance good, but not one fine singer to fill these fine parts. Duprez has had a great reputation, and probably has sung better In former days; still he has a vulgar mind, and can never have had any merit as an artist. At present I find him unbearable. He forces his voice, sings in the most coarse, showy style, and aims at producing effects without regard to the harmony of his part; fat and vulgar, he still takes the part of the lover and young chevalier; to my sorrow I saw him in Ravenswood, and he has well-nigh disenchanted for me the Bride of Lammermoor. The Italian Opera is here as well sustained, I believe, as anywhere in the world at present; all about it is certainly quite good, but alas! nothing excellent, nothing admirable. Yet no! I must not say nothing: Lablache is excellent, — voice, intonation, manner of song, action. Ronconi I found good in the Doctor of “L’Elisire d’Amore”. For the higher parts Grisi, though now much too large for some of her parts, and without a particle of poetic grace or dignity, has certainly beauty of feature, and from nature a fine voice. But I find her conception of her parts equally coarse and shallow. Her love is the love of a peasant; her anger, though having the Italian picturesque richness and vigor, is the anger of an Italian fishwife, entirely unlike anything in the same rank elsewhere; her despair is that of a person with the toothache, or who has drawn a blank in the lottery. The first time I saw her was in Norma; then the beauty of her outline, which becomes really enchanting as she recalls the first emotions of love, the force and gush of her song, filled my ear, and charmed the senses, so that I was pleased, and did not perceive her great defects; but with each time of seeing her I liked her less, and now I do not like her at all. Persiani is more generally a favorite here; she is indeed HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI skilful both as an actress and in the management of her voice, but I find her expression meretricious, her singing mechanical. Neither of these women is equal to Pico in natural force, if she had but the same advantages of culture and environment. In hearing Semiramide here, I first learned to appreciate the degree of talent with which it was cast in New York. Grisi indeed is a far better Semiramis than Borghese, but the best parts of the opera lost all their charm from the inferiority of Brambilla, who took Pico’s place. Mario has a charming voice, grace and tenderness; he fills very well the part of the young, chivalric lover, but he has no range of power. Coletti is a very good singer; he has not from Nature a fine voice or personal beauty; but he has talent, good taste, and often surpasses the expectation he has inspired. Gardini, the new singer, I have only heard once, and that was in a lovesick-shepherd part; he showed delicacy, tenderness, and tact. In fine, among all these male singers there is much to please, but little to charm; and for the women, they never fail absolutely to fill their parts, but no ray of the Muse has fallen on them. Don Giovanni conferred on me a benefit, of which certainly its great author never dreamed. I shall relate it, — first begging pardon of Mozart, and assuring him I had no thought of turning his music to the account of a “vulgar utility.” It was quite by accident. After suffering several days very much with the toothache, I resolved to get rid of the cause of sorrow by the aid of ether; not sorry, either, to try its efficacy, after all the marvellous stories I had heard. The first time I inhaled it, I did not for several seconds feel the effect, and was just thinking, “Alas! this has not power to soothe nerves so irritable as mine,” when suddenly I wandered off, I don’t know where, but it was a sensation like wandering in long garden- walks, and through many alleys of trees, — many impressions, but all pleasant and serene. The moment the tube was removed, I started into consciousness, and put my hand to my cheek; but, sad! the throbbing tooth was still there. The dentist said I had not seemed to him insensible. He then gave me the ether in a stronger dose, and this time I quitted the body instantly, and cannot remember any detail of what I saw and did; but the impression was as in the Oriental tale, where the man has his head in the water an instant only, but in his vision a thousand years seem to have passed. I experienced that same sense of an immense length of time and succession of impressions; even, now, the moment my mind was in that state seems to me a far longer period in time than my life on earth does as I look back upon it. Suddenly I seemed to see the old dentist, as I had for the moment before I inhaled the gas, amid his plants, in his nightcap and dressing-gown; in the twilight the figure had somewhat of a Faust-like, magical air, and he seemed to say, “C’est inutile.” Again I started up, fancying that once more he had not dared to extract the tooth, but it was gone. What is worth, noticing is the mental translation I made of his words, which, my ear must have caught, for my companion tells me he said, “C’est le moment,” a phrase of just as many syllables, but conveying just the opposite sense. Ah! I how I wished then, that you had settled, there in the United States, who really brought this means of evading a portion of the misery of life into use. But as it was, I remained at a loss whom to apostrophize with my benedictions, whether Dr. Jackson, Morton, or Wells, and somebody thus was robbed of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI clue; — neither does Europe know to whom to address her medals. However, there is no evading the heavier part of these miseries. You avoid the moment of suffering, and escape the effort of screwing up your courage for one of these moments, but not the jar to the whole system. I found the effect of having taken the ether bad for me. I seemed to taste it all the time, and neuralgic pain continued; this lasted three days. For the evening of the third, I had taken a ticket to Don Giovanni, and could not bear to give up this opera, which I had always been longing to hear; still I was in much suffering, and, as it was the sixth day I had been so, much weakened. However, I went, expecting to be obliged to come out; but the music soothed the nerves at once. I hardly suffered at all during the opera; however, I supposed the pain would return as soon as I came out; but no! it left me from that time. Ah! if physicians only understood the influence of the mind over the body, instead of treating, as they so often do, their patients like machines, and according to precedent! But I must pause here for to-day.

Early Spring: It had been while she was still in Paris, before departing for Napoli, that Margaret Fuller had a tooth out while under the influence of ether. (This was well before Thoreau’s having all his teeth pulled at once, under ether.)

On her way from Paris to Napoli, the English steamer on which the Fuller/Spring party had embarked was rammed and nearly sunk by a coastal ship. In a letter to Emerson she would comment that she had “only just escaped being drowned.” TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April: At the Vatican, Margaret Fuller was picked up by Giovanni Angelo, marchése d’Ossoli.

The Marchése Giovanni Angelo Ossoli HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May: Somewhat prematurely, Henry Thoreau sent his A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS ms to Wiley & Putnam.

During this month or the following one, Waldo Emerson would confide to his Journal:

On the seashore at Nantucket Island I saw the play of the Atlantic with the coast. Here was wealth: Every wave reached a quarter of a mile along shore as it broke. There are no rich men, I said to compare with these. Every wave is a fortune. One thinks of Etzlers and great projectors who will yet turn this immense waste strength to account and save the limbs of human slaves. Ah what freedom & grace & beauty with all this might. The wind blew back the foam from the top of each billow as it rolled in, like the hair of a woman in the wind. The freedom makes the observer feel as a slave. Our expression is so slender, thin, & cramp; can we not learn here a generous eloquence? This was the lesson our starving poverty wanted. This was the disciplinary Pythagorean music which should be medicine. At Brook Farm one man ploughed all day, & one looked out of the window all day & drew his picture, and both received the same wages.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on art, politics, and the hope of the Romans: I bade adieu to Paris on the 25th of February, just as we had had one fine day. It was the only one of really delightful weather, from morning till night, that I had to enjoy all the while I was at Paris, from the 13th of November till the 25th of February. Let no one abuse our climate; even in winter it is delightful, compared to the Parisian winter of mud and mist. This one day brought out the Parisian world in its gayest colors. I never saw anything more animated or prettier, of the kind, than the promenade that day in the Champs Elysées. Such crowds of gay equipages, with cavaliers and their amazons flying through their midst on handsome and swift horses! On the promenade, what groups of passably pretty ladies, with excessively pretty bonnets, announcing in their hues of light green, peach-blossom, and primrose the approach of spring, and charming children, for French children are charming! I cannot speak with equal approbation of the files of men sauntering arm in arm. One sees few fine-looking men in Paris: the air, half-military, half- dandy, of self-esteem and savoir-faire, is not particularly interesting; nor are the glassy stare and fumes of bad cigars exactly what one most desires to encounter, when the heart is opened by the breath of spring zephyrs and the hope of buds and blossoms. But a French crowd is always gay, full of quick turns and drolleries; most amusing when most petulant, it represents what is so agreeable in the character of the nation. We have now seen it on two good occasions, the festivities of the new year, and just after we came was the procession of the Fat Ox, described, if I mistake not, by Eugene Sue. An immense crowd thronged the streets this year to see it, but few figures and little invention followed the emblem of plenty; indeed, few among the people HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

could have had the heart for such a sham, knowing how the poorer classes have suffered from hunger this winter. All signs of this are kept out of sight in Paris. A pamphlet, called “The Voice HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of Famine,” stating facts, though in the tone of vulgar and exaggerated declamation, unhappily common to productions on the radical side, was suppressed almost as soon as published; but the fact cannot be suppressed, that the people in the provinces have suffered most terribly amid the vaunted prosperity of France. While Louis Philippe lives, the gases, compressed by his strong grasp, may not burst up to light; but the need of some radical measures of reform is not less strongly felt in France than elsewhere, and the time will come before long when such will be imperatively demanded. The doctrines of Fourier are making considerable progress, and wherever they spread, the necessity of some practical application of the precepts of Christ, in lieu of the mummeries of a worn-out ritual, cannot fail to be felt. The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of these subjects, — such as is animated by the hope of prevention. The mind of Fourier was, in many respects, uncongenial to mine. Educated in an age of gross materialism, he was tainted by its faults. In attempts to reorganize society, he commits the error of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the clothing of soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus, — his views were large and noble. His life was one of devout study on these subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, — the most superficial acquaintance with the population of London and Paris, — could seek to hinder a study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes. But always, always, the unthinking mob has found stones on the highway to throw at the prophets. Amid so many great causes for thought and anxiety, how childish has seemed the endless gossip of the Parisian press on the subject of the Spanish marriage, — how melancholy the flimsy falsehoods of M. Guizot, — more melancholy the avowal so naïvely made, amid those falsehoods, that to his mind expediency is the best policy! This is the policy, said he, that has made France so prosperous. Indeed, the success is correspondent with the means, though in quite another sense than that he meant. I went to the Hotel des Invalides, supposing I should be admitted to the spot where repose the ashes of Napoleon, for though I love not pilgrimages to sepulchres, and prefer paying my homage to the living spirit rather than to the dust it once animated, I should have liked to muse a moment beside his urn; but as yet the visitor is not admitted there. In the library, however, one sees the picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps, opposite to that of the present King of the French. Just as they are, these should serve as frontispieces to two chapters of history. In the first, the seed was sown in a field of blood indeed, yet was it the seed of all that is vital in the present period. By Napoleon the career was really laid open to talent, and all that is really great in France now consists in the possibility that talent finds of struggling to the light. Paris is a great intellectual centre, and there is a Chamber of Deputies to represent the people, very different from the poor, limited Assembly politically so called. Their tribune is that of literature, and one needs not to beg tickets to mingle with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the audience. To the actually so-called Chamber of Deputies I was indebted for two pleasures. First and greatest, a sight of the manuscripts of Rousseau treasured in their Library. I saw them and touched them, — those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some detours through villanous places, but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with Rousseau, and learn of him even more and more: such is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd of those rays of whose heat they complain. The second pleasure was in the speech of M. Berryer, when the Chamber was discussing the Address to the King. Those of Thiers and Guizot had been, so far, more interesting, as they stood for more that was important; but M. Berryer is the most eloquent speaker of the House. His oratory is, indeed, very good; not logical, but plausible, full and rapid, with occasional bursts of flame and showers of sparks, though indeed no stone of size and weight enough to crush any man was thrown out of the crater. Although the oratory of our country is very inferior to what might be expected from the perfect freedom and powerful motive for development of genius in this province, it presents several examples of persons superior in both force and scope, and equal in polish, to M. Berryer. Nothing can be more pitiful than the manner in which the infamous affair of Cracow is treated on all hands. There is not even the affectation of noble feeling about it. La Mennais and his coadjutors published in La Reforme an honorable and manly protest, which the public rushed to devour the moment it was out of the press; — and no wonder! for it was the only crumb of comfort offered to those who have the nobleness to hope that the confederation of nations may yet be conducted on the basis of divine justice and human right. Most men who touched the subject apparently weary of feigning, appeared in their genuine colors of the calmest, most complacent selfishness. As described by Körner in the prayer of such a man: — “O God, save me, My wife, child, and hearth, Then my harvest also; Then will I bless thee, Though thy lightning scorch to blackness All the rest of human kind.” A sentiment which finds its paraphrase in the following vulgate of our land: — “O Lord, save me, My wife, child, and brother Sammy, Us four, and no more.” The latter clause, indeed, is not quite frankly avowed as yet by politicians. It is very amusing to be in the Chamber of Deputies when some dull person is speaking. The French have a truly Greek vivacity; they cannot endure to be bored. Though their conduct is not very dignified, I should like a corps of the same kind of sharp- shooters in our legislative assemblies when honorable gentlemen are addressing their constituents and not the assembly, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI repeating in lengthy, windy, clumsy paragraphs what has been the truism of the newspaper press for months previous, wickedly wasting the time that was given us to learn something for ourselves, and help our fellow-creatures. In the French Chamber, if a man who has nothing to say ascends the tribune, the audience-room is filled with the noise as of myriad beehives; the President rises on his feet, and passes the whole time of the speech in taking the most violent exercise, stretching himself to look imposing, ringing his bell every two minutes, shouting to the representatives of the nation to be decorous and attentive. In vain: the more he rings, the more they won’t be still. I saw an orator in this situation, fighting against the desires of the audience, as only a Frenchman could, — certainly a man of any other nation would have died of embarrassment rather, — screaming out his sentences, stretching out both arms with an air of injured dignity, panting, growing red in the face; but the hubbub of voices never stopped an instant. At last he pretended to be exhausted, stopped, and took out his snuff-box. Instantly there was a calm. He seized the occasion, and shouted out a sentence; but it was the only one he was able to make heard. They were not to be trapped so a second time. When any one is speaking that commands interest, as Berryer did, the effect of this vivacity is very pleasing, the murmur of feeling that rushes over the assembly is so quick and electric, — light, too, as the ripple on the lake. I heard Guizot speak one day for a short time. His manner is very deficient in dignity, — has not even the dignity of station; you see the man of cultivated intellect, but without inward strength; nor is even his panoply of proof. I saw in the Library of the Deputies some books intended to be sent to our country through M. Vattemare. The French have shown great readiness and generosity with regard to his project, and I earnestly hope that our country, if it accept these tokens of good-will, will show both energy and judgment in making a return. I do not speak from myself alone, but from others whose opinion is entitled to the highest respect, when I say it is not by sending a great quantity of documents of merely local interest, that would be esteemed lumber in our garrets at home, that you pay respect to a nation able to look beyond, the binding of a book. If anything is to be sent, let persons of ability be deputed to make a selection honorable to us and of value to the French. They would like documents from our Congress, — what is important as to commerce and manufactures; they would also like much what can throw light on the history and character of our aborigines. This project of international exchange could not be carried on to any permanent advantage without accredited agents on either side, but in its present shape it wears an aspect of good feeling that is valuable, and may give a very desirable impulse to thought and knowledge. M. Vattemare has given himself to the plan with indefatigable perseverance, and I hope our country will not be backward to accord him that furtherance he has known how to conquer from his countrymen. To his complaisance I was indebted for opportunity of a leisurely survey of the Imprimeri Royale, which gave me several suggestions I shall impart at a more favorable time, and of the operations of the Mint also. It was at his request that the Librarian of the Chamber showed me the manuscripts of Rousseau, which are not always seen by the traveller. He also introduced HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI me to one of the evening schools of the Frères Chretiens, where I saw, with pleasure, how much can be done for the working classes only by evening lessons. In reading and writing, adults had made surprising progress, and still more so in drawing. I saw with the highest pleasure, excellent copies of good models, made by hard-handed porters and errand-boys with their brass badges on their breasts. The benefits of such an accomplishment are, in my eyes, of the highest value, giving them, by insensible degrees, their part in the glories of art and science, and in the tranquil refinements of home. Visions rose in my mind of all that might be done in our country by associations of men and women who have received the benefits of literary culture, giving such evening lessons throughout our cities and villages. Should I ever return, I shall propose to some of the like-minded an association for such a purpose, and try the experiment of one of these schools of Christian brothers, with the vow of disinterestedness, but without the robe and the subdued priestly manner, which even in these men, some of whom seemed to me truly good, I could not away with. I visited also a Protestant institution, called that of the Deaconesses, which pleased me in some respects. Beside the regular Crèche, they take the sick children of the poor, and nurse them till they are well. They have also a refuge like that of the Home which, the ladies of New York have provided, through which members of the most unjustly treated class of society may return to peace and usefulness. There are institutions of the kind in Paris, but too formal, — and the treatment shows ignorance of human nature. I see nothing that shows so enlightened a spirit as the Home, a little germ of good which I hope flourishes and finds active aid in the community. I have collected many facts with regard to this suffering class of women, both in England and in France. I have seen them under the thin veil of gayety, and in the horrible tatters of utter degradation. I have seen the feelings of men with regard to their condition, and the general heartlessness in women of more favored and protected lives, which I can only ascribe to utter ignorance of the facts. If a proclamation of some of these can remove it, I hope to make such a one in the hour of riper judgment, and after a more extensive survey. Sad as are many features of the time, we have at least the satisfaction of feeling that if something true can be revealed, if something wise and kind shall be perseveringly tried, it stands a chance of nearer success than ever before; for much light has been let in at the windows of the world, and many dark nooks have been touched by a consoling ray. The influence of such a ray I felt in visiting the School for Idiots, near Paris, — idiots, so called long time by the impatience of the crowd; yet there are really none such, but only beings so below the average standard, so partially organized, that it is difficult for them to learn or to sustain themselves. I wept the whole time I was in this place a shower of sweet and bitter tears; of joy at what had been done, of grief for all that I and others possess and cannot impart to these little ones. But patience, and the Father of All will give them all yet. A good angel these of Paris have in their master. I have seen no man that seemed to me more worthy of envy, if one could envy happiness so pure and tender. He is a man of seven or eight and twenty, who formerly came there only to give lessons in writing, but became HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI so interested in his charge that he came at last to live among them and to serve them. They sing the hymns he writes for them, and as I saw his fine countenance looking in love on those distorted and opaque vases of humanity, where he had succeeded in waking up a faint flame, I thought his heart could never fail to be well warmed and buoyant. They sang well, both in parts and in chorus, went through gymnastic exercises with order and pleasure, then stood in a circle and kept time, while several danced extremely well. One little fellow, with whom the difficulty seemed to be that an excess of nervous sensibility paralyzed instead of exciting the powers, recited poems with a touching, childish grace and perfect memory. They write well, draw well, make shoes, and do carpenter’s work. One of the cases most interesting to the metaphysician is that of a boy, brought there about two years and a half ago, at the age of thirteen, in a state of brutality, and of ferocious brutality. I read the physician’s report of him at that period. He discovered no ray of decency or reason; entirely beneath the animals in the exercise of the senses, he discovered a restless fury beyond that of beasts of prey, breaking and throwing down whatever came in his way; was a voracious glutton, and every way grossly sensual. Many trials and vast patience were necessary before an inlet could be obtained to his mind; then it was through the means of mathematics. He delights in the figures, can draw and name them all, detects them by the touch when blindfolded. Each, mental effort of the kind he still follows up with an imbecile chuckle, as indeed his face and whole manner are still that of an idiot; but he has been raised from his sensual state, and can now discriminate and name colors and perfumes which before were all alike to him. He is partially redeemed; earlier, no doubt, far more might have been done for him, but the degree of success is an earnest which must encourage to perseverance in the most seemingly hopeless cases. I thought sorrowfully of the persons of this class whom I have known in our country, who might have been so raised and solaced by similar care. I hope ample provision may erelong be made for these Pariahs of the human race; every case of the kind brings its blessings with it, and observation on these subjects would be as rich in suggestion for the thought, as such acts of love are balmy for the heart. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

May 15, Saturday: An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on the need for radical reform was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: Rome, May, 1847. There is very little that I can like to write about Italy. Italy is beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not talked about. Yet I remember well that, when afar, I liked to read what was written about her; now, all thought of it is very tedious. The traveller passing along the beaten track, vetturinoed from inn to inn, ciceroned from gallery to gallery, thrown, through indolence, want of tact, or ignorance of the language, too much into the society of his compatriots, sees the least possible of the country; fortunately, it is impossible to avoid seeing a great deal. The great features of the part pursue and fill the eye. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Yet I find that it is quite out of the question to know Italy; to say anything of her that is full and sweet, so as to convey any idea of her spirit, without long residence, and residence in the districts untouched by the scorch and dust of foreign invasion (the invasion of the dilettanti I mean), and without an intimacy of feeling, an abandonment to the spirit of the place, impossible to most Americans. They retain too much, of their English blood; and the travelling English, as a class, seem to me the most unseeing of all possible animals. There are exceptions; for instance, the perceptions and pictures of Browning seem as delicate and just here on the spot as they did at a distance; but, take them as a class, they have the vulgar familiarity of Mrs. Trollope without her vivacity, the cockneyism of Dickens without his graphic power and love of the odd corners of human nature. I admired the English at home in their island; I admired their honor, truth, practical intelligence, persistent power. But they do not look well in Italy; they are not the figures for this landscape. I am indignant at the contempt they have presumed to express for the faults of our semi-barbarous state. What is the vulgarity expressed in our tobacco-chewing, and way of eating eggs, compared to that which elbows the Greek marbles, guide-book in hand, — chatters and sneers through the Miserere of the Sistine Chapel, beneath the very glance of Michel Angelo’s Sibyls, — praises St. Peter’s as “nice” — talks of “managing” the Colosseum by moonlight, — and snatches “bits” for a “sketch” from the sublime silence of the Campagna. Yet I was again reconciled with them, the other day, in visiting the studio of Macdonald. There I found a complete gallery of the aristocracy of England; for each lord and lady who visits Rome considers it a part of the ceremony to sit to him for a bust. And what a fine race! how worthy the marble! what heads of orators, statesmen, gentlemen! of women chaste, grave, resolute, and tender! Unfortunately, they do not look as well in flesh and blood; then they show the habitual coldness of their temperament, the habitual subservience to frivolous conventionalities. They need some great occasion, some exciting crisis, in order to make them look as free and dignified as these busts; yet is the beauty there, though, imprisoned, and clouded, and such a crisis would show us more then one Boadicea, more than one Alfred. Tenerani has just completed a statue which is highly-spoken of; it is called the Angel of the Resurrection. I was not so fortunate as to find it in his studio. In that of Wolff I saw a Diana, ordered by the Emperor of Russia. It is modern and sentimental; as different from, the antique Diana as the trance of a novel-read young lady of our day from the thrill with which the ancient shepherds deprecated the magic pervasions of Hecate, but very beautiful and exquisitely wrought. He has also lately finished the Four Seasons, represented as children. Of these, Winter is graceful and charming. Among the sculptors I delayed longest in the work-rooms of Gott. I found his groups of young figures connected with animals very refreshing after the grander attempts of the present time. They seem real growths of his habitual mind, — fruits of Nature, full of joy and freedom. His spaniels and other frisky poppets would please Apollo far better than most of the marble nymphs and muses of the present day. Our Crawford has just finished a bust of Mrs. Crawford, which HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI is extremely beautiful, full of grace and innocent sweetness. All its accessaries are charming, — the wreaths, the arrangement of drapery, the stuff of which the robe is made. I hope it will be much seen on its arrival in New York. He has also an Herodias in the clay, which is individual in expression, and the figure of distinguished elegance. I liked the designs of Crawford better than those of Gibson, who is estimated as highest in the profession now. Among the studios of the European painters I have visited only that of Overbeck. It is well known in the United States what his pictures are. I have much to say at a more favorable time of what they represented to me. He himself looks as if he had just stepped out of one of them, — a lay monk, with a pious eye and habitual morality of thought which limits every gesture. Painting is not largely represented here by American artists at present. Terry has two pleasing pictures on the easel: one is a costume picture of Italian life, such as I saw it myself, enchanted beyond my hopes, on coming to Naples on a day of grand festival in honor of Santa Agatha. Cranch sends soon to America a picture of the Campagna, such as I saw it on my first entrance into Rome, all light and calmness; Hicks, a charming half-length of an Italian girl, holding a mandolin: it will be sure to please. His pictures are full of life, and give the promise of some real achievement in Art. Of the fragments of the great time, I have now seen nearly all that are treasured up here: I have, however, as yet nothing of consequence to say of them. I find that others have often given good hints as to how they look; and as to what they are, it can only be known by approximating to the state of soul out of which they grew. They should not be described, but reproduced. They are many and precious, yet is there not so much of high excellence as I had expected: they will not float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on our Western prairies. Yet I love much to see the galleries of marbles, even when there are not many separately admirable, amid the cypresses and ilexes of Roman villas; and a picture that is good at all looks very good in one of these old palaces. The Italian painters whom I have learned most to appreciate, since I came abroad, are Domenichino and Titian. Of others one may learn something by copies and engravings: but not of these. The portraits of Titian look upon me from the walls things new and strange. They are portraits of men such as I have not known. In his picture, absurdly called Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese Palace, one of the figures has developed my powers of gazing to an extent unknown before. Domenichino seems very unequal in his pictures; but when he is grand and free, the energy of his genius perfectly satisfies. The frescos of Caracci and his scholars in the Farnese Palace have been to me a source of the purest pleasure, and I do not remember to have heard of them. I loved Guercino much before I came here, but I have looked too much at his pictures and begin to grow sick of them; he is a very limited genius. Leonardo I cannot yet like at all, but I suppose the pictures are good for some people to look at; they show a wonderful deal of study and thought. That is not what I can best appreciate in a work of art. I hate to see the marks of them. I want a simple and direct expression of soul. For the rest, the ordinary cant of connoisseur-ship on these matters seems in Italy even more HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI detestable than elsewhere. I have not yet so sufficiently recovered from my pain at finding the frescos of Raphael in such a state, as to be able to look at them, happily. I had heard of their condition, but could not realize it. However, I have gained nothing by seeing his pictures in oil, which are well preserved. I find I had before the full impression of his genius. Michel Angelo’s frescos, in like manner, I seem to have seen as far as I can. But it is not the same with the sculptures: my thought had not risen to the height of the Moses. It is the only thing in Europe, so far, which has entirely outgone my hopes. Michel Angelo was my demigod before; but I find no offering worthy to cast at the feet of his Moses. I like much, too, his Christ. It is a refreshing contrast with all the other representations of the same subject. I like it even as contrasted with Raphael’s Christ of the Transfiguration, or that of the cartoon of Feed my Lambs. I have heard owls hoot in the Colosseum by moonlight, and they spoke more to the purpose than I ever heard any other voice upon that subject. I have seen all the pomps and shows of Holy Week in the church of St. Peter, and found them less imposing than an habitual acquaintance with the place, with processions of monks and nuns stealing in now and then, or the swell of vespers from some side chapel. I have ascended the dome, and seen thence Rome and its Campagna, its villas with, their cypresses and pines serenely sad as is nothing else in the world, and the fountains of the Vatican garden gushing hard by. I have been in the Subterranean to see a poor little boy introduced, much to his surprise, to the bosom of the Church; and then I have seen by torch-light the stone popes where they lie on their tombs, and the old mosaics, and virgins with gilt caps. It is all rich, and full, — very impressive in its way. St. Peter’s must be to each one a separate poem. The ceremonies of the Church, have been numerous and splendid during our stay here; and they borrow unusual interest from the love and expectation inspired by the present Pontiff. He is a man of noble and good aspect, who, it is easy to see, has set his heart upon doing something solid for the benefit of man. But pensively, too, must one feel how hampered and inadequate are the means at his command to accomplish these ends. The Italians do not feel it, but deliver themselves, with all the vivacity of their temperament, to perpetual hurras, vivas, rockets, and torch-light processions. I often think how grave and sad must the Pope feel, as he sits alone and hears all this noise of expectation. A week or two ago the Cardinal Secretary published a circular inviting the departments to measures which would give the people a sort of representative council. Nothing could seem more limited than this improvement, but it was a great measure for Rome. At night the Corso in which, we live was illuminated, and many thousands passed through it in a torch-bearing procession. I saw them first assembled in the Piazza del Popolo, forming around its fountain a great circle of fire. Then, as a river of fire, they streamed slowly through the Corso, on their way to the Quirinal to thank the Pope, upbearing a banner on which the edict was printed. The stream, of fire advanced slowly, with a perpetual surge-like sound of voices; the torches flashed on the animated Italian faces. I have never seen anything finer. Ascending the Quirinal they made it a mount of light. Bengal HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fires were thrown up, which cast their red and white light on the noble Greek figures of men and horses that reign over it. The Pope appeared on his balcony; the crowd shouted three vivas; he extended his arms; the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction; he retired, and the torches were extinguished, and the multitude dispersed in an instant. The same week came the natal day of Rome. A great dinner was given at the Baths of Titus, in the open air. The company was on the grass in the area; the music at one end; boxes filled with the handsome Roman women occupied the other sides. It was a new thing here, this popular dinner, and the Romans greeted it in an intoxication of hope and pleasure. Sterbini, author of “The Vestal,” presided: many others, like him, long time exiled and restored to their country by the present Pope, were at the tables. The Colosseum, and triumphal arches were in sight; an effigy of the Roman wolf with her royal nursling was erected on high; the guests, with shouts and music, congratulated themselves on the possession, in Pius IX., of a new and nobler founder for another state. Among the speeches that of the Marquis d’Azeglio, a man of literary note in Italy, and son-in- law of Manzoni, contained this passage (he was sketching the past history of Italy): — “The crown passed to the head of a German monarch; but he wore it not to the benefit, but the injury, of Christianity, — of the world. The Emperor Henry was a tyrant who wearied out the patience of God. God said to Rome, ‘I give you the Emperor Henry’; and from these hills that surround us, Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII., raised his austere and potent voice to say to the Emperor, ‘God did not give you Italy that you might destroy her,’ and Italy, Germany, Europe, saw her butcher prostrated at the feet of Gregory in penitence. Italy, Germany, Europe, had then kindled in the heart the first spark of liberty.” The narrative of the dinner passed the censor, and was published: the Ambassador of Austria read it, and found, with a modesty and candor truly admirable, that this passage was meant to allude to his Emperor. He must take his passports, if such home thrusts are to be made. And so the paper was seized, and the account of the dinner only told from, mouth to mouth, from those who had already read it. Also the idea of a dinner for the Pope’s fête-day is abandoned, lest something too frank should again be said; and they tell me here, with a laugh, “I fancy you have assisted at the first and last popular dinner.” Thus we may see that the liberty of Rome does not yet advance with seven- leagued boots; and the new Romulus will need to be prepared for deeds at least as bold as his predecessor, if he is to open a new order of things. I cannot well wind up my gossip on this subject better than by translating a passage from the programme of the Contemporaneo, which represents the hope of Rome at this moment. It is conducted by men of well-known talent. “The Contemporaneo (Contemporary) is a journal of progress, but tempered, as the good and wise think best, in conformity with the will of our best of princes, and the wants and expectations of the public.... “Through discussion it desires to prepare minds to receive reforms so soon and far as they are favored by the law of opportunity. “Every attempt which is made contrary to this social law must HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fail. It is vain to hope fruits from a tree out of season, and equally in vain to introduce the best measures into a country not prepared to receive them.” And so on. I intended to have translated in full the programme, but time fails, and the law of opportunity does not favor, as my “opportunity” leaves for London this afternoon. I have given enough to mark the purport of the whole. It will easily be seen that it was not from the platform assumed by the Contemporaneo that Lycurgus legislated, or Socrates taught, — that the Christian religion was propagated, or the Church, was reformed by Luther. The opportunity that the martyrs found here in the Colosseum, from whose blood grew up this great tree of Papacy, was not of the kind waited for by these moderate progressists. Nevertheless, they may be good schoolmasters for Italy, and are not to be disdained in these piping times of peace. More anon, of old and new, from Tuscany.

Henry Thoreau was written to by Isaac Hecker in Wittem. May 15. 1847. Wittem. Dear Friend. My interest in your greatest welfare comp[els] me to write you a few lines, perhaps they may aid you in your progress. I have found my centre and of course my place in the Roman Catholic Church. This gives me the peace and liberty which have long been the object of my persuit. I have come to this result not as one who is ignorant or worse who has an erroneous idea of the C. Church would suppose, by being false to my nature, no, but by being true, true to my highest aspirations and ideal. My ideal is real, or rather the ideal of humanity is the R.C. Church. I can readily conceive that those who know not what the Church is, will smile at this statement. But I repeat it. The Catholic Church is the ideal of every individual of the race, the universal ideal of humanity. It is for her communion the hearts of men sigh, it is for her perfection their souls aspire, she is the inspiration of humanity. Let those my friend smile who wish. Your singularities so called in your uncatholic community, and not only yours, are to a catholic so many proofs of this assertion. They are the evidences of the secret workings of that life which will and eventually must, so that you remain true, bring you into the unity of the one, holy, catholic Church. Be true O my friend! for all my you hopes of ever meeting depend upon my confidence in ^ in your fidelity, heroic fidelity. Be true the catholic Church is one and universal, take what road you will you will arrive into the bosom of her who is destined to receive the human race entire. Be true, for your HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI ideal is real, divine, and means more than you are now aware of.

Page 2 The soul once in actual communion with the Church a new life is commenced. It enters upon a higher, sublimer supernatural career. The beatific instinct of the soul fed with a supernatural food, invigorated with an un- iterrupted divine excitement,— “grace”, —gradually elevates the soul towards its ultimate end. It passess through vi[ol]ent combats and victories from sphere to sphere. After having passed countless struggles and made frequent conquests sustained only by this supernatural force, its forces and fidelity having been tried and purified, it reaches the end of its creation, the perfect union with, and immediate vision of God. This is the highest end for which the soul of Man can aspire. This is the destiny of each individual and of humanity. And this is the work of the C. Church. For she alone directs and furnishes her children with the means of obtaining this sublime end of their creation. This is but a simple statement of the Church in her rapport with the individual soul from the religious or mystic point of view. Her rapport with humanity, with society is equally triumphant and divine. Wherever her influence penetrates Man acts from a higher inspiration. She is the life of art, of poesy, of social happiness, of political freedom. True heroism is only found in her bosom. This is evident from its nature and pooven too by fact. A hero is one who possesses virtue in a heroic degree, invariable, constant even unto death. But this surpasses the natural forces of Man. Hence a Hero necessarily supposes act the aid of a force supernatural, divine. A heroic is ^ possible but an act does not make a Hero. But the Church, the Catholic Church is the sole organ of this force divine. Hence out of her communion heroism is impossible. For the fact. No sect seper- ated from the R.C. Church can show one example

Page 3 which will bear this test. Let them produce one example of a constant invariable heroic life in all the virtues if they can. They cannot. But this is the test of a Hero, a Saint in the language of the Church. It is such she has never ceased, to and never will cease to produce. This prooves her divine origin and sanctity and their cant and falsehood. It is a sad fact that Carlyle and many others, tho they recognize [this] truth in the middle ages, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI when speaking of the present, make use of the same cant that all the flunkies have employed against the Church from Martin Luther to Joe Smith. A little more disinterested research and study will it is to be hoped lead them to see what they are now ignorant of. The fact is my friend the protestant world lays under great ignorance, and is sadly deluded concerning the C. Church. The future lies hid in her bosom. O happy is he who sees it and becomes its voice. Tho now my friend within cloistered walks in my cell I am infinitely freer than I was when breathing the air on Concord cliffs. After having passed one years Novitiate I was admitted to take the “vows”. Let me tell thee my friend it is no small affair to be scholar in that school where I came to Jesus the God-Man is Master. From the Novitiate the Col- lege where ^ I now am. The community of this house is composed of upwards a hundred members. The order is prohibited from begging and from holding benefices, thus it is thrown upon & supported spontaneous by providence, the voluntary charity of the faithful. When ^ I remember the dreams of fruitlands and see how far [the] below their boldest aspirations fall from what has existed for centuries in the C. Church and now exists, I am led to smile, but I esteem truly these men as far as they went. Would to God that they knew what they were striving after and had the manliness to act up to their aspirations, Tho the primary object of the order of which I am a member is the same as all other religious orders [MS torn?] render its members saints, its distinctive characteristic is [MS torn?]tion to the cause of the

Page 4 poor “the souls the most abandoned”. Its life is half contemplative & half active. Its founder St. Alphonse of Ligouri of Naples who lived in the latter part of the l8teenth century. If these men who say that the Church is dead would look a little below the surface of things they would see that the life of the middle ages which they laud so high is not dead, but only retarded by the enemies of the Church for a few centuries past, and which is now ready to burst upon the world in all its glory. We don’t want the Middle Ages, but we want its [written perpendicular to text in center of page: Henry Thorough. Concord. Massachusetts.] inspiration. It is here my friend, it is here. Mon Dieu could you see & feel it once! Your true & sincere Friend HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI I. Hecker My address is. Chez les R. [illegible] Redemptoristes. Wittem. Province de Limbou [illegible] Hollande.

May 29, Saturday: Dr. Martin Gay’s “A Statement of the Claims of Charles T. Jackson, M.D. to the Discovery of the Applicability of Sulphuric Ether to the Prevention of Pain in Surgical Operations” (Boston: David Clapp, 184 Washington Street). IT WAS ME, ME, I TELL YOU

An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on her travel experiences from Paris to Naples was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: Naples. In my last days at Paris I was fortunate in hearing some delightful music. A friend of Chopin’s took me to see him, and I had the pleasure, which the delicacy of Iris health makes a rare one for the public, of hearing him play. All the impressions I had received from hearing his music imperfectly performed were justified, for it has marked traits, which can be veiled, but not travestied; but to feel it as it merits, one must hear himself; only a person as exquisitely organized as he can adequately express these subtile secrets of the creative spirit. It was with, a very different sort of pleasure that I listened to the Chevalier Neukomm, the celebrated composer of “David,” which has been so popular in our country. I heard him improvise on the orgue expressif, and afterward on a great organ which has just been built here by Cavaille for the cathedral of Ajaccio. Full, sustained, ardent, yet exact, the stream, of his thought bears with it the attention of hearers of all characters, as his character, full of bonhommie, open, friendly, animated, and sagacious, would seem to have something to present for the affection and esteem of all kinds of men. Chopin is the minstrel, Neukomm the orator of music: we want them both, — the mysterious whispers and the resolute pleadings from the better world, which calls us not to slumber here, but press daily onward to claim our heritage. Paris! I was sad to leave thee, thou wonderful focus, where ignorance ceases to be a pain, because there we find such means daily to lessen it. It is the only school where I ever found abundance of teachers who could bear being examined by the pupil in their special branches. I must go to this school more before I again cross the Atlantic, where often for years I have carried about some trifling question without finding the person who could answer it. Really deep questions we must all answer for ourselves; the more the pity, then, that we get not quickly through with a crowd of details, where the experience of others might accelerate our progress. Leaving by diligence, we pursued our way from twelve o’clock on Thursday till twelve at night on Friday, thus having a large share of magnificent moonlight upon the unknown fields we were traversing. At Chalons we took boat and reached Lyons betimes that afternoon. So soon as refreshed, we sallied out to visit some of the garrets of the weavers. As we were making inquiries about these, a sweet little girl who heard us offered to be our guide. She led us by a weary, winding way, whose pavement was HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI much easier for her feet in their wooden sabots than for ours in Paris shoes, to the top of a hill, from which we saw for the first time “the blue and arrowy Rhone.” Entering the light buildings on this high hill, I found each chamber tenanted by a family of weavers, — all weavers; wife, husband, sons, daughters, — from nine years old upward, — each was helping. On one side were the looms; nearer the door the cooking apparatus; the beds were shelves near the ceiling: they climbed up to them on ladders. My sweet little girl turned out to be a wife of six or seven years’ standing, with two rather sickly-looking children; she seemed to have the greatest comfort that is possible amid the perplexities of a hard and anxious lot, to judge by the proud and affectionate manner in which she always said “mon mari,” and by the courteous gentleness of his manner toward her. She seemed, indeed, to be one of those persons on whom “the Graces have smiled in their cradle,” and to whom a natural loveliness of character makes the world as easy as it can be made while the evil spirit is still so busy choking the wheat with tares. I admired her graceful manner of introducing us into those dark little rooms, and she was affectionately received by all her acquaintance. But alas! that voice, by nature of such bird-like vivacity, repeated again and again, “Ah! we are all very unhappy now.” “Do you sing together, or go to evening schools?” “We have not the heart. When we have a piece of work, we do not stir till it is finished, and then we run to try and get another; but often we have to wait idle for weeks. It grows worse and worse, and they say it is not likely to be any better. We can think of nothing, but whether we shall be able to pay our rent. Ah! the workpeople are very unhappy now.” This poor, lovely little girl, at an age when the merchant’s daughters of Boston and New York are just gaining their first experiences of “society,” knew to a farthing the price of every article of food and clothing that is wanted by such a household. Her thought by day and her dream by night was, whether she should long be able to procure a scanty supply of these, and Nature had gifted her with precisely those qualities, which, unembarrassed by care, would have made her and all she loved really happy; and she was fortunate now, compared with many of her sex in Lyons, — of whom a gentleman who knows the class well said: “When their work fails, they have no resource except in the sale of their persons. There are but these two ways open to them, weaving or prostitution, to gain their bread.” And there are those who dare to say that such a state of things is well enough, and what Providence intended for man, — who call those who have hearts to suffer at the sight, energy and zeal to seek its remedy, visionaries and fanatics! To themselves be woe, who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, the convulsions and sobs of injured Humanity! My little friend told me she had nursed both her children, — though almost all of her class are obliged to put their children out to nurse; “but,” said she, “they are brought back so little, so miserable, that I resolved, if possible, to keep mine with me.” Next day in the steamboat I read a pamphlet by a physician of Lyons in which he recommends the establishment of Crèches, not merely like those of Paris, to keep the children by day, but to provide wet-nurses for them. Thus, by the infants receiving nourishment from more healthy persons, and who under the supervision of directors would treat them well, he hopes to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI counteract the tendency to degenerate in this race of sedentary workers, and to save the mothers from too heavy a burden of care and labor, without breaking the bond between them and their children, whom, under such circumstances, they could visit often, and see them taken care of as they, brought up to know nothing except how to weave, cannot take care of them. Here, again, how is one reminded of Fourier’s observations and plans, still more enforced by the recent developments at Manchester as to the habit of feeding children on opium, which has grown out of the position of things there. Descending next day to Avignon, I had the mortification of finding the banks of the Rhone still sheeted with white, and there waded through melting snow to Laura’s tomb. We did not see Mr. Dickens’s Tower and Goblin, — it was too late in the day, — but we saw a snowball fight between two bands of the military in the castle yard that was gay enough to make a goblin laugh. And next day on to Arles, still snow, — snow and cutting blasts in the South of France, where everybody had promised us bird- songs and blossoms to console us for the dreary winter of Paris. At Arles, indeed, I saw the little saxifrage blossoming on the steps of the Amphitheatre, and fruit-trees in flower amid the tombs. Here for the first time I saw the great handwriting of the Romans in its proper medium of stone, and I was content. It looked us grand and solid as I expected, as if life in those days was thought worth the having, the enjoying, and the using. The sunlight was warm this day; it lay deliciously still and calm upon the ruins. One old woman sat knitting where twenty- five thousand persons once gazed down in fierce excitement on the fights of men and lions. Coming back, we were refreshed all through the streets by the sight of the women of Arles. They answered to their reputation for beauty; tall, erect, and noble, with high and dignified features, and a full, earnest gaze of the eye, they looked as if the Eagle still waved its wings over their city. Even the very old women still have a degree of beauty, because when the colors are all faded, and the skin wrinkled, the face retains this dignity of outline. The men do not share in these characteristics; some priestess, well beloved of the powers of old religion, must have called down an especial blessing on her sex in this town. Hence to Marseilles, — where is little for the traveller to see, except the mixture of Oriental blood in the crowd of the streets. Thence by steamer to Genoa. Of this transit, he who has been on the Mediterranean in a stiff breeze well understands I can have nothing to say, except “I suffered.” It was all one dull, tormented dream to me, and, I believe, to most of the ship’s company, — a dream too of thirty hours’ duration, instead of the promised sixteen. The excessive beauty of Genoa is well known, and the impression upon the eye alone was correspondent with what I expected; but, alas! the weather was still so cold I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm, — “I saw, not felt, how beautiful they were.” Only at Naples have I found my Italy, and here not till after a week’s waiting, — not till I began to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy was fable, and that there HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI is really no spring anywhere except in the imagination of poets. For the first week was an exact copy of the miseries of a New England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then came up a villanous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain, and turning hope and fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue, in lieu of their native rose. However, here at Naples I have at last found my Italy; I have passed through the Grotto of Pausilippo, visited Cuma, Baiæ, and Capri, ascended Vesuvius, and found all familiar, except the sense of enchantment, of sweet exhilaration, this scene conveys. “Behold how brightly breaks the morning!” and yet all new, as if never yet described, for Nature here, most prolific and exuberant in her gifts, has touched them all with a charm unhackneyed, unhackneyable, which the boots of English dandies cannot trample out, nor the raptures of sentimental tourists daub or fade. Baiæ had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento — O Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy, for the greatest Artist had been at work there in a temper beyond the reach of human art. Beyond this, reader, my old friend and valued acquaintance on other themes, I shall tell you nothing of Naples, for it is a thing apart in the journey of life, and, if represented at all, should be so in a fairer form than offers itself at present. Now the actual life here is over, I am going to Rome, and expect to see that fane of thought the last day of this week. At Genoa and Leghorn, I saw for the first time Italians in their homes. Very attractive I found them, charming women, refined men, eloquent and courteous. If the cold wind hid Italy, it could not the Italians. A little group of faces, each so full of character, dignity, and, what is so rare in an American face, the capacity for pure, exalting passion, will live ever in my memory, — the fulfilment of a hope! We started from Leghorn in an English boat, highly recommended, and as little deserving of such praise as many another bepuffed article. In the middle of a fine, clear night, she was run into by the mail steamer, which all on deck clearly saw coming upon her, for no reason that could be ascertained, except that the man at the wheel said he had turned the right way, and it never seemed to occur to him that he could change when he found the other steamer had taken the same direction. To be sure, the other steamer was equally careless, but as a change on our part would have prevented an accident that narrowly missed sending us all to the bottom, it hardly seemed worth while to persist, for the sake of convicting them of error. Neither the Captain nor any of his people spoke French, and we had been much amused before by the chambermaid acting out the old story of “Will you lend me the loan of a gridiron?” A Polish lady was on board, with a French waiting-maid, who understood no word of English. The daughter of John Bull would speak to the lady in English, and, when she found it of no use, would say imperiously to the suivante, “Go and ask your mistress what she will have for breakfast.” And now when I went on deck there was a parley between the two steamers, which the Captain was obliged to manage by such interpreters as he could find; it was a long and confused business. It ended at last in the Neapolitan HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI steamer taking us in tow for an inglorious return to Leghorn. When she had decided upon this she swept round, her lights glancing like sagacious eyes, to take us. The sea was calm as a lake, the sky full of stars; she made a long detour, with her black hull, her smoke and lights, which look so pretty at night, then came round to us like the bend of an arm embracing. It was a pretty picture, worth the stop and the fright, — perhaps the loss of twenty-four hours, though I did not think so at the time. At Leghorn we changed the boat, and, retracing our steps, came now at last to Naples, — to this priest-ridden, misgoverned, full of dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely Naples, — of which the most I can say is that the divine aspect of nature can make you forget the situation of man in this region, which was surely intended for him as a princely child, angelic in virtue, genius, and beauty, and not as a begging, vermin- haunted, image kissing Lazzarone.

At some point during this year, when she visited his studio in Florence (and presumably this was during the summer before she settled in Rome), a marble bust was sculpted of Margaret Fuller by Joseph Mozier.

June 4, Friday: Waldo Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller, in a letter hand-delivered by the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge,

By all means keep the Atlantic between you & us for the present, as you love your eyes.

August: This is the sort of private correspondence that Margaret Fuller was generating during this month: FROM A LETTER TO ———— . Bellagio, Lake of Como, August, 1847. You do not deceive yourself surely about religion, in so far as that there is a deep meaning in those pangs of our fate which, if we live by faith, will become our most precious possession. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI “Live for thy faith and thou shalt yet behold it living,” is with me, as it hath been, a maxim. Wherever I turn, I see still the same dark clouds, with occasional gleams of light. In this Europe how much suffocated life! — a sort of woe much less seen with us. I know many of the noble exiles, pining for their natural sphere; many of them seek in Jesus the guide and friend, as you do. For me, it is my nature to wish to go straight to the Creative Spirit, and I can fully appreciate what you say of the need of our happiness depending on no human being. Can you really have attained such wisdom? Your letter seemed to me very modest and pure, and I trust in Heaven all may be solid. I am everywhere well received, and high and low take pleasure in smoothing my path. I love much the Italians. The lower classes have the vices induced by long subjection to tyranny; but also a winning sweetness, a ready and discriminating love for the beautiful, and a delicacy in the sympathies, the absence of which always made me sick in our own country. Here, at least, one does not suffer from obtuseness or indifference. They take pleasure, too, in acts of kindness; they are bountiful, but it is useless to hope the least honor in affairs of business. I cannot persuade those who serve me, however attached, that they should not deceive me, and plunder me. They think that is part of their duty towards a foreigner. This is troublesome no less than disagreeable; it is absolutely necessary to be always on the watch against being cheated. * * * * * Extract from a Letter. One loses sight of all dabbling and pretension when seated at the feet of dead Rome, — Rome so grand and beautiful upon her bier. Art is dead here; the few sparkles that sometimes break through the embers cannot make a flame; but the relics of the past are great enough, over-great; we should do nothing but sit, and weep, and worship. In Rome, one has all the free feeling of the country; the city is so interwoven with vineyards and gardens, such delightful walks in the villas, such ceaseless music of the fountains, and from every high point the Campagna and Tiber seem so near. Full of enchantment has been my summer, passed wholly among Italians, in places where no foreigner goes, amid the snowy peaks, in the exquisite valleys of the Abruzzi. I have seen a thousand landscapes, any one of which might employ the thoughts of the painter for years. Not without reason the people dream that, at the death of a saint, columns of light are seen to hover on those mountains. They take, at sunset, the same rose-hues as the Alps. The torrents are magnificent. I knew some noblemen, with baronial castles nestled in the hills and slopes, rich in the artistic treasures of centuries. They liked me, and showed me the hidden beauties of Roman remains. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI August 9, Monday: The phrenologist Dr. Andrew Combe, author of so much evil, who had for the longest time been suffering from tuberculosis and trying various cures, succumbed at Gorgie near Edinburgh, Scotland. Physician, heal thyself? —No, don’t say that, he didn’t know he was evil.

A dozen elders of the Mormon church assembled and decided that they would designate their new settlement “Salt Lake City, Great Basin, North America” and employ that as “a caption for all letters and documents issued from this place.”

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Milan on her experience of the summer in northern Italy: Milan, August 9, 1847. Since leaving Rome, I have not been able to steal a moment from the rich and varied objects before me to write about them. I will, therefore, take a brief retrospect of the ground. I passed from Florence to Rome by the Perugia route, and saw for the first time the Italian vineyards. The grapes hung in little clusters. When I return, they will be full of light and life, but the fields will not be so enchantingly fresh, nor so enamelled with flowers. The profusion of red poppies, which dance on every wall and glitter throughout the grass, is a great ornament to the landscape. In full sunlight their vermilion is most beautiful. Well might Ceres gather such poppies to mingle with her wheat. We climbed the hill to Assisi, and my ears thrilled as with many old remembered melodies, when an old peasant, in sonorous phrase, bade me look out and see the plain of Umbria. I looked back and saw the carriage toiling up the steep path, drawn by a pair of those light-colored oxen Shelley so much admired. I stood near the spot where Goethe met with a little adventure, which he has described with even more than his usual delicate humor. Who can ever be alone for a moment in Italy? Every stone has a voice, every grain of dust seems instinct with spirit from the Past, every step recalls some line, some legend of long- neglected lore. Assisi was exceedingly charming to me. So still! — all temporal noise and bustle seem hushed down yet by the presence of the saint. So clean! — the rains of heaven wash down all impurities into the valley. I must confess that, elsewhere, I have shared the feelings of Dickens toward St. Francis and St. Sebastian, as the “Mounseer Tonsons” of Catholic art. St. Sebastian I have not been so tired of, for the beauty and youth of the figure make the monotony with which the subject of his martyrdom is treated somewhat less wearisome. But St. Francis is so sad, and so ecstatic, and so brown, so entirely the monk, — and St. Clara so entirely the nun! I have been very sorry for her that he was able to draw her from the human to the heavenly life; she seems so sad and so worn out by the effort. But here at Assisi, one cannot help being penetrated by the spirit that flowed from that life. Here is the room where his father shut up the boy to punish his early severity of devotion. Here is the picture which represents him despoiled of all outward things, even his garments, — devoting himself, body and soul, to the service of God in the way he believed most acceptable. Here is the underground chapel, where rest those weary bones, saluted by the tears of so many weary pilgrims who have come hither to seek strength from his example. Here are the churches above, full of the works of earlier art, animated by the contagion of a great HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI example. It is impossible not to bow the head, and feel how mighty an influence flows from a single soul, sincere in its service of truth, in whatever form that truth comes to it. A troop of neat, pretty school-girls attended us about, going with us into the little chapels adorned with pictures which open at every corner of the streets, smiling on us at a respectful distance. Some of them were fourteen or fifteen years old. I found reading, writing, and sewing were all they learned at their school; the first, indeed, they knew well enough, if they could ever get books to use it on. Tranquil as Assisi was, on every wall was read Viva Pio IX.! and we found the guides and workmen in the shop full of a vague hope from him. The old love which has made so rich this aerial cradle of St. Francis glows warm as ever in the breasts of men; still, as ever, they long for hero-worship, and shout aloud at the least appearance of an object. The church at the foot of the hill, Santa Maria degli Angeli, seems tawdry after Assisi. It also is full of records of St. Francis, his pains and his triumphs. Here, too, on a little chapel, is the famous picture by Overbeck; too exact a copy, but how different in effect from the early art we had just seen above! Harmonious but frigid, grave but dull; childhood is beautiful, but not when continued, or rather transplanted, into the period where we look for passion, varied means, and manly force. Before reaching Perugia, I visited an Etrurian tomb, which is a little way off the road; it is said to be one of the finest in Etruria. The hill-side is full of them, but excavations are expensive, and not frequent. The effect of this one was beyond my expectations; in it were several female figures, very dignified and calm, as the dim lamp-light fell on them by turns. The expression of these figures shows that the position of woman in these states was noble. Their eagles’ nests cherished well the female eagle who kept watch in the eyrie. Perugia too is on a noble hill. What a daily excitement such a view, taken at every step! life is worth ten times as much in a city so situated. Perugia is full, overflowing, with the treasures of early art. I saw them so rapidly it seems now as if in a trance, yet certainly with a profit, a manifold gain, such as Mahomet thought he gained from his five minutes’ visits to other spheres. Here are two portraits of Raphael as a youth: it is touching to see what effect this angel had upon all that surrounded him from the very first. Florence! I was there a month, and in a sense saw Florence: that is to say, I took an inventory of what is to be seen there, and not without great intellectual profit. There is too much that is really admirable in art, — the nature of its growth lies before you too clearly to be evaded. Of such things more elsewhere. I do not like Florence as I do cities more purely Italian. The natural character is ironed out here, and done up in a French pattern; yet there is no French vivacity, nor Italian either. The Grand Duke — more and more agitated by the position in which he finds himself between the influence of the Pope and that of Austria — keeps imploring and commanding his people to keep still, and they are still and glum as death. This is all on the outside; within, Tuscany burns. Private culture has not been in vain, and there is, in a large circle, mental preparation for a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI very different state of things from the present, with an ardent desire to diffuse the same amid the people at large. The sovereign has been obliged for the present to give more liberty to the press, and there is an immediate rush of thought to the new vent; if it is kept open a few months, the effect on the body of the people cannot fail to be great. I intended to have translated some passages from the programme of the Patria, one of the papers newly started at Florence, but time fails. One of the articles in the same number by Lambruschini, on the duties of the clergy at this juncture, contains views as liberal as can be found in print anywhere in the world. More of these things when I return to Rome in the autumn, when I hope to find a little leisure to think over what I have seen, and, if found worthy, to put the result in writing. I visited the studios of our sculptors; Greenough has in clay a David which promises high beauty and nobleness, a bass-relief, full of grace and tender expression; he is also modelling a head of Napoleon, and justly enthusiastic in the study. His great group I did not see in such a state as to be secure of my impression. The face of the Pioneer is very fine, the form of the woman graceful and expressive; but I was not satisfied with the Indian. I shall see it more as a whole on my return to Florence. As to the Eve and the Greek Slave, I could only join with the rest of the world in admiration of their beauty and the fine feeling of nature which they exhibit. The statue of Calhoun is full of power, simple, and majestic in attitude and expression. In busts Powers seems to me unrivalled; still, he ought not to spend his best years on an employment which cannot satisfy his ambition nor develop his powers. If our country loves herself, she will order from him some great work before the prime of his genius has been frittered away, and his best years spent on lesser things. I saw at Florence the festivals of St. John, but they are poor affairs to one who has seen the Neapolitan and Roman people on such occasions. Passing from Florence, I came to Bologna, — learned Bologna; indeed an Italian city, full of expression, of physiognomy, so to speak. A woman should love Bologna, for there has the spark of intellect in woman been cherished with reverent care. Not in former ages only, but in this, Bologna raised a woman who was worthy to the dignities of its University, and in their Certosa they proudly show the monument to Matilda Tambroni, late Greek Professor there. Her letters, preserved by her friends, are said to form a very valuable collection. In their anatomical hall is the bust of a woman, Professor of Anatomy. In Art they have had Properzia di Rossi, Elizabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and delight to give their works a conspicuous place. In other cities the men alone have their Casino dei Nobili, where they give balls, conversazioni, and similar entertainments. Here women have one, and are the soul of society. In Milan, also, I see in the Ambrosian Library the bust of a female mathematician. These things make me feel that, if the state of woman in Italy is so depressed, yet a good-will toward a better is not wholly wanting. Still more significant is the reverence to the Madonna and innumerable female saints, who, if, like St. Teresa, they had intellect as well as piety, became counsellors no less than comforters to the spirit of men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Ravenna, too, I saw, and its old Christian art, the Pineta, where Byron loved to ride, and the paltry apartments where, cheered by a new affection, in which was more of tender friendship than of passion, he found himself less wretched than at beautiful Venice or stately Genoa. All the details of this visit to Ravenna are pretty. I shall write them out some time. Of Padua, too, the little to be said should be said in detail. Of Venice and its enchanted life I could not speak; it should only be echoed back in music. There only I began to feel in its fulness Venetian Art. It can only be seen in its own atmosphere. Never had I the least idea of what is to be seen at Venice. It seems to me as if no one ever yet had seen it, — so entirely wanting is any expression of what I felt myself. Venice! on this subject I shall not write much till time, place, and mode agree to make it fit. Venice, where all is past, is a fit asylum for the dynasties of the Past. The Duchesse de Berri owns one of the finest palaces on the Grand Canal; the Duc de Bordeaux rents another; Mademoiselle Taglioni has bought the famous Casa d’Oro, and it is under repair. Thanks to the fashion which has made Venice a refuge of this kind, the palaces, rarely inhabited by the representatives of their ancient names, are valuable property, and the noble structures will not be suffered to lapse into the sea, above which they rose so proudly. The restorations, too, are made with excellent taste and judgment, — nothing is spoiled. Three of these fine palaces are now hotels, so that the transient visitor can enjoy from their balconies all the wondrous shows of the Venetian night and day as much as any of their former possessors did. I was at the Europa, formerly the Giustiniani Palace, with better air than those on the Grand Canal, and a more unobstructed view than Danieli’s. Madame de Berri gave an entertainment on the birthnight of her son, and the old Duchesse d’Angoulême came from Vienna to attend it. ‘T was a scene of fairy-land, the palace full of light, so that from the canal could be seen even the pictures on the walls. Landing from the gondolas, the elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen seemed to rise from the water; we also saw them glide up the great stair, rustling their plumes, and in the reception- rooms make and receive the customary grimaces. A fine band stationed on the opposite side of the canal played the while, and a flotilla of gondolas lingered there to listen. I, too, amid, the mob, a pleasant position in Venice alone, thought of the Stuarts, Bourbons, Bonapartes, here in Italy, and offered up a prayer that other names, when the possessors have power without the heart to use it for the emancipation of mankind, might he added to the list, and other princes, more rich in blood than brain, might come to enjoy a perpetual villeggiatura in Italy. It did not seem to me a cruel wish. The show of greatness will satisfy every legitimate desire of such minds. A gentle punishment for the distributors of letters de cachet and Spielberg dungeons to their fellow-men. Having passed more than a fortnight at Venice, I have come here, stopping at Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, Lago di Garda, Brescia. Certainly I have learned more than ever in any previous ten days of my existence, and have formed an idea what is needed for the study of Art and its history in these regions. To be sure, I shall never have time to follow it up, but it is a delight to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI look up those glorious vistas, even when there is no hope of entering them. A violent shower obliged me to stop on the way. It was late at night, and I was nearly asleep, when, roused by the sound of bubbling waters, I started up and asked, “Is that the Adda?” and it was. So deep is the impression made by a simple natural recital, like that of Renzo’s wanderings in the Promessi Sposi, that the memory of his hearing the Adda in this way occurred to me at once, and the Adda seemed familiar as if I had been a native of this region. As the Scottish lakes seem the domain of Walter Scott, so does Milan and its neighborhood in the mind of a foreigner belong to Manzoni. I have seen him since, the gentle lord of this wide domain; his hair is white, but his eyes still beam as when he first saw the apparitions of truth, simple tenderness, and piety which he has so admirably recorded for our benefit. Those around lament that the fastidiousness of his taste prevents his completing and publishing more, and that thus a treasury of rare knowledge and refined thought will pass from us without our reaping the benefit. We, indeed, have no title to complain, what we do possess from his hand is so excellent. At this moment there is great excitement in Italy. A supposed spy of Austria has been assassinated at Ferrara, and Austrian troops are marched there. It is pretended that a conspiracy has been discovered in Rome; the consequent disturbances have been put down. The National Guard is forming. All things seem to announce that some important change is inevitable here, but what? Neither Radicals nor Moderates dare predict with confidence, and I am yet too much a stranger to speak with assurance of impressions I have received. But it is impossible not to hope. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

August 29, Sunday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller mentioning that Henry Thoreau was close to closing the deal on his book.

October: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the Italian lakes, and warned of a “coming storm”: Rome, October, 1847. I think my last letter was from Milan, and written after I had seen Manzoni. This was to me a great pleasure. I have now seen the most important representatives who survive of the last epoch in thought. Our age has still its demonstrations to make, its heroes and poets to crown. Although the modern Italian literature is not poor, as many persons at a distance suppose, but, on the contrary, surprisingly rich in tokens of talent, if we consider the circumstances under which it struggles to exist, yet very few writers have or deserve a European or American reputation. Where a whole country is so kept down, her best minds cannot take the lead in the progress of the age; they have too much to suffer, too much to explain. But among the few who, through depth of spiritual experience and the beauty of form in which it is expressed, belong not only to Italy, but to the world, Manzoni HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI takes a high rank. The passive virtues he teaches are no longer what is wanted; the manners he paints with so delicate a fidelity are beginning to change; but the spirit of his works, — the tender piety, the sensibility to the meaning of every humblest form of life, the delicate humor and satire so free from disdain, — these are immortal. Young Italy rejects Manzoni, though not irreverently; Young Italy prizes his works, but feels that the doctrine of “Pray and wait” is not for her at this moment, — that she needs a more fervent hope, a more active faith. She is right. It is well known that the traveller, if he knows the Italian language as written in books, the standard Tuscan, still finds himself a stranger in many parts of Italy, unable to comprehend the dialects, with their lively abbreviations and witty slang. That of Venice I had understood somewhat, and could enter into the drollery and naïveté of the gondoliers, who, as a class, have an unusual share of character. But the Milanese I could not at first understand at all. Their language seemed to me detestably harsh, and their gestures unmeaning. But after a friend, who possesses that large and ready sympathy easier found in Italy than anywhere else, had translated for me verbatim into French some of the poems written in the Milanese, and then read them aloud in the original, I comprehended the peculiar inflection of voice and idiom in the people, and was charmed with it, as one is with the instinctive wit and wisdom of children. There is very little to see at Milan, compared with any other Italian city; and this was very fortunate for me, allowing an interval of repose in the house, which I cannot take when there is so much without, tempting me to incessant observation and study. I went through, the North of Italy with a constantly increasing fervor of interest. When I had thought of Italy, it was always of the South, of the Roman States, of Tuscany. But now I became deeply interested in the history, the institutions, the art of the North. The fragments of the past mark the progress of its waves so clearly, I learned to understand, to prize them every day more, to know how to make use of the books about them. I shall have much to say on these subjects some day. Leaving Milan, I went on the Lago Maggiore, and afterward into Switzerland. Of this tour I shall not speak here; it was a beautiful little romance by itself, and infinitely refreshing to be so near nature in these grand and simple forms, after so much exciting thought of Art and Man. The day passed in the St. Bernardin, with its lofty peaks and changing lights upon the distant snows, — its holy, exquisite valleys and waterfalls, its stories of eagles and chamois, was the greatest refreshment I ever experienced: it was bracing as a cold bath after the heat of a crowd amid which one has listened to some most eloquent oration. Returning from Switzerland, I passed a fortnight on the Lake of Como, and afterward visited Lugano. There is no exaggeration in the enthusiastic feeling with which artists and poets have viewed these Italian lakes. Their beauties are peculiar, enchanting, innumerable. The Titan of Richter, the Wanderjahre of Goethe, the Elena of Taylor, the pictures of Turner, had not prepared me for the visions of beauty that daily entranced the eyes and heart in those regions. To our country Nature has been most bounteous; but we have nothing in the same kind that can compare with these lakes, as seen under the Italian heaven. As HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to those persons who have pretended to discover that the effects of light and atmosphere were no finer than they found in our own lake scenery, I can only say that they must be exceedingly obtuse in organization, — a defect not uncommon among Americans. Nature seems to have labored to express her full heart in as many ways as possible, when she made these lakes, moulded and planted their shores. Lago Maggiore is grand, resplendent in Its beauty; the view of the Alps gives a sort of lyric exaltation to the scene. Lago di Garda is so soft and fair, — so glittering sweet on one side, the ruins of ancient palaces rise so softly with the beauties of that shore; but at the other end, amid the Tyrol, it is sublime, calm, concentrated in its meaning. Como cannot be better described in general than in the words of Taylor: “Softly sublime, profusely fair.” Lugano is more savage, more free in its beauty. I was on it in a high gale; there was a little clanger, just enough to exhilarate; its waters were wild, and clouds blowing across the neighboring peaks. I like very much the boatmen on these lakes; they have strong and prompt character. Of simple features, they are more honest and manly than Italian men are found in the thoroughfares; their talk is not so witty as that of the Venetian gondoliers, but picturesque, and what the French call incisive. Very touching were some of their histories, as they told them to me while pausing sometimes on the lake. On this lake, also, I met Lady Franklin, wife of the celebrated navigator. She has been in the United States, and showed equal penetration and candor in remarks on what she had seen there. She gave me interesting particulars as to the state of things in Van Diemen’s Land, where she passed seven years when her husband was in authority there. I returned to Milan for the great feast of the Madonna, 8th September, and those made for the Archbishop’s entry, which took place the same week. These excited as much feeling as the Milanese can have a chance to display, this Archbishop being much nearer the public heart than his predecessor, who was a poor servant of Austria. The Austrian rule is always equally hated, and time, instead of melting away differences, only makes them more glaring. The Austrian race have no faculties that can ever enable them to understand the Italian character; their policy, so well contrived to palsy and repress for a time, cannot kill, and there is always a force at work underneath which shall yet, and I think now before long, shake off the incubus. The Italian nobility have always kept the invader at a distance; they have not been at all seduced or corrupted by the lures of pleasure or power, but have shown a passive patriotism highly honorable to them. In the middle class ferments much thought, and there is a capacity for effort; in the present system it cannot show itself, but it is there; thought ferments, and will yet produce a wine that shall set the Lombard veins on fire when the time for action shall arrive. The lower classes of the population are in a dull state indeed. The censorship of the press prevents all easy, natural ways of instructing them; there are no public meetings, no free access to them by more instructed and aspiring minds. The Austrian policy is to allow them a degree of material well-being, and though so much wealth is drained from, the country for the service of the foreigners, jet enough must HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI remain on these rich plains comfortably to feed and clothe the inhabitants. Yet the great moral influence of the Pope’s action, though obstructed in their case, does reach and rouse them, and they, too, felt the thrill of indignation at the occupation of Ferrara. The base conduct of the police toward the people, when, at Milan, some youths were resolute to sing the hymn in honor of Pius IX., when the feasts for the Archbishop afforded so legitimate an occasion, roused all the people to unwonted feeling. The nobles protested, and Austria had not courage to persist as usual. She could not sustain her police, who rushed upon a defenceless crowd, that had no share in what excited their displeasure, except by sympathy, and, driving them like sheep, wounded them in the backs. Austria feels that there is now no sympathy for her in these matters; that it is not the interest of the world to sustain her. Her policy is, indeed, too thoroughly organized to change except by revolution; its scope is to serve, first, a reigning family instead of the people; second, with the people to seek a physical in preference to an intellectual good; and, third, to prefer a seeming outward peace to an inward life. This policy may change its opposition from the tyrannical to the insidious; it can know no other change. Yet do I meet persons who call themselves Americans, — miserable, thoughtless Esaus, unworthy their high birthright, — who think that a mess of pottage can satisfy the wants of man, and that the Viennese listening to Strauss’s waltzes, the Lombard peasant supping full of his polenta, is happy enough. Alas: I have the more reason to be ashamed of my countrymen that it is not among the poor, who have so much, toil that there is little time to think, but those who are rich, who travel, — in body that is, they do not travel in mind. Absorbed at home by the lust of gain, the love of show, abroad they see only the equipages, the fine clothes, the food, — they have no heart for the idea, for the destiny of our own great nation: how can they feel the spirit that is struggling now in this and others of Europe? But of the hopes of Italy I will write more fully in another letter, and state what I have seen, what felt, what thought. I went from Milan, to Pavia, and saw its magnificent Certosa, I passed several hours in examining its riches, especially the sculptures of its façade, full of force and spirit. I then went to Florence by Parma and Bologna. In Parma, though ill, I went to see all the works of the masters. A wonderful beauty it is that informs them, — not that which is the chosen food of my soul, yet a noble beauty, and which did its message to me also. Those works are failing; it will not be useless to describe them in a book. Beside these pictures, I saw nothing in Parma and Modena; these states are obliged to hold their breath while their poor, ignorant sovereigns skulk in corners, hoping to hide from the coming storm. Of all this more in my next. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 18, Monday: Discovery of a 8th asteroid. ASTRONOMY

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome about Italian patriotism: Rome, October 18, 1847. In the spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust. With equal pleasure I saw the Pope, who has not in his expression the signs of intellectual greatness so much as of nobleness and tenderness of heart, of large and liberal sympathies. Heart had spoken to heart between the prince and the people; it was beautiful to see the immediate good influence exerted by human feeling and generous designs, on the part of a ruler. He had wished to be a father, and the Italians, with that readiness of genius that characterizes them, entered at once into the relation; they, the Roman people, stigmatized by prejudice as so crafty and ferocious, showed themselves children, eager to learn, quick to obey, happy to confide. Still doubts were always present whether all this joy was not premature. The task undertaken by the Pope seemed to present insuperable difficulties. It is never easy to put new wine into old bottles, and our age is one where all things tend to a great crisis; not merely to revolution, but to radical reform. From the people themselves the help must come, and not from princes; in the new state of things, there will be none but natural princes, great men. From the aspirations of the general heart, from the teachings of conscience in individuals, and not from an old ivy-covered church long since undermined, corroded by time and gnawed by vermin, the help must come. Rome, to resume her glory, must cease to be an ecclesiastical capital; must renounce all this gorgeous mummery, whose poetry, whose picture, charms no one more than myself, but whose meaning is all of the past, and finds no echo in the future. Although I sympathized warmly with the warm love of the people, the adulation of leading writers, who were so willing to take all from the hand of the prince, of the Church, as a gift and a bounty, instead of implying steadily that it was the right of the people, was very repulsive to me. The moderate party, like all who, in a transition state, manage affairs with a constant eye to prudence, lacks dignity always in its expositions; it is disagreeable and depressing to read them. Passing into Tuscany, I found the liberty of the press just established, and a superior preparation to make use of it. The Alba, the Patria, were begun, and have been continued with equal judgment and spirit. Their aim is to educate the youth, to educate the lower people; they see that this is to be done by promoting thought fearlessly, yet urge temperance in action, while the time is yet so difficult, and many of its signs dubious. They aim at breaking down those barriers between the different states of Italy, relics of a barbarous state of polity, artificially kept up by the craft of her foes. While anxious not to break down what is really native to the Italian character, — defences and differences that give individual genius a chance to grow and the fruits of each region to ripen in their natural way, — they aim at a harmony of spirit as to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI measures of education and for the affairs of business, without which Italy can never, as one nation, present a front strong enough to resist foreign robbery, and for want of which so much time and talent are wasted here, and internal development almost wholly checked. There is in Tuscany a large corps of enlightened minds, well prepared to be the instructors, the elder brothers and guardians, of the lower people, and whose hearts burn to fulfil that noble office. Before, it had been almost impossible to them, for the reasons I have named in speaking of Lombardy; but during these last four months that the way has been opened by the freedom of the press, and establishment of the National Guard, — so valuable, first of all, as giving occasion for public meetings and free interchange of thought between the different classes, — it is surprising how much light they have been able to diffuse. A Bolognese, to whom I observed, “How can you be so full of trust when all your hopes depend, not on the recognition of principles and wants throughout the people, but on the life of one mortal man?” replied: “Ah! but you don’t consider that his life gives us a chance to effect that recognition. If Pius IX. be spared to us five years, it will be impossible for his successors ever to take a backward course. Our nation is of a genius so vivacious, — we are unhappy, but not stupid, we Italians, — we can learn as much in two months as other nations in twenty years.” This seemed to me no brag when I returned to Tuscany and saw the great development and diffusion of thought that had taken place during my brief absence. The Grand Duke, a well- intentioned, though dull man, had dared, to declare himself “an ITALIAN prince” and the heart of Tuscany had bounded with hope. It is now deeply as justly felt that the curse of Italy is foreign intrusion; that if she could dispense with foreign aid, and be free from foreign aggression, she would find the elements of salvation within herself. All her efforts tend that way, to re- establish the natural position of things; may Heaven grant them success! For myself, I believe they will attain it. I see more reason for hope, as I know more of the people. Their rash and baffled struggles have taught them prudence; they are wanted in the civilized world as a peculiar influence; their leaders are thinking men, their cause is righteous. I believe that Italy will revive to new life, and probably a greater, one more truly rich and glorious, than at either epoch of her former greatness. During the period of my absence, the Austrians had entered Ferrara. It is well that they hazarded this step, for it showed them the difficulties in acting against a prince of the Church who is at the same time a friend to the people. The position was new, and they were probably surprised at the result, — surprised at the firmness of the Pope, surprised at the indignation, tempered by calm resolve, on the part of the Italians. Louis Philippe’s mean apostasy has this time turned to the advantage of freedom. He renounced the good understanding with England which it had been one of the leading features of his policy to maintain, in the hope of aggrandizing and enriching his family (not France, he did not care for France); he did not know that he was paving the way for Italian freedom. England now is led to play a part a little nearer her pretensions as the guardian of progress than she often comes, and the ghost of La Fayette looks down, not unappeased, to see the “Constitutional King” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI decried by the subjects he has cheated and lulled so craftily. The king of Sardinia is a worthless man, in whom nobody puts any trust so far as regards his heart or honor; but the stress of things seems likely to keep him on the right side. The little sovereigns blustered at first, then ran away affrighted when they found there was really a spirit risen at last within the charmed circle, — a spirit likely to defy, to transcend, the spells of haggard premiers and imbecile monarchs. I arrived in Florence, unhappily, too late for the great fête of the 12th of September, in honor of the grant of a National Guard. But I wept at the mere recital of the events of that day, which, if it should lead to no important results, must still be hallowed for ever in the memory of Italy, for the great and beautiful emotions that flooded the hearts of her children. The National Guard is hailed with no undue joy by Italians, as the earnest of progress, the first step toward truly national institutions and a representation of the people. Gratitude has done its natural work in their hearts; it has made them better. Some days before the fête were passed in reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and individuals. They wished to drop all petty, all local differences, to wash away all stains, to bathe and prepare for a new great covenant of brotherly love, where each should act for the good of all. On that day they all embraced in sign of this, — strangers, foes, all exchanged the kiss of faith and love; they exchanged banners, as a token that they would fight for, would animate, one another. All was done in that beautiful poetic manner peculiar to this artist people; but it was the spirit, so great and tender, that melts my heart to think of. It was the spirit of true religion, — such, my Country! as, welling freshly from some great hearts in thy early hours, won for thee all of value that thou canst call thy own, whose groundwork is the assertion, still sublime though thou hast not been true to it, that all men have equal rights, and that these are birth-rights, derived from God alone. I rejoice to say that the Americans took their share on this occasion, and that Greenough — one of the few Americans who, living in Italy, takes the pains to know whether it is alive or dead, who penetrates beyond the cheats of tradesmen and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to know the real mind, the vital blood, of Italy — took a leading part. I am sorry to say that a large portion of my countrymen here take the same slothful and prejudiced view as the English, and, after many years’ sojourn, betray entire ignorance of Italian literature and Italian life, beyond what is attainable in a month’s passage through the thoroughfares. However, they did show, this time, a becoming spirit, and erected the American eagle where its cry ought to be heard from afar, — where a nation is striving for independent existence, and a government representing the people. Crawford here in Rome has had the just feeling to join the Guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an artist to spend time on the exercises; but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus, — of him who had such faith, such music of divine thought, that he made the stones move, turned the beasts from their accustomed haunts, and shamed hell itself into sympathy with the grief of love. I do not deny that such a spirit is wanted here in Italy; it is everywhere, if anything great, anything permanent, is to be done. In reference to what I have HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add, that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better. As to the English, some of them are full of generous, intelligent sympathy; — indeed what is more solidly, more wisely good than the right sort of Englishmen! — but others are like a gentleman I travelled with the other day, a man of intelligence and refinement too as to the details of life and outside culture, who observed, that he did not see what the Italians wanted of a National Guard, unless to wear these little caps. He was a man who had passed five years in Italy, but always covered with that non-conductor called by a witty French writer “the Britannic fluid.” Very sweet to my ear was the continual hymn in the streets of Florence, in honor of Pius IX. It is the Roman hymn, and none of the new ones written in Tuscany have been able to take its place. The people thank the Grand Duke when he does them good, but they know well from whose mind that good originates, and all their love is for the Pope. Time presses, or I would fain describe in detail the troupe of laborers of the lower class, marching home at night, keeping step as if they were in the National Guard, filling the air, and cheering the melancholy moon, by the patriotic hymns sung with the mellow tone and in the perfect time which belong to Italians. I would describe the extempore concerts in the streets, the rejoicings at the theatres, where the addresses of liberal souls to the people, through that best vehicle, the drama, may now be heard. But I am tired; what I have to write would fill volumes, and my letter must go. I will only add some words upon the happy augury I draw from the wise docility of the people. With what readiness they listened to wise counsel, and the hopes of the Pope that they would give no advantage to his enemies, at a time when they were so fevered by the knowledge that conspiracy was at work in their midst! That was a time of trial. On all these occasions of popular excitement their conduct is like music, in such order, and with such union of the melody of feeling with discretion where to stop; but what is wonderful is that they acted in the same manner on that difficult occasion. The influence of the Pope here is without bounds; he can always calm the crowd at once. But in Tuscany, where they have no such idol, they listened in the same way on a very trying occasion. The first announcement of the regulation for the Tuscan National Guard terribly disappointed the people; they felt that the Grand Duke, after suffering them to demonstrate such trust and joy on the feast of the 12th, did not really trust, on his side; that he meant to limit them all he could. They felt baffled, cheated; hence young men in anger tore down at once the symbols of satisfaction and respect; but the leading men went among the people, begged them to be calm, and wait till a deputation had seen the Grand Duke. The people, listening at once to men who, they were sure, had at heart their best good, waited; the Grand Duke became convinced, and all ended without disturbance. If they continue to act thus, their hopes cannot be baffled. Certainly I, for one, do not think that the present road will suffice to lead Italy to her goal. But it is an onward, upward road, and the people learn as they advance. Now they can seek and think HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fearless of prisons and bayonets, a healthy circulation of blood begins, and the heart frees itself from disease. I earnestly hope for some expression of sympathy from my country toward Italy. Take a good chance and do something; you have shown much good feeling toward the Old World in its physical difficulties, — you ought to do still more in its spiritual endeavor. This cause is OURS, above all others; we ought to show that we feel it to be so. At present there is no likelihood of war, but in case of it I trust the United States would not fail in some noble token of sympathy toward this country. The soul of our nation need not wait for its government; these things are better done by individuals. I believe some in the United States will pay attention to these words of mine, will feel that I am not a person to be kindled by a childish, sentimental enthusiasm, but that I must be sure I have seen something of Italy before speaking as I do. I have been here only seven months, but my means of observation have been uncommon. I have been ardently desirous to judge fairly, and had no prejudices to prevent; beside, I was not ignorant of the history and literature of Italy, and had some common ground on which to stand with, its inhabitants, and hear what they have to say. In many ways Italy is of kin to us; she is the country of Columbus, of Amerigo, of Cabot. It would please me much to see a cannon here bought by the contributions of Americans, at whose head should stand the name of Cabot, to be used by the Guard for salutes on festive occasions, if they should be so happy as to have no more serious need. In Tuscany they are casting one to be called the “Gioberti,” from a writer who has given a great impulse to the present movement. I should like the gift of America to be called the AMERIGO, the COLUMBO, or the WASHINGTON. Please think of this, some of my friends, who still care for the eagle, the Fourth of July, and the old cries of hope and honor. See if there are any objections that I do not think of, and do something if it is well and brotherly. Ah! America, with all thy rich boons, thou hast a heavy account to render for the talent given; see in every way that thou be not found wanting. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI December: The Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz had written Margaret Fuller “For you the first step of your deliverance … is to know whether you are to be permitted to remain a virgin.” Her revolutionary nobleman lover Ossoli was eleven years her junior. Although he was an aristocrat and had rubbed shoulders with a great many people, he was not what you would call an educated, or even a bookish person: “The connection seemed so every way unfit.” Regarding the disparity in their ages, Margaret would commit that should her age come to cause her soulmate any sexual problem, “I shall do all that this false state of society permits to give him what freedom he may need.” Although he was the youngest son of the family, he was nevertheless a marchése and one of the heirs of the great lords of the castle of Pietraforte. There is in fact in one of the oldest churches in Roma an Ossoli chapel, provided by his noble ancestors. One big problem was that if the Ossoli family should discover that he was having to do with a poor woman, –a Protestant, –a radical, for sure his brothers would see that he was disinherited. When Fuller discovered she was pregnant she continued to refuse Ossoli’s offers of marriage: “At present I see no way out except through the gate of death.” As her pregnancy would gradually become undisguisable, she would seek out a hiding place some 50 miles outside of Roma, in the village of Rieti. While in this village she would receive a letter from Emerson planning his return from lecturing in England, and in this letter he would ask her to arrange to voyage with him, but later, when he would learn about the pregnancy, he would experience a change of heart which he would term “unexpected,” and would come to see “advantages” to what he would term “absenteeism.”

December 17, Friday: Duchess Maria Luigia of Parma, daughter of Austrian Emperor Franz II and widow of the Emperor Napoléon I, died in Parma and was succeeded by Carlo II, son of Luigi I of Etruria and grandson of Duke Ferdinando of Parma.

Esmerelda, an opera by Alyeksandr Sergeyevich Dargomizhsky to his own words after Hugo, was performed for the initial time, at the Bolshoi Theater, Moscow.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: This 17th day of December I rise to see the floods of sunlight blessing us, as they have almost every day since I returned to Rome, — two months and more, — with scarce three or four days of rainy weather. I still see the fresh roses and grapes each morning on my table, though both these I expect to give up at Christmas. This autumn is something like, as my countrymen say at home. Like what, they do not say; so I always supposed they meant like their ideal standard. Certainly this weather corresponds with mine; and I begin to believe the climate of Italy is really what it has been represented. Shivering here last spring in an air no better than the cruel cast wind of Puritan Boston, I thought all the praises lavished on “Italia, O Italia!” would turn out to be figments of the brain; and that even Byron, usually accurate beyond the conception of plodding pedants, had deceived us when he says, you have the happiness in Italy to “See the sun set, sure he’ll rise to-morrow,” and not, according to a view which exercises a withering influence on the enthusiasm of youth in my native land, be forced to regard each pleasant day as a weather-breeder. How delightful, too, is the contrast between this time and the spring in another respect! Then I was here, like travellers in general, expecting to be driven away in a short time. Like others, I went through the painful process of sight-seeing, so unnatural everywhere, so counter to the healthful methods and true life of the mind. You rise in the morning knowing there are a great number of objects worth knowing, which you may never HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI have the chance to see again. You go every day, in all moods, under all circumstances; feeling, probably, in seeing them, the inadequacy of your preparation for understanding or duly receiving them. This consciousness would be most valuable if one had time to think and study, being the natural way in which the mind is lured to cure its defects; but you have no time; you are always wearied, body and mind, confused, dissipated, sad. The objects are of commanding beauty or full of suggestion, but there is no quiet to let that beauty breathe its life into the soul; no time to follow up these suggestions, and plant for the proper harvest. Many persons run about Rome for nine days, and then go away; they might as well expect to appreciate the Venus by throwing a stone at it, as hope really to see Rome in this time. I stayed in Rome nine weeks, and came away unhappy as he who, having been taken in the visions of the night through some wondrous realm, wakes unable to recall anything but the hues and outlines of the pageant; the real knowledge, the recreative power induced by familiar love, the assimilation of its soul and substance, — all the true value of such a revelation, — is wanting; and he remains a poor Tantalus, hungrier than before he had tasted this spiritual food. No; Rome is not a nine-days wonder; and those who try to make it such lose the ideal Rome (if they ever had it), without gaining any notion of the real. To those who travel, as they do everything else, only because others do, I do not speak; they are nothing. Nobody counts in the estimate of the human race who has not a character. For one, I now really live in Rome, and I begin to see and feel the real Rome. She reveals herself day by day; she tells me some of her life. Now I never go out to see a sight, but I walk every day; and here I cannot miss of some object of consummate interest to end a walk. In the evenings, which are long now, I am at leisure to follow up the inquiries suggested by the day. As one becomes familiar, Ancient and Modern Rome, at first so painfully and discordantly jumbled together, are drawn apart to the mental vision. One sees where objects and limits anciently wore; the superstructures vanish, and you recognize the local habitation of so many thoughts. When this begins to happen, one feels first truly at ease in Rome. Then the old kings, the consuls and tribunes, the emperors, drunk with blood and gold, the warriors of eagle sight and remorseless beak, return for us, and the togated procession finds room to sweep across the scene; the seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more. Ah! how joyful to see once more this Rome, instead of the pitiful, peddling, Anglicized Rome, first viewed in unutterable dismay from the coupé of the vettura, — a Rome all full of taverns, lodging-houses, cheating chambermaids, vilest valets de place, and fleas! A Niobe of nations indeed! Ah! why, secretly the heart blasphemed, did the sun omit to kill her too, when all the glorious race which wore her crown fell beneath his ray? Thank Heaven, it is possible to wash away all this dirt, and come at the marble yet. Their the later Papal Rome: it requires much acquaintance, much thought, much reference to books, for the child of Protestant Republican America to see where belong the legends illustrated by rite and picture, the sense of all the rich tapestry, where it has a united and poetic meaning, where it is broken by some HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI accident of history. For all these things — a senseless mass of juggleries to the uninformed eye — are really growths of the human spirit struggling to develop its life, and full of instruction for those who learn to understand them. Then Modern Rome, — still ecclesiastical, still darkened and damp in the shadow of the Vatican, but where bright hopes gleam now amid the ashes! Never was a people who have had more to corrupt them, — bloody tyranny, and incubus of priestcraft, the invasions, first of Goths, then of trampling emperors and kings, then of sight-seeing foreigners, — everything to turn them from a sincere, hopeful, fruitful life; and they are much corrupted, but still a fine race. I cannot look merely with a pictorial eye on the lounge of the Roman dandy, the bold, Juno gait of the Roman Contadina. I love them, — dandies and all? I believe the natural expression of these fine forms will animate them yet. Certainly there never was a people that showed a better heart than they do in this day of love, of purely moral influence. It makes me very happy to be for once in a place ruled by a father’s love, and where the pervasive glow of one good, generous heart is felt in every pulse of every day. I have seen the Pope several times since my return, and it is a real pleasure to see him in the thoroughfares, where his passage is always greeted as that of the living soul. The first week of November there is much praying for the dead here in the chapels of the cemeteries. I went to Santo Spirito. This cemetery stands high, and all the way up the slope was lined with beggars petitioning for alms, in every attitude find tone, (I mean tone that belongs to the professional beggar’s gamut, for that is peculiar,) and under every pretext imaginable, from the quite legless elderly gentleman to the ragged ruffian with the roguish twinkle in his eye, who has merely a slight stiffness in one arm and one leg. I could not help laughing, it was such a show, — greatly to the alarm of my attendant, who declared they would kill me, if ever they caught me alone; but I was not afraid. I am sure the endless falsehood in which such creatures live must make them very cowardly. We entered the cemetery; it was a sweet, tranquil place, lined with cypresses, and soft sunshine lying on the stone coverings where repose the houses of clay in which once dwelt joyous Roman hearts, — for the hearts here do take pleasure in life. There were several chapels; in one boys were chanting, in others people on their knees silently praying for the dead. In another was one of the groups in wax exhibited in such chapels through the first week of November. It represented St. Carlo Borromeo as a beautiful young man in a long scarlet robe, pure and brilliant as was the blood of the martyrs, relieving the poor who were grouped around him, — old people and children, the halt, the maimed, the blind; he had called them all into the feast of love. The chapel was lighted and draped so as to give very good effect to this group; the spectators were mainly children and young girls, listening with ardent eyes, while their parents or the nuns explained to them the group, or told some story of the saint. It was a pretty scene, only marred by the presence of a villanous-looking man, who ever and anon shook the poor’s box. I cannot understand the bad taste of choosing him, when there were frati and priests enough of expression less unprepossessing. I next entered a court-yard, where the stations, or different periods in the Passion of Jesus, are painted on the wall. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Kneeling before these were many persons: here a Franciscan, in his brown robe and cord; there a pregnant woman, uttering, doubtless, some tender aspiration for the welfare of the yet unborn dear one; there some boys, with gay yet reverent air; while all the while these fresh young voices were heard chanting. It was a beautiful moment, and despite the wax saint, the ill-favored friar, the professional mendicants, and my own removal, wide as pole from pole, from the positron of mind indicated by these forms, their spirit touched me, and. I prayed too; prayed for the distant, every way distant, — for those who seem to have forgotten me, and with me all we had in common; prayed for the dead in spirit, if not in body; prayed for myself, that I might never walk the earth “The tomb of my dead self”; and prayed in general for all unspoiled and loving hearts, — no less for all who suffer and find yet no helper. Going out, I took my road by the cross which marks the brow of the hill. Up the ascent still wound the crowd of devotees, and still the beggars beset them. Amid that crowd, how many lovely, warm-hearted women! The women of Italy are intellectually in a low place, but — they are unaffected; you can see what Heaven meant them to be, and I believe they will be yet the mothers of a great and generous race. Before me lay Rome, — how exquisitely tranquil in the sunset! Never was an aspect that for serene grandeur could vie with that of Rome at sunset. Next day was the feast of the Milanese saint, whose life has been made known to some Americans by Manzoni, when speaking in his popular novel of the cousin of St. Carlo, Federigo Borromeo. The Pope came in state to the church of St. Carlo, in the Corso. The show was magnificent; the church is not very large, and was almost filled with Papal court and guards, in all their splendid harmonies of color. An Italian child was next me, a little girl of four or five years, whom her mother had brought to see the Pope. As in the intervals of gazing the child smiled and made signs to me, I nodded in return, and asked her name. “Virginia,” said she; “and how is the Signora named?” “Margherita,” “My name,” she rejoined, “is Virginia Gentili.” I laughed, but did not follow up the cunning, graceful lead, — still I chatted and played with her now and then. At last, she said to her mother, “La Signora e molto cara,” (“The Signora is very dear,” or, to use the English equivalent, a darling,) “show her my two sisters.” So the mother, herself a fine-looking woman, introduced two handsome young ladies, and with the family I was in a moment pleasantly intimate for the hour. Before me sat three young English ladies, the pretty daughters of a noble Earl; their manners were a strange contrast to this Italian graciousness, best expressed by their constant use of the pronoun that. “See that man!” (i.e. some high dignitary of the Church,) “Look at that dress!” dropped constantly from their lips. Ah! without being a Catholic, one may well wish Rome was not dependent on English sight-seers, who violate her ceremonies with acts that bespeak their thoughts full of wooden shoes and warming-pans. Can anything be more sadly expressive of times out of joint than the fact that Mrs. Trollope is a resident in Italy? Yes! she is fixed permanently in Florence, as I am told, pensioned at the rate of two thousand pounds a year to trail her slime over the fruit of Italy. She is here in Rome this winter, and, after having violated the virgin beauty of America, will HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI have for many a year her chance to sully the imperial matron of the civilized world. What must the English public be, if it wishes to pay two thousand pounds a year to get Italy Trollopified? But to turn to a pleasanter subject. When the Pope entered, borne in his chair of state amid the pomp of his tiara and his white and gold robes, he looked to me thin, or, as the Italians murmur anxiously at times, consumato, or wasted. But during the ceremony he seemed absorbed in his devotions, and at the end I think he had become exhilarated by thinking of St. Carlo, who was such another over the human race as himself, and his face wore a bright glow of faith. As he blessed the people, he raised his eyes to Heaven, with a gesture quite natural: it was the spontaneous act of a soul which felt that moment more than usual its relation with things above it, and sure of support from a higher Power. I saw him to still greater advantage a little while after, when, riding on the Campagna with a young gentleman who had been ill, we met the Pope on foot, taking exercise. He often quits his carriage at the gates and walks in this way. He walked rapidly, robed in a simple white drapery, two young priests in spotless purple on either side; they gave silver to the poor who knelt beside the way, while the beloved Father gave his benediction. My companion knelt; he is not a Catholic, but he felt that “this blessing would do him no harm.” The Pope saw at once he was ill, and gave him a mark of interest, with that expression of melting love, the true, the only charity, which assures all who look on him that, were his power equal to his will, no living thing would ever suffer more. This expression the artists try in vain to catch; all busts and engravings of him are caricatures; it is a magnetic sweetness, a lambent light that plays over his features, and of which only great genius or a soul tender as his own would form an adequate image. The Italians have one term of praise peculiarly characteristic of their highly endowed nature. They say of such and such, Ha una phisonomia simpatica, — “He has a sympathetic expression”; and this is praise enough. This may be pre-eminently said of that of Pius IX. He looks, indeed, as if nothing human could be foreign to him. Such alone are the genuine kings of men. He has shown undoubted wisdom, clear-sightedness, bravery, and firmness; but it is, above all, his generous human heart that gives him his power over this people. His is a face to shame the selfish, redeem the sceptic, alarm the wicked, and cheer to new effort the weary and heavy-laden. What form the issues of his life may take is yet uncertain; in my belief, they are such as he does not think of; but they cannot fail to be for good. For my part, I shall always rejoice to have been here in his time. The working of his influence confirms my theories, and it is a positive treasure to me to have seen him. I have never been presented, not wishing to approach, so real a presence in the path of mere etiquette; I am quite content to see him standing amid the crowd, while the band plays the music he has inspired. “Sons of Rome, awake!” Yes, awake, and let no police-officer put you again to sleep in prison, as has happened to those who were called by the Marseillaise. Affairs look well. The king of Sardinia has at last, though with evident distrust and heartlessness, entered the upward path in a way that makes it difficult to return. The Duke of Modena, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI most senseless of all these ancient gentlemen, after publishing a declaration, which made him more ridiculous than would the bitterest pasquinade penned by another, that he would fight to the death against reform, finds himself obliged to lend an ear as to the league for the customs; and if he joins that, other measures follow of course. Austria trembles; and, in fine, cannot sustain the point of Ferrara. The king of Naples, after having shed much blood, for which he has a terrible account to render, (ah! how many sad, fair romances are to tell already about the Calabrian difficulties!) still finds the spirit fomenting in his people; he cannot put it down. The dragon’s teeth are sown, and the Lazzaroni may be men yet! The Swiss affairs have taken the right direction, and good will ensue, if other powers act with decent honesty, and think of healing the wounds of Switzerland, rather than merely of tying her down, so that she cannot annoy them. In Rome, here, the new Council is inaugurated, and elections have given tolerable satisfaction. Already, struggles ended in other places begin to be renewed here, as to gas-lights, introduction of machinery, &c. We shall see at the end of the winter how they have gone on. At any rate, the wants of the people are in some measure represented; and already the conduct of those who have taken to themselves so large a portion of the loaves and fishes on the very platform supposed to be selected by Jesus for a general feeding of his sheep, begins to be the subject of spoken as well as whispered animadversion. Torlonia is assailed in his bank, Campana amid his urns or his Monte di Picti; but these assaults have yet to be verified. On the day when the Council was to be inaugurated, great preparations were made by representatives of other parts of Italy, and also of foreign nations friendly to the cause of progress. It was considered to represent the same fact as the feast of the 12th of September in Tuscany, — the dawn of an epoch when the people shall find their wants and aspirations represented and guarded. The Americans showed a warm interest; the gentlemen subscribing to buy a flag, the United States having none before in Rome, and the ladies meeting to make it. The same distinguished individual, indeed, who at Florence made a speech to prevent “the American eagle being taken out on so trifling an occasion,” with similar perspicuity and superiority of view, on the present occasion, was anxious to prevent “rash demonstrations, which might embroil the United States with Austria”; but the rash youth here present rushed on, ignorant how to value his Nestorian prudence, — fancying, hot-headed simpletons, that the cause of Freedom was the cause of America, and her eagle at home wherever the sun shed a warmer ray, and there was reason to hope a happier life for man. So they hurried to buy their silk, red, white, and blue, and inquired of recent arrivals how many States there are this winter in the Union, in order to making the proper number of stars. A magnificent spread-eagle was procured, not without difficulty, as this, once the eyrie of the king of birds, is now a rookery rather, full of black, ominous fowl, ready to eat the harvest sown by industrious hands. This eagle, having previously spread its wings over a piece of furniture where its back was sustained by the wall, was somewhat deficient in a part of its anatomy. But we flattered ourselves he should be held so high that no Roman eye, if disposed, could carp and criticise. When lo! just as the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI banner was ready to unfold its young glories in the home of Horace, Virgil, and Tacitus, an ordinance appeared prohibiting the display of any but the Roman ensign. This ordinance was, it is said, caused by representations made to the Pope that the Oscurantists, ever on the watch to do mischief, meant to make this the occasion of disturbance, — as it is their policy to seek to create irritation here; that the Neapolitan and Lombardo-Venetian flags would appear draped with black, and thus the signal be given for tumult. I cannot help thinking these fears were groundless; that the people, on their guard, would have indignantly crushed at once any of these malignant efforts. However that may be, no one can ever be really displeased with any measure of the Pope, knowing his excellent intentions. But the limitation of the festival deprived it of the noble character of the brotherhood of nations and an ideal aim, worn by that of Tuscany. The Romans, drilled and disappointed, greeted their Councillors with but little enthusiasm. The procession, too, was but a poor affair for Rome. Twenty-four carriages had been lent by the princes and nobles, at the request of the city, to convey the Councillors. I found something symbolical in this. Thus will they be obliged to furnish from their old grandeur the vehicles of the new ideas. Each deputy was followed by his target and banner. When the deputy for Ferrara passed, many garlands were thrown upon his carriage. There has been deep respect and sympathy felt for the citizens of Ferrara, they have conducted so well under their late trying circumstances. They contained themselves, knowing that the least indiscretion would give a handle for aggression to the enemies of the good cause. But the daily occasions of irritation must have been innumerable, and they have shown much power of wise and dignified self-government. After the procession passed, I attempted to go on foot from the Café Novo, in the Corso, to St. Peter’s, to see the decorations of the streets, but it was impossible. In that dense, but most vivacious, various, and good-humored crowd, with all best will on their part to aid the foreigner, it was impossible to advance. So I saw only themselves; but that was a great pleasure. There is so much individuality of character here, that it is a great entertainment to be in a crowd. In the evening, there was a ball given at the Argentina. Lord Minto was there; Prince Corsini, now Senator; the Torlonias, in uniform of the Civic Guard, — Princess Torlonia in a sash of their colors, given her by the Civic Guard, which she waved often in answer to their greetings. But the beautiful show of the evening was the Trasteverini dancing the Saltarello in their most brilliant costume. I saw them thus to much greater advantage than ever before. Several were nobly handsome, and danced admirably; it was really like Pinelli. The Saltarello enchants me; in this is really the Italian wine, the Italian sun. The first time, I saw it danced one night very unexpectedly near the Colosseum; it carried me quite beyond myself, so that I most unamiably insisted on staying, while the friends in my company, not heated by enthusiasm like me, were shivering and perhaps catching cold from the damp night-air. I fear they remember it against me; nevertheless I cherish the memory of the moments wickedly stolen at their expense, for it is only the first time seeing such a thing that you enjoy a peculiar delight. But since, I love to see and study it much. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The Pope, in receiving the Councillors, made a speech, — such as the king of Prussia intrenched himself in on a similar occasion, only much better and shorter, — implying that he meant only to improve, not to reform, and should keep things in statu quo, safe locked with the keys of St. Peter. This little speech was made, no doubt, more to reassure czars, emperors, and kings, than from the promptings of the spirit. But the fact of its necessity, as well as the inferior freedom and spirit of the Roman journals to those of Tuscany, seems to say that the pontifical government, though from the accident of this one man’s accession it has taken the initiative to better times, yet may not, after a while, from its very nature, be able to keep in the vanguard. A sad contrast to the feast of this day was presented by the same persons, a fortnight after, following the body of Silvani, one of the Councillors, who died suddenly. The Councillors, the different societies of Rome, a corps frati bearing tapers, the Civic Guard with drums slowly beating, the same state carriages with their liveried attendants all slowly, sadly moving, with torches and banners, drooped along the Corso in the dark night. A single horseman, with his long white plume and torch reversed, governed the procession; it was the Prince Aldobrandini. The whole had that grand effect so easily given by this artist people, who seize instantly the natural poetry of an occasion, and with unanimous tact hasten to represent it. More and much anon.

December 19, Sunday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune on the sightseeing she was doing in Rome and the ceremonies she was witnessing: This letter will reach the United States about the 1st of January; and it may not be impertinent to offer a few New-Year’s reflections. Every new year, indeed, confirms the old thoughts, but also presents them under some new aspects. The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although we have an independent political existence, bur position toward Europe, as to literature and the arts, is still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more: we see the pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes, — lifts some mists from his horizon. There are three species. First, the servile American, — a being utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among those less travelled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance at home. I look with unspeakable HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI contempt on this class, — a class which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However, though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our country is fated to a grand, independent existence, and, as its laws develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away. Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and proud of — he knows not what. He does not see, not he, that the history of Humanity for many centuries is likely to have produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish, in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the ritual of the Church, seem simply silly, — and no wonder, profoundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the Connecticut Blue-Laws. He criticises severely pictures, feeling quite sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the rules of connoisseurs, — not feeling that, to see such objects, mental vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed and that something is aimed at in Art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of Nature. This is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring enough to be a good school-boy. Yet in his folly there is meaning; add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy of the class first specified. The artistes form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to speak. This is that of the thinking American, — a man who, recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this. The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and little, — such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some brilliant successes, — such a crushing of the mass of men beneath, the feet of a few, and these, too, often the least worthy, — such a small drop of honey to each cup of gall, and, in many cases, so mingled that it is never one moment in life purely tasted, — above all, so little achieved for HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening to blot out the traces of each triumph, — that no wonder if the strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes. Yes! those men are worthy of admiration who can carry this cross faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some such there are; and, feeling that, with all the excuses for failure, still only the sight of those who triumph, gives a meaning to life or makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow. Eighteen hundred years of this Christian culture in these European kingdoms, a great theme never lost sight of, a mighty idea, an adorable history to which the hearts of men invariably cling, yet are genuine results rare as grains of gold in the river’s sandy bed! Where is the genuine democracy to which the rights of all men are holy? where the child-like wisdom learning all through life more and more of the will of God? where the aversion to falsehood, in all its myriad disguises of cant, vanity, covetousness, so clear to be read in all the history of Jesus of Nazareth? Modern Europe is the sequel to that history, and see this hollow England, with its monstrous wealth and cruel poverty, its conventional life, and low, practical aims! see this poor France, so full of talent, so adroit, yet so shallow and glossy still, which could not escape from a false position with all its baptism of blood! see that lost Poland, and this Italy bound down by treacherous hands in all the force of genius! see Russia with its brutal Czar and innumerable slaves! see Austria and its royalty that represents nothing, and its people, who, as people, are and have nothing! If we consider the amount of truth that has really been spoken out in the world, and the love that has beat in private hearts, — how genius has decked each spring-time with such splendid flowers, conveying each one enough of instruction in its life of harmonious energy, and how continually, unquenchably, the spark of faith has striven to burst into flame and light up the universe, — the public failure seems amazing, seems monstrous. Still Europe toils and struggles with her idea, and, at this moment, all things bode and declare a new outbreak of the fire, to destroy old palaces of crime! May it fertilize also many vineyards! Here at this moment a successor of St. Peter, after the lapse of near two thousand years, is called “Utopian” by a part of this Europe, because he strives to get some food to the mouths of the leaner of his flock. A wonderful state of things, and which leaves as the best argument against despair, that men do not, cannot despair amid such dark experiences. And thou, my Country! wilt thou not be more true? does no greater success await thee? All things have so conspired to teach, to aid! A new world, a new chance, with oceans to wall in the new thought against interference from the old! — treasures of all kinds, gold, silver, corn, marble, to provide for every physical need! A noble, constant, starlike soul, an Italian, led the way to thy shores, and, in the first days, the strong, the pure, those too brave, too sincere, for the life of the Old World, hastened to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI people them. A generous struggle then shook off what was foreign, and gave the nation a glorious start for a worthy goal. Men rocked the cradle of its hopes, great, firm, disinterested, men, who saw, who wrote, as the basis of all that was to be done, a statement of the rights, the inborn rights of men, which, if fully interpreted and acted upon, leaves nothing to be desired. Yet, O Eagle! whose early flight showed this clear sight of the sun, how often dost thou near the ground, how show the vulture in these later days! Thou wert to be the advance-guard of humanity, the herald of all progress; how often hast thou betrayed this high commission! Fain would the tongue in clear, triumphant accents draw example from thy story, to encourage the hearts of those who almost faint and die beneath the old oppressions. But we must stammer and blush when we speak of many things. I take pride here, that I can really say the liberty of the press works well, and that checks and balances are found naturally which suffice to its government. I can say that the minds of our people are alert, and that talent has a free chance to rise. This is much. But dare I further say that political ambition is not as darkly sullied as in other countries? Dare I say that men of most influence in political life are those who represent most virtue, or even intellectual power? Is it easy to find names in that career of which I can speak with enthusiasm? Must I not confess to a boundless lust of gain in my country? Must I not concede the weakest vanity, which bristles and blusters at each foolish taunt of the foreign press, and admit that the men who make these undignified rejoinders seek and find popularity so? Can I help admitting that there is as yet no antidote cordially adopted, which will defend even that great, rich country against the evils that have grown out of the commercial system in the Old World? Can I say our social laws are generally better, or show a nobler insight into the wants of man and woman? I do, indeed, say what I believe, that voluntary association for improvement in these particulars will be the grand means for my nation to grow, and give a nobler harmony to the coming age. But it is only of a small minority that I can say they as yet seriously take to heart these things; that they earnestly meditate on what is wanted for their country, for mankind, — for our cause is indeed, the cause of all mankind at present. Could we succeed, really succeed, combine a deep religious love with practical development, the achievements of genius with the happiness of the multitude, we might believe man had now reached a commanding point in his ascent, and would stumble and faint no more. Then there is this horrible cancer of slavery, and the wicked war that has grown out of it. How dare I speak of these things here? I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico. I find the cause of tyranny and wrong everywhere the same, — and lo! my country! the darkest offender, because with the least excuse; forsworn to the high calling with which she was called; no champion of the rights of men, but a robber and a jailer; the scourge hid behind her banner; her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possessions of other men. How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home, they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life; and if it was not the only thing worth thinking of, it was really something worth living and dying for, to free a great nation from such a terrible blot, such a threatening plague. God strengthen them, and make them wise to achieve their purpose! I please myself, too, with remembering some ardent souls among the American youth, who I trust will yet expand, and help to give soul to the huge, over-fed, too hastily grown-up body. May they be constant! “Were man but constant, he were perfect,” it has been said; and it is true that he who could be constant to those moments in which he has been truly human, not brutal, not mechanical, is on the sure path to his perfection, and to effectual service of the universe. It is to the youth that hope addresses itself; to those who yet burn with aspiration, who are not hardened in their sins. But I dare not expect too much of them. I am not very old; yet of those who, in life’s morning, I saw touched by the light of a high hope, many have seceded. Some have become voluptuaries; some, mere family men, who think it quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people, and treat them, decently; others are lost through indolence and vacillation. Yet some remain constant; “I have witnessed many a shipwreck, Yet still beat noble hearts.” I have found many among the youth of England, of France, of Italy, also, full of high desire; but will they have courage and purity to fight the battle through in the sacred, the immortal band? Of some of them I believe it, and await the proof. If a few succeed amid the trial, we have not lived and loved in vain. To these, the heart and hope of my country, a happy new year! I do not know what I have written; I have merely yielded to my feelings in thinking of America; but something of true love must be in these lines. Receive them kindly, my friends; it is, of itself, some merit for printed words to be sincere.

December 30, Thursday: At 38 years of age F.A.P. Barnard married with Margaret Heywood McMurray, who was about 27 and from England. There would be no children.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome her rainy-days observations: Rome, December 30, 1847. I could not, in my last, content myself with praising the glorious weather. I wrote in the last day of it. Since, we have had a fortnight of rain falling incessantly, and whole days and nights of torrents such as are peculiar to the “clearing-up” shower in our country. Under these circumstances, I have found my lodging in the Corso not only has its dark side, but is all dark, and that one in the Piazza di Spagne would have been better for me in this respect; there on these days, the only ones when I wish to stay at home and write and study, I should have had the light. Now, if I consulted the good of my eyes, I should have the lamp lit on first rising in the morning. “Every sweet must have its bitter,” and the exchange from the brilliance of the Italian heaven to weeks and months of rain, and such black cloud, is unspeakably dejecting. For myself, at the end of this fortnight without exercise or light, and in such HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI a damp atmosphere, I find myself without strength, without appetite, almost without spirits. The life of the German scholar who studies fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, or that of the Spielberg prisoner who could live through ten, fifteen, twenty years of dark prison with, only half an hour’s exercise in the day, is to me a mystery. How can the brain, the nerves, ever support it? We are made to keep in motion, to drink the air and light; to me these are needed to make life supportable, the physical state is so difficult and full of pains at any rate. I am sorry for those who have arrived just at this time hoping to enjoy the Christmas festivities. Everything was spoiled by the weather. I went at half past ten to San Luigi Francese, a church adorned with some of Domenichino’s finest frescos on the life and death of St. Cecilia. This name leads me to a little digression. In a letter to Mr. Phillips, the dear friend of our revered Dr. Charming, I asked him if he remembered what recumbent statue it was of which Dr. Charming was wont to speak as of a sight that impressed him more than anything else in Rome. He said, indeed, his mood, and the unexpectedness in seeing this gentle, saintly figure lying there as if death had just struck her down, had no doubt much influence upon him; but still he believed the work had a peculiar holiness in its expression. I recognized at once the theme of his description (the name he himself had forgotten) as I entered the other evening the lonely church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere. As in his case, it was twilight: one or two nuns were at their devotions, and there lay the figure in its grave-clothes, with an air so gentle, so holy, as if she had only ceased to pray as the hand of the murderer struck her down. Her gentle limbs seemed instinct still with soft, sweet life; the expression was not of the heroine, the martyr, so much as of the tender, angelic woman. I could well understand the deep impression made upon his mind. The expression of the frescos of Domenichino is not inharmonious with the suggestions of this statue. Finding the Mass was not to begin for some time, I set out for the Quirinal to see the Pope return from that noble church, Santa Maria Maggiore, where he officiated this night. I reached the mount just as he was returning. A few torches gleamed before his door; perhaps a hundred people were gathered together round the fountain. Last year an immense multitude waited for him there to express their affection in one grand good-night; the change was occasioned partly by the weather, partly by other causes, of which I shall speak by and by. Just as he returned, the moon looked palely out from amid the wet clouds, and shone upon the fountain, and the noble figures above it, and the long white cloaks of the Guardia Nobile who followed his carriage on horseback; darker objects could scarcely be seen, except by the flickering light of the torches, much blown by the wind. I then returned to San Luigi. The effect of the night service there was very fine; those details which often have such a glaring, mean look by day are lost sight of in the night, and the unity of impression from the service is much more undisturbed. The music, too, descriptive of that era which promised peace on earth, good-will to men, was very sweet, and the pastorale particularly soothed the heart amid the crowd, and pompous ceremonial. But here, too, the sweet had its bitter, in the vulgar vanity of the leader of the orchestra, a trait too common in such, who, not content with marking the time for the musicians, made his stick HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI heard in the remotest nook of the church; so that what would have been sweet music, and flowed in upon the soul, was vulgarized to make you remember the performers and their machines. On Monday the leaders of the Guardia Civica paid their respects to the Pope, who, in receiving them, expressed his constantly increasing satisfaction in having given this institution to his people. The same evening there was a procession with torches to the Quirinal, to pay the homage due to the day (Feast of St. John, and name-day of the Pope, Giovanni Maria Mastai); but all the way the rain continually threatened to extinguish the torches, and the Pope could give but a hasty salute under an umbrella, when the heavens were again opened, and such a cataract of water descended, as drove both man and beast to seek the nearest shelter. On Sunday, I went to see a nun take the veil. She was a person of high family; a princess gave her away, and the Cardinal Ferreti, Secretary of State, officiated. It was a much less effective ceremony than I expected from the descriptions of travellers and romance-writers. There was no moment of throwing on the black veil; no peal of music; no salute of cannon. The nun, an elegantly dressed woman of five or six and twenty, — pretty enough, but whose quite worldly air gave the idea that it was one of those arrangements made because no suitable establishment could otherwise be given her, — came forward, knelt, and prayed; her confessor, in that strained, unnatural whine too common among preachers of all churches and all countries, praised himself for having induced her to enter on a path which would lead her fettered steps “from palm to palm, from triumph to triumph,” Poor thing! she looked as if the domestic olives and poppies were all she wanted; and lacking these, tares and wormwood must be her portion. She was then taken behind a grating, her hair cut, and her clothes exchanged for the nun’s vestments; the black-robed sisters who worked upon her looking like crows or ravens at their ominous feasts. All the while, the music played, first sweet and thoughtful, then triumphant strains. The effect on my mind was revolting and painful to the last degree. Were monastic seclusion always voluntary, and could it be ended whenever the mind required a change back from seclusion to common life, I should have nothing to say against it; there are positions of the mind which it suits exactly, and even characters that might choose it all through life; certainly, to the broken-hearted it presents a shelter that Protestant communities do not provide. But where it is enforced or repented of, no hell could be worse; nor can a more terrible responsibility be incurred than by him who has persuaded a novice that the snares of the world are less dangerous than the demons of solitude. Festivities in Italy have been of great importance, since, for a century or two back, the thought, the feeling, the genius of the people have had more chance to expand, to express themselves, there than anywhere else. Now, if the march of reform goes forward, this will not be so; there will be also speeches made freely on public occasions, without having the life pressed out of them by the censorship. Now we hover betwixt the old and the new; when the many reasons for the new prevail, I hope what is poetical in the old will not be lost. The ceremonies of New Year are before me; but as I shall have to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI send this letter on New-Year’s day, I cannot describe them. The Romans begin now to talk of the mad gayeties of Carnival, and the Opera is open. They have begun with “Attila,” as, indeed, there is little hope of hearing in Italy other music than Verdi’s. Great applause waited on the following words: — “EZIO (THE ROMAN LEADER). “E gittata la mia sorte, Pronto sono ad ogni guerra, S’ io cardò, cadrè da forte, E il mio nome resterà.

“Non vedrò l’amata terra Svener lenta e farri a brano, Sopra l’ultimo Romano Tutta Italia piangerà.” “My lot is fixed, and I stand ready for every conflict. If I must fall, I shall fall as a brave man, and my fame will survive. I shall not see my beloved country fall to pieces and slowly perish, and over the last Roman all Italy will weep.” And at lines of which the following is a translation: — “O brave man, whose mighty power can raise thy country from such dire distress; from the immortal hills, radiant with glory, let the shades of our ancestors arise; oh! only one day, one instant, arise to look upon us!” It was an Italian who sung this strain, though, singularly enough, here in the heart of Italy, so long reputed the home of music, three principal parts were filled by persons bearing the foreign names of Ivanoff, Mitrovich, and Nissren. Naples continues in a state of great excitement, which now pervades the upper classes, as several young men of noble families have been arrested; among them, one young man much beloved, son of Prince Terella, and who, it is said, was certainly not present on the occasion for which he was arrested, and that the measure was taken because he was known to sympathize strongly with the liberal movement. The nobility very generally have not feared to go to the house of his father to express their displeasure at the arrest and interest in the young man. The ministry, it is said, are now persuaded of the necessity of a change of measures. The king alone remains inflexible in his stupidity. The stars of Bonaparte and Byron show again a conjunction, by the almost simultaneous announcement of changes in the lot of women with whom they were so intimately connected; — the Archduchess of Parma, Maria Louisa, is dead; the Countess Guiccioli is married. The Countess I have seen several times; she still looks young, and retains the charms which by the contemporaries of Byron she is reputed to have had; they never were of a very high order; her best expression is that of a good heart. I always supposed that Byron, weary and sick of the world such as he had known it, became attached to her for her good disposition, and sincere, warm tenderness for him; the sight of her, and the testimony of a near relative, confirmed this impression. This friend of hers added, that she had tried very hard to remain devoted to the memory of Byron, but was quite unequal to the part, being one of those affectionate natures that must have some one near with whom to be occupied; and now, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI it seems, she has resigned herself publicly to abandon her romance. However, I fancy the manes of Byron remain undisturbed. We all know the worthless character of Maria Louisa, the indifference she showed to a husband who, if he was not her own choice, yet would have been endeared to almost any woman, as one fallen from an immense height into immense misfortune, and as the father of her child. No voice from her penetrated to cheer his exile: the unhappiness of Josephine was well avenged. And that child, the poor Duke of Reichstadt, of a character so interesting, and with obvious elements of greatness, withering beneath the mean, cold influence of his grandfather, — what did Maria Louisa do for him, — she, appointed by Nature to be his inspiring genius, his protecting angel? I felt for her a most sad and profound contempt last summer, as I passed through her oppressed dominion, a little sphere, in which, if she could not save it from the usual effects of the Austrian rule, she might have done so much private, womanly good, — might have been a genial heart to warm it, — and where she had let so much ill be done. A journal announces her death in these words: “The Archduchess is dead; a woman who might have occupied one of the noblest positions in the history of the age”; — and there makes expressive pause. Parma, passing from bad to worse, falls into the hands of the Duke of Modena; and the people and magistracy have made an address to their new ruler. The address has received many thousand signatures, and seems quite sincere, except in the assumption of good-will in the Duke of Modena; and this is merely an insincerity of etiquette.

December 31, Friday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome, on New-Year’s-Eve there, and on the Pope and his people. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1848

The protests of Berliners led to the abolition of the last restrictions on their use of tobacco.

In Italy, a “Tobacco War” modeled on the Boston Tea Party erupted as Italians protested Austrian control of the tobacco monopoly.

Our PG war correspondent in Italy, Margaret Fuller, insisted “Those have not lived who have not seen Rome.”

THE GRAND TOUR

According to page 4 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), the attitudes of Professor Jules Michelet were at this point having such an adverse influence upon the stability of France –owing entirely to his having been influenced by the thought of Waldo Emerson– that the government was being forced to cancel his lectures at the Collège de France: Ironically, Emerson, who viewed the French revolution of 1848 with skepticism, had, unbeknownst to himself, contributed to its outbreak. Three famous professors of the Collège de France — Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Adam Mickiewicz— became during the early forties great admirers of Emerson, and they in turn through their lectures cultivated revolutionary impulses in their students. Michelet, historian of the great French Revolution, apparently appreciated Emerson’s apology for subjectivism in history, which seemed to justify the republican biases in his own lectures and writings. Quinet, a reformer and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI philosopher, was attracted to Emerson’s ethical ideas and incorporated striking phrases from Emerson’s works into his lectures. Mickiewicz, the Polish poet and mystic who would become the godfather of Margaret Fuller’s child, enthusiastically accepted Emerson’s idealism as his own, and he too quoted Emerson frequently in his lectures. Together, these three, because they opposed the materialistic spirit of the age and advocated a democratic idealism associated with the 1789 French Revolution, posed a threat to Louis Philippe’s government, which canceled their lectures —Mickiewicz’s in 1844, Quinet’s in 1846, and Michelet’s in 1848. Not before their influence had been felt, however. As Daniel Stern (the comtesse d’Agoult) put it in her HISTOIRE DE LA RÉVOLUTION DE 1848, “At the College of France, the courses of Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz gave life to the republican tradition of the colleges, spread among the youth a sense of love for the people, of contempt for the church and ‘official’ society, and thus prepared the union of students and workers that was destined to manifest itself on the barricades.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

The Associated Press news wire service began in New-York. One of the events they may have reported was the revolution in Paris, an event in which many, many were interested. Certainly the wire service carried the death of John Quincy Adams, although the fledgling reporters may have missed the beginning of the Oneida Institution in upstate New York. It is also unlikely that the wire service reported that the revolution of 1848 was being condemned by Arthur Schopenhauer as an eruption of humankind’s primitive nature. (Another of the events they may have reported but probably did not report was that some 600 Waldenses, suddenly granted freedom of conscience and freedom of worship by King Charles Albert, walked down from their mountain fastnesses near Monte Viso to hold a legal, public worship within the city of Torino, Italy — it is hard to imagine how such an event would have been of interest to anyone other than those people, who were suddenly taking part in the first legal, public worship which they had experienced in their entire lives!) Giuseppe Mazzini returned to Italy to prosecute his revolution, was initially welcomed in Milano, and would serve for a short period with an irregular force under Giuseppe Garibaldi before he would flee the peninsula.

The illegitimate son of British nobility, Hugh Forbes, who had been a British soldier, participated in the European revolutions of this period and then fought under Garibaldi in Italy (after the failure of this Italian revolt, he would surface as a silk merchant in Florence). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The Hungarian revolution of Lajos Kossuth began. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The United States and the 1848 Revolutions (Timothy M. Roberts) Americans entered the year 1848 flushed from military success in Mexico. The US Senate ratified the Mexican peace treaty only a few days before transatlantic steamers brought the first news of the 1848 upheavals in Europe. The events together seemed to symbolize rising American power. American soldiers in Mexico, for instance, rejoiced that the “refulgence of their glorious stars” had penetrated the “noxious fogs of European despotism.” It was easy to envision an American republican mission unfolding in the European upheavals. Some northern journalists and Democratic politicians, enunciating this national mission under the moniker of “young America,” saw the time ripe for an aggressive American policy in Europe. They supported military assistance to revolutionary governments in Germany and Hungary, and suspension of diplomatic relations with Prussia and Austria, whose rulers refused to submit to or cooperate with popular authority. Besides hastily recognizing the French Second Republic, the US also accorded recognition to short-lived regimes in Sicily and Frankfurt. Outside official channels, moreover, support for radical Europe showed in various ways. Americans paraded, wore revolutionary cockades, and staged banquets to evince sympathy with European rebels. Protestant ministers preached, especially with the ousting of Pope Pius IX from the Vatican, that the downfall of Catholicism, and perhaps the beginning of the millennium, was near. Mexican war veterans and recent Irish and German immigrants organized volunteers and gathered arms and money to return to Europe to assist in its liberation. Yet support for vigorous pro-revolutionary American action in Europe was far from universal. In politics, Whigs and many southern Democrats opposed all but the most symbolic of American shows of support. American businessmen took interest in European turbulence, but mainly in hopes that shaken European financiers would buy American securities, and American exports of cotton and tobacco would gain in more open European markets. Apologists for American slavery frowned on support for European liberation movements, especially with the abolition of feudal labor in central Europe and slavery in the French West Indian colonies. But while the 1848 Revolutions did not foster majority American interest in intervention in Europe, the revolutions did have an impact in the US. Advocates of various reform movements —urban labor organization, women’s rights, and most prominently, antislavery— perceived that transatlantic reform was indeed gaining momentum, and used upheavals in Europe to argue that analogous change should occur in the United States. Revolutionary Europe, these groups declared, was an indicator of American defects, and a warning of what awaited the United States if inequities went unattended. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, requiring the national government to help recapture runaway slaves, the antislavery press described episodes of slaves’ flight and apprehension in terms of Hungarian freedom-fighters succumbing to Austrian oppression. Land reform in the western United States in part stemmed from pressure brought by immigrant and native laborers who used revolutionary Europe as a foil. Many European revolutionary refugees came to America, some to settle permanently, others to raise funds to rejoin the struggle HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in Europe. Of the latter type, the most celebrated was the Hungarian lawyer Lajos Kossuth, whose 1852 speaking and fundraising tour was sensational if quixotic. Kossuth pleaded for both private financial support for the Hungarian struggle, which he received, and military intervention in Europe, which he was refused. Kossuth spent most of the money he raised before he left the United States; perhaps the most lasting impact of his tour was in the realm of personal attire, as “Kossuth” hats, cloaks, and, for men, beards, became popular. With the collapses of the 1848 Revolutions many Americans took comfort in the idea that the United States was different from Europe in its stability achieved via a republican revolution. But a decade later this would prove hubris. Then America would undergo a conflict whose upheavals and attendant suffering dwarfed the preceding conflicts in Europe. In their failed quests for greater liberty the 1848 Revolutions did not so much follow the American example of a republican revolution as they themselves provided a glimpse of coming, more comprehensive conflicts of democracy and nation-building on both sides of the Atlantic.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI At 12 West Street in Boston, Bronson Alcott’s “Conversations” were usually given in a series of seven, once a week, at a charge of $2.00 per series. Here is a sample, a sleeper on Silence:78

Bronson Alcott: “As God alone is the sleepless, so is he the only silent one. Silence is ever grand and beautiful — but from its loss comes noise and hubbub — and we live in wrangling— We speak because we know not how to be silent. Is it not so with the morning call— How is it with the priests. Do they know how to be silent?” Ellery Channing: “I think we talk small talk — that the silence may be uttered. It is not what we speak but what is unsaid that is valuable.” Mrs. Channing: “It is a test of perfect communion that we can keep silence.” Miss Parsons: “A friend is one with whom we may be silent.” Ednah Dow Littlehale: “Is not silence the background of all speech, as the Earth was silent for thousands of years?” Bronson Alcott: “All music is best in proportion as it partakes of silence, as it is resolved again into silence…. Silence is soundless. Is it not soundless only as light as colorless because it is the union of all sound?…”

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

A young lady, 24 years of age, who had been one of Margaret Fuller’s pupils, Ednah Dow Littlehale, began to attend Alcott’s series of Conversations on “Man — His History, Resources and Expectations.” After a while she would begin to act as his amanuensis and transcribe these Conversations, as above.

January: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on kingcraft vs priestcraft: Rome, January, 1848. I think I closed my last letter, without having had time to speak of the ceremonies that precede and follow Epiphany. This month, no day, scarcely an hour, has passed unmarked by some showy spectacle or some exciting piece of news. On the last day of the year died Don Carlo Torlonia, brother of the banker, a man greatly beloved and regretted. The public felt this event the more that its proximate cause was an attack made upon his brother’s house by Paradisi, now imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo, pending a law process for proof of his accusations. Don Carlo had been ill before, and the painful agitation caused by these circumstances decided his fate. The public had been by no means displeased at this inquiry into the conduct of Don Alessandro Torlonia, believing that his assumed munificence is, in this case, literally a robbery of Peter to pay Paul, and that all he gives to Rome is taken from Rome. But I sympathized no less with the affectionate indignation of his brother, too good a man to be made the confidant of wrong, or have eyes for it, if such exist. 78. And you just might want to compare and contrast this with the essay on silence that Thoreau positioned at the end of WEEK. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Thus, in the poetical justice which does not fail to be done in the prose narrative of life, while men hastened, the moment a cry was raised against Don Alessandro, to echo it back with all kinds of imputations both on himself and his employees, every man held his breath, and many wept, when the mortal remains of Don Carlo passed; feeling that in him was lost a benefactor, a brother, a simple, just man. Don Carlo was a Knight of Malta; yet with him the celibate life had not hardened the heart, but only left it free on all sides to general love. Not less than half a dozen pompous funerals were given in his honor, by his relatives, the brotherhoods to which he belonged, and the battalion of the Civic Guard of which he was commander-in-chief. But in his own house the body lay in no other state than that of a simple Franciscan, the order to which he first belonged, and whose vow he had kept through half a century, by giving all he had for the good of others. He lay on the ground in the plain dark robe and cowl, no unfit subject for a modern picture of little angels descending to shower lilies on a good man’s corpse. The long files of armed men, the rich coaches, and liveried retinues of the princes, were little observed, in comparison with more than a hundred orphan girls whom his liberality had sustained, and who followed the bier in mourning robes and long white veils, spirit-like, in the dark night. The trumpet’s wail, and soft, melancholy music from the bands, broke at times the roll of the muffled drum; the hymns of the Church were chanted, and volleys of musketry discharged, in honor of the departed; but much more musical was the whisper in which the crowd, as passed his mortal frame, told anecdotes of his good deeds. I do not know when I have passed more consolatory moments than in the streets one evening during this pomp and picturesque show, — for once not empty of all meaning as to the present time, recognizing that good which remains in the human being, ineradicable by all ill, and promises that our poor, injured nature shall rise, and bloom again, from present corruption to immortal purity. If Don Carlo had been a thinker, — a man of strong intellect, — he might have devised means of using his money to more radical advantage than simply to give it in alms; he had only a kind human heart, but from that heart distilled a balm which made all men bless it, happy in finding cause to bless. As in the moral little books with which our nurseries are entertained, followed another death in violent contrast. One of those whom the new arrangements deprived of power and the means of unjust gain was the Cardinal Prince Massimo, a man a little younger than Don Carlo, but who had passed his forty years in a very different manner. He remonstrated; the Pope was firm, and, at last, is said to have answered with sharp reproof for the past. The Cardinal contained himself in the audience, but, going out, literally suffocated with the rage he had suppressed. The bad blood his bad heart had been so long making rushed to his head, and he died on his return home. Men laughed, and proposed that all the widows he had deprived of a maintenance should combine to follow his bier. It was said boys hissed as that bier passed. Now, a splendid suit of lace being for sale in a shop of the Corso, everybody says: “Have you been to look at the lace of Cardinal Massimo, who died of rage, because he could no longer devour the public goods?” And this is the last echo of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI requiem. The Pope is anxious to have at least well-intentioned men in places of power. Men of much ability, it would seem, are not to be had. His last prime minister was a man said to have energy, good dispositions, but no thinking power. The Cardinal Bofondi, whom he has taken now, is said to be a man of scarce any ability; there being few among the new Councillors the public can name as fitted for important trust. In consolation, we must remember that the Chancellor Oxenstiern found nothing more worthy of remark to show his son, than by how little wisdom the world could be governed. We must hope these men of straw will serve as thatch to keep out the rain, and not be exposed to the assaults of a devouring flame. Yet that hour may not be distant. The disturbances of the 1st of January here were answered by similar excitements in Leghorn and Genoa, produced by the same hidden and malignant foe. At the same time, the Austrian government in Milan organized an attempt to rouse the people to revolt, with a view to arrests, and other measures calculated to stifle the spirit of independence they know to be latent there. In this iniquitous attempt they murdered eighty persons; yet the citizens, on their guard, refused them the desired means of ruin, and they were forced to retractions as impudently vile as their attempts had been. The Viceroy proclaimed that “he hoped the people would confide in him as he did in them”; and no doubt they will. At Leghorn and Genoa, the wiles of the foe were baffled by the wisdom of the popular leaders, as I trust they always will be; but it is needful daily to expect these nets laid in the path of the unwary. Sicily is in full insurrection; and it is reported Naples, but this is not sure. There was a report, day before yesterday, that the poor, stupid king was already here, and had taken cheap chambers at the Hotel d’Allemagne, as, indeed, it is said he has always a turn for economy, when he cannot live at the expense of his suffering people. Day before yesterday, every carriage that the people saw with a stupid-looking man in it they did not know, they looked to see if it was not the royal runaway. But it was their wish was father to that thought, and it has not as yet taken body as fact. In like manner they report this week the death of Prince Metternich; but I believe it is not sure he is dead yet, only dying. With him passes one great embodiment of ill to Europe. As for Louis Philippe, he seems reserved to give the world daily more signal proofs of his base apostasy to the cause that placed him on the throne, and that heartless selfishness, of which his face alone bears witness to any one that has a mind to read it. How the French nation could look upon that face, while yet flushed with the hopes of the Three Days, and put him on the throne as representative of those hopes, I cannot conceive. There is a story current in Italy, that he is really the child of a man first a barber, afterwards a police- officer, and was substituted at nurse for the true heir of Orleans; and the vulgarity of form in his body of limbs, power of endurance, greed of gain, and hard, cunning intellect, so unlike all traits of the weak, but more “genteel” Bourbon race, might well lend plausibility to such a fable. But to return to Rome, where I hear the Ave Maria just ringing. By the way, nobody pauses, nobody thinks, nobody prays. “Ave Maria! ‘t is the hour of prayer, Ave Maria! ‘t is the hour HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of love,” &c., is but a figment of the poet’s fancy. To return to Rome: what a Rome! the fortieth day of rain, and damp, and abominable reeking odors, such as blessed cities swept by the sea-breeze — bitter sometimes, yet indeed a friend — never know. It has been dark all day, though the lamp has only been lit half an hour. The music of the day has been, first the atrocious arias, which last in the Corso till near noon, though certainly less in virulence on rainy days. Then came the wicked organ-grinder, who, apart from the horror of the noise, grinds exactly the same obsolete abominations as at home or in England, — the Copenhagen Waltz, “Home, sweet home,” and all that! The cruel chance that both an English my-lady and a Councillor from one of the provinces live opposite, keeps him constantly before my window, hoping baiocchi. Within, the three pet dogs of my landlady, bereft of their walk, unable to employ their miserable legs and eyes, exercise themselves by a continual barking, which is answered by all the dogs in the neighborhood. An urchin returning from the laundress, delighted with the symphony, lays down his white bundle in the gutter, seats himself on the curb- stone, and attempts an imitation of the music of cats as a tribute to the concert. The door-bell rings. Chi è? “Who is it?” cries the handmaid, with unweariable senselessness, as if any one would answer, Rogue, or Enemy, instead of the traditionary Amico, Friend. Can it be, perchance, a letter, news of home, or some of the many friends who have neglected so long to write, or some ray of hope to break the clouds of the difficult Future? Far from it. Enter a man poisoning me at once with the smell of the worst possible cigars, not to be driven out, insisting I shall look upon frightful, ill-cut cameos, and worse-designed mosaics, made by some friend of his, who works in a chamber and will sell so cheap. Man of ill-odors and meanest smile! I am no Countess to be fooled by you. For dogs they were not even — dog- cheap. A faint and misty gleam of sun greeted the day on which there was the feast to the Bambino, the most venerated doll of Rome. This is the famous image of the infant Jesus, reputed to be made of wood from a tree of Palestine, and which, being taken away from its present abode, — the church of Ara Coeli, — returned by itself, making the bells ring as it sought admittance at the door. It is this which is carried in extreme cases to the bedside of the sick. It has received more splendid gifts than any other idol. An orphan by my side, now struggling with difficulties, showed me on its breast a splendid jewel, which a doting grandmother thought more likely to benefit her soul if given to the Bambino, than if turned into money to give her grandchildren education and prospects in life. The same old lady left her vineyard, not to these children, but to her confessor, a well- endowed Monsignor, who occasionally asks this youth, his godson, to dinner! Children so placed are not quite such devotees to Catholicism as the new proselytes of America; — they are not so much patted on the head, and things do not show to them under quite the same silver veil. The church of Ara Coeli is on or near the site of the temple of Capitoline Jove, which certainly saw nothing more idolatrous than these ceremonies. For about a week the Bambino is exhibited in an illuminated chapel, in the arms of a splendidly dressed Madonna doll. Behind, a transparency represents the shepherds, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI by moonlight, at the time the birth was announced, and, above, God the Father, with many angels hailing the event. A pretty part of this exhibition, which I was not so fortunate as to hit upon, though I went twice on purpose, is the children making little speeches in honor of the occasion. Many readers will remember some account of this in Andersen’s “Improvvisatore.” The last time I went was the grand feast in honor of the Bambino. The church was entirely full, mostly with Contadini and the poorer people, absorbed in their devotions: one man near me never raised his head or stirred from his knees to see anything; he seemed in an anguish of prayer, either from repentance or anxiety. I wished I could have hoped the ugly little doll could do Mm any good. The noble stair which descends from the great door of this church to the foot of the Capitol, — a stair made from fragments of the old imperial time, — was flooded with people; the street below was a rapid river also, whose waves were men. The ceremonies began with splendid music from the organ, pealing sweetly long and repeated invocations. As if answering to this call, the world came in, many dignitaries, the Conservatori, (I think conservatives are the same everywhere, official or no,) and did homage to the image; then men in white and gold, with the candles they are so fond here of burning by daylight, as if the poorest artificial were better than the greatest natural light, uplifted high above themselves the baby, with its gilded robes and crown, and made twice the tour of the church, passing twice the column labelled “From the Home of Augustus,” while the band played — what? — the Hymn to Pius IX. and “Sons of Rome, awake!” Never was a crueller comment upon the irreconcilableness of these two things. Rome seeks to reconcile reform and priestcraft. But her eyes are shut, that they see not. O awake indeed, Romans! and you will see that the Christ who is to save men is no wooden dingy effigy of bygone superstitions, but such as Art has seen him in your better mood, — a Child, living, full of love, prophetic of a boundless future, — a Man acquainted with all sorrows that rend the heart of all, and ever loving man with sympathy and faith death could not quench, — that Christ lives and may be sought; burn your doll of wood. How any one can remain a Catholic — I mean who has ever been aroused to think, and is not biassed by the partialities of childish years — after seeing Catholicism here in Italy, I cannot conceive. There was once a soul in the religion while the blood of its martyrs was yet fresh upon the ground, but that soul was always too much encumbered with the remains of pagan habits and customs: that soul is now quite fled elsewhere, and in the splendid catafalco, watched by so many white and red- robed snuff-taking, sly-eyed men, would they let it be opened, nothing would be found but bones! Then the College for propagating all this, the most venerable Propaganda, has given its exhibition in honor of the Magi, wise men of the East who came to Christ. I was there one day. In conformity with the general spirit of Rome, — strangely inconsistent in a country where the Madonna is far more frequently and devoutly worshipped than God or Christ, in a city where at least as many female saints and martyrs are venerated as male, — there was no good place for women to sit. All the good seats were for the men in the area below, but in the gallery windows, and from the organ-loft, a few women were allowed to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI peep at what was going on. I was one of these exceptional characters. The exercises were in all the different languages under the sun. It would have been exceedingly interesting to hear them, one after the other, each in its peculiar cadence and inflection, but much of the individual expression was taken away by that general false academic tone which is sure to pervade such exhibitions where young men speak who have as yet nothing to say. It would have been different, indeed, if we could have heard natives of all those countries, who were animated by real feelings, real wants. Still it was interesting, particularly the language and music of Kurdistan, and the full-grown beauty of the Greek after the ruder dialects. Among those who appeared to the best advantage were several blacks, and the majesty of the Latin hexameters was confided to a full-blooded Guinea negro, who acquitted himself better than any other I heard. I observed, too, the perfectly gentlemanly appearance of these young men, and that they had nothing of that Cuffy swagger by which those freed from a servile state try to cover a painful consciousness of their position in our country. Their air was self-possessed, quiet and free beyond that of most of the whites. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

January 1, Saturday: Birth of the Reverend John Stetson Barry and Louisa Young Barry’s 3d child, Henrietta Maria Barry.

Evelina E. Vannevar Slack wrote to Charles Wesley Slack extending her best wishes for the new year.79

By this point Margaret Fuller, in Florence, was aware that she was pregnant, but had not yet advised her lover of this situation. A letter written during the previous month, on the topic of New-World vs Old-World “democracy,” appeared as a column in the New-York Tribune.

January 10, Monday: Margaret Fuller, by this point pregnant with the child of Giovanni Angelo, the Marchése d’Ossoli, arrived in Rome and was shocked, at a ceremony, when the new officials of the city of Rome “actually kissed his [the Pope’s] foot.” As did so many Americans of that period, in her mind’s eye Fuller perceived “the old kings, the consuls and tribunes, the emperors, drunk with blood and gold, the warriors of eagle sight and remorseless beak, return for us, and the togated procession finds room to sweep across the scene; the seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more.”80 She was our first war correspondent, and the Italian uprising had begun. She filed this report with the New-York Tribune: Rome, January 10, 1848. In the first morning of this New Year I sent off a letter which must then be mailed, in order to reach the steamer of the 16th. So far am I from home, that even steam does not come nigh to annihilate the distance. This afternoon I went to the Quirinal Palace to see the Pope receive the new municipal officers. He was to-day in his robes of white and gold, with his usual corps of attendants in pure 79. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885. Kent State University, Library, Special Collections 80. However, when old boys Waldo Emerson, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, and the Reverend William Henry Channing got together to edit Fuller’s memoirs, I should mention, they allowed her Via Sacra to continue to swarm, her temples to glitter, her hills to tower, her togated procession to sweep, and her warriors to display remorseless beaks, but they could not allow her to describe the grand old emperors of Rome as having been “drunk with blood and gold.” What was this? –A cat may look at a king but a woman mayn’t critique a Caesar? Go figure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI red and white, or violet and white. The new officers were in black velvet dresses, with broad white collars. They took the oaths of office, and then actually kissed his foot. I had supposed this was never really done, but only a very low obeisance made; the act seemed to me disgustingly abject. A Heavenly Father does not want his children at his feet, but in his arms, on a level with his heart. After this was over the Pope went to the Gesù, a very rich church, belonging to the Jesuits, to officiate at Vespers, and we followed. The music was beautiful, and the effect of the church, with its richly-painted dome and altar-piece in a blaze of light, while the assembly were in a sort of brown darkness, was very fine. A number of Americans there, new arrivals, kept requesting in the midst of the music to know when it would begin. “Why, this is it,” some one at last had the patience to answer; “you are hearing Vespers now.” “What,” they replied, “is there no oration, no speech!” So deeply rooted in the American mind is the idea that a sermon is the only real worship! This church, is indelibly stamped on my mind. Coming to Rome this time, I saw in the diligence a young man, whom his uncle, a priest of the convent that owns this church, had sent for, intending to provide him employment here. Some slight circumstances tested the character of this young man, and showed it what I have ever found it, singularly honorable and conscientious. He was led to show me his papers, among which was a letter from a youth whom, with that true benevolence only possible to the poor, because only they can make great sacrifices, he had so benefited as to make an entire change in his prospects for life. Himself a poor orphan, with nothing but a tolerable education at an orphan asylum, and a friend of his dead parents to find him employment on leaving it, he had felt for this young man, poorer and more uninstructed than himself, had taught him at his leisure to read and write, had then collected from, friends, and given himself, till he had gathered together sixty francs, procuring also for his protégé a letter from monks, who were friends of his, to the convents on the road, so that wherever there was one, the poor youth had lodging and food gratis. Thus armed, he set forth on foot for Rome; Piacenza, their native place, affording little hope even of gaining bread, in the present distressed state of that dominion. The letter was to say that he had arrived, and been so fortunate as to find employment immediately in the studio of Benzoni, the sculptor. The poor patron’s eyes sparkled as I read the letter. “How happy he is!” said he. “And does he not spell and write well? I was his only master.” But the good do not inherit the earth, and, less fortunate than his protégé, Germano on his arrival found his uncle ill of the Roman fever. He came to see me, much agitated. “Can it be, Signorina,” says he, “that God, who has taken my father and mother, will also take from me the only protector I have left, and just as I arrive in this strange place, too?” After a few days he seemed more tranquil, and told me that, though he had felt as if it would console him and divert his mind to go to some places of entertainment, he had forborne and applied the money to have masses said for his uncle. “I feel,” he said, “as if God would help me.” Alas! at that moment the uncle was dying. Poor Germano came next day with a receipt for masses said for HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the soul of the departed, (his simple faith in these being apparently indestructible,) and amid his tears he said: “The Fathers were so unkind, they were hardly willing to hear me speak a word; they were so afraid I should be a burden to them, I shall never go there again. But the most cruel thing was, I offered them a scudo (dollar) to say six masses for the soul of my poor uncle; they said they would only say five, and must have seven baiocchi (cents) more for that.” A few days after, I happened to go into their church, and found it thronged, while a preacher, panting, sweating, leaning half out of the pulpit, was exhorting his hearers to “imitate Christ.” With unspeakable disgust I gazed on this false shepherd of those who had just so failed in their duty to a poor stray lamb, Their church is so rich in ornaments, the seven baiocchi were hardly needed to burnish it. Their altar-piece is a very imposing composition, by an artist of Rome, still in the prime of his powers. Capalti. It represents the Circumcision, with the cross and six waiting angels in the background; Joseph, who holds the child, the priest, and all the figures in the foreground, seem intent upon the barbarous rite, except Mary the mother; her mind seems to rush forward into the future, and understand the destiny of her child; she sees the cross, — she sees the angels, too. Now I have mentioned a picture, let me say a word or two about Art and artists, by way of parenthesis in this letter so much occupied, with political affairs. We laugh a little here at some words that come from your city on the subject of Art. We hear that the landscapes painted here show a want of familiarity with Nature; artists need to return to America and see her again. But, friends, Nature wears a different face in Italy from what she does in America. Do you not want to see her Italian face? it is very glorious! We thought it was the aim of Art to reproduce all forms of Nature, and that you would not be sorry to have transcripts of what you have not always round you. American Art is not necessarily a reproduction of American Nature. Hicks has made a charming picture of familiar life, which those who cannot believe in Italian daylight would not tolerate. I am not sure that all eyes are made in the same manner, for I have known those who declare they see nothing remarkable in these skies, these hues; and always complain when they are reproduced in picture. I have yet seen no picture by Cropsey on an Italian subject, but his sketches from Scotch scenes are most poetical and just presentations of those lakes, those mountains, with their mourning veils. He is an artist of great promise. Cranch has made a picture for Mr. Ogden Haggerty of a fine mountain- hold of old Colonna story. I wish he would write a ballad about it too; there is plenty of material. But to return to the Jesuits. One swallow does not make a summer, nor am I — who have seen so much hard-heartedness and barbarous greed of gain in all classes of men — so foolish as to attach undue importance to the demand, by those who have dared to appropriate peculiarly to themselves the sacred name of Jesus, from a poor orphan, and for the soul of one of their own order, of “seven baiocchi more.” But I have always been satisfied, from the very nature of their institutions, that the current prejudice against them must be correct. These institutions are calculated to harden the heart, and destroy entirely that truth HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI which is the conservative principle in character. Their influence is and must be always against the free progress of humanity. The more I see of its working, the more I feel how pernicious it is, and were I a European, to no object should I lend myself with more ardor, than to the extirpation of this cancer. True, disband the Jesuits, there would still remain Jesuitical men, but singly they would have infinitely less power to work mischief. The influence of the Oscurantist foe has shown itself more and more plainly in Rome, during the last four or five weeks. A false miracle is devised: the Madonna del Popolo, (who has her handsome house very near me,) has cured, a paralytic youth, (who, in fact, was never diseased,) and, appearing to him in a vision, takes occasion to criticise severely the measures of the Pope. Rumors of tumult in one quarter are circulated, to excite it in another. Inflammatory handbills are put up in the night. But the Romans thus far resist all intrigues of the foe to excite them to bad conduct. On New-Year’s day, however, success was near. The people, as usual, asked permission of the Governor to go to the Quirinal and receive the benediction of the Pope. This was denied, and not, as it might truly have been, because the Pope was unwell, but in the most ungracious, irritating manner possible, by saying, “He is tired of these things: he is afraid of disturbance.” Then, the people being naturally excited and angry, the Governor sent word to the Pope that there was excitement, without letting him know why, and had the guards doubled on the posts. The most absurd rumors were circulated among the people that the cannon of St. Angelo were to be pointed on them, &c. But they, with that singular discretion which they show now, instead of rising, as their enemies had hoped, went to ask counsel of their lately appointed Senator, Corsini. He went to the Pope, found him ill, entirely ignorant of what was going on, and much distressed when he heard it. He declared that the people should be satisfied, and, since they had not been allowed to come to him, he would go to them. Accordingly, the next day, though rainy and of a searching cold like that of a Scotch mist, we had all our windows thrown open, and the red and yellow tapestries hung out. He passed through the principal parts of the city, the people throwing themselves on their knees and crying out, “O Holy Father, don’t desert us! don’t forget us! don’t listen to our enemies!” The Pope wept often, and replied, “Fear nothing, my people, my heart is yours.” At last, seeing how ill he was, they begged him to go in, and he returned to the Quirinal; the present Tribune of the People, as far as rule in the heart is concerned, Ciceronacchio, following his carriage. I shall give some account of this man in another letter. For the moment, the difficulties are healed, as they will be whenever the Pope directly shows himself to the people. Then his generous, affectionate heart will always act, and act on them, dissipating the clouds which others have been toiling to darken. In speaking of the intrigues of these emissaries of the power of darkness, I will mention that there is a report here that they are trying to get an Italian Consul for the United States, and one in the employment of the Jesuits. This rumor seems ridiculous; yet it is true that Dr. Beecher’s panic about Catholic influence in the United States is not quite unfounded, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI and that there is considerable hope of establishing a new dominion there. I hope the United States will appoint no Italian, no Catholic, to a consulship. The representative of the United States should be American; our national character and interests are peculiar, and cannot be fitly represented by a foreigner, unless, like Mr. Ombrossi of Florence, he has passed part of his youth in the United States. It would, indeed, be well if our government paid attention to qualification for the office in the candidate, and not to pretensions founded on partisan service; appointing only men of probity, who would not stain the national honor in the sight of Europe. It would be wise also not to select men entirely ignorant of foreign manners, customs, ways of thinking, or even of any language in which to communicate with foreign society, making the country ridiculous by all sorts of blunders; but ‘t were pity if a sufficient number of Americans could not be found, who are honest, have some knowledge of Europe and gentlemanly tact, and are able at least to speak French. To return to the Pope, although the shadow that has fallen on his popularity is in a great measure the work of his enemies, yet there is real cause for it too. His conduct in deposing for a time one of the Censors, about the banners of the 15th of December, his speech to the Council the same day, his extreme displeasure at the sympathy of a few persons with the triumph of the Swiss Diet, because it was a Protestant triumph, and, above all, his speech to the Consistory, so deplorably weak in thought and absolute in manner, show a man less strong against domestic than foreign foes, instigated by a generous, humane heart to advance, but fettered by the prejudices of education, and terribly afraid to be or seem to be less the Pope of Rome, in becoming a reform prince, and father to the fatherless. I insert a passage of this speech, which seems to say that, whenever there shall be collision between the priest and the reformer, the priest shall triumph: — “Another subject there is which profoundly afflicts and harasses our mind. It is not certainly unknown to you, Venerable Brethren, that many enemies of Catholic truth have, in our times especially, directed their efforts by the desire to place certain monstrous offsprings of opinion on a par with the doctrine of Christ, or to blend them therewith, seeking to propagate more and more that impious system of indifference toward all religion whatever. “And lately some have been found, dreadful to narrate! who have offered such an insult to our name and Apostolic dignity, as slanderously to represent us participators in their folly, and favorers of that most iniquitous system above named. These have been pleased to infer from, the counsels (certainly not foreign to the sanctity of the Catholic religion) which, in certain affairs pertaining to the civil exercise of the Pontific sway, we had benignly embraced for the increase of public prosperity and good, and also from the pardon bestowed in clemency upon certain persons subject to that sway, in the very beginning of our Pontificate, that we had such benevolent sentiments toward every description of persons as to believe that not only the sons of the Church, but others also, remaining aliens from Catholic unity, are alike in the way of salvation, and may attain eternal life. Words are wanting to us, from horror, to repel this new and atrocious calumny against us. It is true that with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI intimate affection of heart we love all mankind, but not otherwise than in the charity of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came to seek and to save that which had perished, who wisheth that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth, and who sent his disciples through the whole world to preach the Gospel to every creature, declaring that those who should believe and be baptized should be saved, but those who should not believe, should be condemned. Let those therefore who seek salvation come to the pillar and support of the Truth, which is the Church, — let them come, that is, to the true Church of Christ, which possesses in its bishops and the supreme head of all, the Roman Pontiff, a never-interrupted succession of Apostolic authority, and which for nothing has ever been more zealous than to preach, and with all care preserve and defend, the doctrine announced as the mandate of Christ by his Apostles; which Church afterward increased, from the time of the Apostles, in the midst of every species of difficulties, and flourished throughout the whole world, radiant in the splendor of miracles, amplified by the blood of martyrs, ennobled by the virtues of confessors and virgins, corroborated by the testimony and most sapient writings of the fathers, — as it still flourishes throughout all lands, refulgent in perfect unity of the sacraments, of faith, and of holy discipline. We who, though unworthy, preside in this supreme chair of the Apostle Peter, in which Christ our Lord placed the foundation of his Church, have at no time abstained, from any cares or toils to bring, through the grace of Christ himself, those who are in ignorance and error to this sole way of truth and salvation. Let those, whoever they be, that are adverse, remember that heaven and earth shall pass away, but nothing can ever perish of the words of Christ, nor be changed in the doctrine which the Catholic Church received, to guard, defend, and publish, from him. “Next to this we cannot but speak to you, Venerable Brethren, of the bitterness of sorrow by which we were affected, on seeing that a few days since, in this our fair city, the fortress and centre of the Catholic religion, it proved possible to find some — very few indeed and well-nigh frantic men — who, laying aside the very sense of humanity, and to the extreme disgust and indignation of other citizens of this town, were not withheld, by horror from triumphing openly and publicly over the most lamentable intestine war lately excited among the Helvetic people; which truly fatal war we sorrow over from the depths of our heart, as well considering the blood shed by that nation, the slaughter of brothers, the atrocious, daily recurring, and fatal discords, hatreds, and dissensions (which usually redound among nations in consequence especially of civil wars), as the detriment which we learn the Catholic religion has suffered, and fear it may yet suffer, in consequence of this, and, finally, the deplorable acts of sacrilege committed in the first conflict, which our soul shrinks from narrating.” It is probably on account of these fears of Pius IX. lest he should be a called a Protestant Pope, that the Roman journals thus far, in translating the American Address to the Pope, have not dared to add any comment. But if the heart, the instincts, of this good man have been beyond his thinking powers, that only shows him the providential agent to work out aims beyond his ken. A wave has been set in motion, which cannot stop till it casts up its freight upon the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI shore, and if Pius IX. does not suffer himself to be surrounded by dignitaries, and see the signs of the times through the eyes of others, — if he does not suffer the knowledge he had of general society as a simple prelate to become incrusted by the ignorance habitual to princes, — he cannot fail long to be a most important agent in fashioning a new and better era for this beautiful injured land. I will now give another document, which may be considered as representing the view of what is now passing taken by the democratic party called “Young Italy.” Should it in any other way have reached the United States, yet it will not come amiss to have it translated for the Tribune, as many of your readers may not otherwise have a chance of seeing this noble document, one of the milestones in the march of thought. It is a letter to the Most High Pontiff, Pius IX., from Joseph Mazzini. “London, 8th September, 1847. “MOST HOLY FATHER, — Permit an Italian, who has studied your every step for some months back with much hopefulness, to address to you, in the midst of the applauses, often far too servile and unworthy of you, which, resound near you, some free and profoundly sincere words. Take to read them some moments from your infinite cares. From a simple individual animated by holy intentions may come, sometimes, a great counsel; and I write to you with so much love, with so much emotion of my whole soul, with so much faith in the destiny of my country, which may be revived by your means, that my thoughts ought to speak truth. “And first, it is needful, Most Holy Father, that I should say to you somewhat of myself. My name has probably reached your ears, but accompanied by all the calumnies, by all the errors, by all the foolish conjectures, which the police, by system, and many men of my party through want of knowledge or poverty of intellect, have heaped upon it. I am not a subverter, nor a communist, nor a man of blood, nor a hater, nor intolerant, nor exclusive adorer of a system, or of a form imagined by my mind. I adore God, and an idea which seems to me of God, — Italy an angel of moral unity and of progressive civilization for the nations of Europe. Here and everywhere I have written the best I know how against the vices of materialism, of egotism, of reaction, and against the destructive tendencies which contaminate many of our party. If the people should rise in violent attack against the selfishness and bad government of their rulers, I, while rendering homage to the right of the people, shall be among the first to prevent the excesses and the vengeance which long slavery has prepared. I believe profoundly in a religious principle, supreme above all social ordinances; in a divine order, which we ought to seek to realize here on earth; in a law, in a providential design, which we all ought, according to our powers, to study and to promote. I believe in the inspiration of my immortal soul, in the teaching of Humanity, which shouts to me, through the deeds and words of all its saints, incessant progress for all through, the work of all my brothers toward a common moral amelioration, toward the fulfilment of the Divine Law. And in the great history of Humanity I have studied the history of Italy, and have found there Rome twice directress of the world, — first through the Emperors, later through the Popes. I have found there, that every manifestation of Italian life has also been a manifestation of European life; and that always when Italy fell, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the moral unity of Europe began to fall apart in analysis, in doubt, in anarchy. I believe in yet another manifestation of the Italian idea; and I believe that another European world ought to be revealed from the Eternal City, that had the Capitol, and has the Vatican. And this faith has not abandoned me ever, through years, poverty, and griefs which God alone knows. In these few words lies all my being, all the secret of my life. I may err in the intellect, but the heart has always remained pure. I have never lied through fear or hope, and I speak to you as I should speak to God beyond the sepulchre. “I believe you good. There is no man this day, I will not say in Italy, but in all Europe, more powerful than you; you then have, most Holy Father, vast duties. God measures these according to the means which he has granted to his creatures. “Europe is in a tremendous crisis of doubts and desires. Through the work of time, accelerated by your predecessors of the hierarchy of the Church, faith is dead, Catholicism is lost in despotism; Protestantism is lost in anarchy. Look around you; you will find superstitious and hypocrites, but not believers. The intellect travels in a void. The bad adore calculation, physical good; the good pray and hope; nobody believes. Kings, governments, the ruling classes, combat for a power usurped, illegitimate, since it does not represent the worship of truth, nor disposition to sacrifice one’s self for the good of all; the people combat because they suffer, because they would fain take their turn to enjoy; nobody fights for duty, nobody because the war against evil and falsehood is a holy war, the crusade of God. We have no more a heaven; hence we have no more a society. “Do not deceive yourself, Most Holy Father; this is the present state of Europe. “But humanity cannot exist without a heaven. The idea of society is only a consequence of the idea of religion. We shall have then, sooner or later, religion and heaven. We shall have these not in the kings and the privileged classes, — their very condition excludes love, the soul of all religions, — but in the people. The spirit from God descends on many gathered together in his name. The people have suffered for ages on the cross, and God will bless them with a faith. “You can, Most Holy Father, hasten that moment. I will not tell you my individual opinions on the religious development which is to come; these are of little importance. But I will say to you, that, whatever be the destiny of the creeds now existing, you can put yourself at the head of this development. If God wills that such creeds should revive, you can make them revive; if God wills that they should be transformed, that, leaving the foot of the cross, dogma and worship should be purified by rising a step nearer God, the Father and Educator of the world, you can put yourself between the two epochs, and guide the world to the conquest and the practice of religious truth, extirpating a hateful egotism, a barren negation. “God preserve me from tempting you with ambition; that would be profanation. I call you, in the name of the power which God has granted you, and has not granted without a reason, to fulfil the good, the regenerating European work. I call you, after so many ages of doubt and corruption, to be apostle of Eternal Truth. I call you to make yourself the ‘servant of all,’ to sacrifice yourself, if needful, so that ‘the will of God may be done on the earth as it is in heaven’; to hold yourself ready to glorify HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI God in victory, or to repeat with resignation, if you must fail, the words of Gregory VII.: ‘I die in exile, because I have loved justice and hated iniquity.’ “But for this, to fulfil the mission which God confides to you, two things are needful, — to be a believer, and to unify Italy. Without the first, you will fall in the middle of the way, abandoned by God and by men; without the second, you will not have the lever with which only you can effect great, holy, and durable things. “Be a believer; abhor to be king, politician, statesman. Make no compromise with error; do not contaminate yourself with diplomacy, make no compact with fear, with expediency, with the false doctrines of a legality, which is merely a falsehood invented when faith failed. Take no counsel except from God, from the inspirations of your own heart, and from the imperious necessity of rebuilding a temple to truth, to justice, to faith. Self- collected, in enthusiasm of love for humanity, and apart from every human regard, ask of God that he will teach you the way; then enter upon it, with the faith of a conqueror on your brow, with the irrevocable decision of the martyr in your heart; look neither to the right hand nor the left, but straight before you, and up to heaven. Of every object that meets you on the way, ask of yourself: ‘Is this just or unjust, true or false, law of man or law of God?’ Proclaim aloud the result of your examination, and act accordingly. Do not say to yourself: ‘If I speak and work in such a way, the princes of the earth will disagree; the ambassadors will present notes and protests!’ What are the quarrels of selfishness in princes, or their notes, before a syllable of the eternal Evangelists of God? They have had importance till now, because, though phantoms, they had nothing to oppose them but phantoms; oppose to them the reality of a man who sees the Divine view, unknown to them, of human affairs, of an immortal soul conscious of a high mission, and these will vanish before you as vapors accumulated in darkness before the sun which rises in the east. Do not let yourself be affrighted by intrigues; the creature who fulfils a duty belongs not to men, but to God. God will protect you; God will spread around you such a halo of love, that neither the perfidy of men irreparably lost, nor the suggestions of hell, can break through it. Give to the world a spectacle new, unique: you will have results new, not to be foreseen by human calculation. Announce an era; declare that Humanity is sacred, and a daughter of God; that all who violate her rights to progress, to association, are on the way of error; that in God is the source of every government; that those who are best by intellect and heart, by genius and virtue, must be the guides of the people. Bless those who suffer and combat; blame, reprove, those who cause suffering, without regard to the name they bear, the rank that invests them. The people will adore in you the best interpreter of the Divine design, and your conscience will give you rest, strength, and ineffable comfort. “Unify Italy, your country. For this you have no need to work, but to bless Him who works through you and in your name. Gather round you those who best represent the national party. Do not beg alliances with princes. Continue to seek the alliance of our own people; say, ‘The unity of Italy ought to be a fact of the nineteenth century,’ and it will suffice; we shall work for you. Leave our pens free; leave free the circulation of ideas in what HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI regards this point, vital for us, of the national unity. Treat the Austrian government, even when it no longer menaces your territory, with the reserve of one who knows that it governs by usurpation in Italy and elsewhere; combat it with words of a just man, wherever it contrives oppressions and violations of the rights of others out of Italy. Require, in the name of the God of Peace, the Jesuits allied with Austria in Switzerland to withdraw from that country, where their presence prepares an inevitable and speedy effusion of the blood of the citizens. Give a word of sympathy which shall become public to the first Pole of Galicia who comes into your presence. Show us, in fine, by some fact, that you intend not only to improve the physical condition of your own few subjects, but that you embrace in your love the twenty-four millions of Italians, your brothers; that you believe them called by God to unite in family unity under one and the same compact; that you would bless the national banner, wherever it should be raised by pure and incontaminate hands; and leave the rest to us. We will cause to rise around you a nation over whose free and popular development you, living, shall preside. We will found a government unique in Europe, which shall destroy the absurd divorce between spiritual and temporal power, and in which you shall be chosen to represent the principle of which the men chosen by the nation will make the application. We shall know how to translate into a potent fact the instinct which palpitates through all Italy. We will excite for you active support among the nations of Europe; we will find you friends even in the ranks of Austria; we alone, because we alone have unity of design, believe in the truth of our principle, and have never betrayed it. Do not fear excesses from the people once entered upon this way; the people only commit excesses when left to their own impulses without any guide whom they respect. Do not pause before the idea of becoming a cause of war. War exists, everywhere, open or latent, but near breaking out, inevitable; nor can human power prevent it. Nor do I, it must be said frankly, Most Holy Father, address to you these words because I doubt in the least of our destiny, or because I believe you the sole, the indispensable means of the enterprise. The unity of Italy is a work of God, — a part of the design of Providence and of all, even of those who show themselves most satisfied with local improvements, and who, less sincere than I, wish to make them means of attaining their own aims. It will be fulfilled, with you or without you. But I address you, because I believe you worthy to take the initiative in a work so vast; because your putting yourself at the head of it would much abridge the road and diminish the dangers, the injury, the blood; because with you the conflict would assume a religious aspect, and be freed from many dangers of reaction and civil errors; because might be attained at once under your banner a political result and a vast moral result; because the revival of Italy under the ægis of a religious idea, of a standard, not of rights, but of duties, would leave behind all the revolutions of other countries, and place her immediately at the head of European progress; because it is in your power to cause that God and the people, terms too often fatally disjoined, should meet at once in beautiful and holy harmony, to direct the fate of nations. “If I could be near you, I would invoke from God power to convince you, by gesture, by accent, by tears; now I can only HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI confide to the paper the cold corpse, as it were, of my thought; nor can I ever have the certainty that you have read, and meditated a moment what I write. But I feel an imperious necessity of fulfilling this duty toward Italy and you, and, whatsoever you may think of it, I shall find myself more in peace with my conscience for having thus addressed you. “Believe, Most Holy Father, in the feelings of veneration and of high hope which professes for you your most devoted “JOSEPH MAZZINI.” Whatever may be the impression of the reader as to the ideas and propositions contained in this document,81 I think he cannot fail to be struck with its simple nobleness, its fervent truth. A thousand petty interruptions have prevented my completing this letter, till, now the hour of closing the mail for the steamer is so near, I shall not have time to look over it, either to see what I have written or make slight corrections. However, I suppose it represents the feelings of the last few days, and shows that, without having lost any of my confidence in the Italian movement, the office of the Pope in promoting it has shown narrower limits, and sooner than I had expected. This does not at all weaken my personal feeling toward this excellent man, whose heart I have seen in his face, and can never doubt. It was necessary to be a great thinker, a great genius, to compete with the difficulties of his position. I never supposed he was that; I am only disappointed that his good heart has not carried him on a little farther. With regard to the reception of the American address, it is only the Roman press that is so timid; the private expressions of pleasure have been very warm; the Italians say, “The Americans are indeed our brothers.” It remains to be seen, when Pius IX. receives it, whether the man, the reforming prince, or the Pope is uppermost at that moment. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

January 22, Sunday: With the fighting finally at an end, Representative Abraham Lincoln of Illinois gave a speech on floor of the House of Representatives in opposition to President James Knox Polk’s war policy regarding Mexico.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: January 22, 2 o’clock, P.M. Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night, — many people coming in to see me because they don’t know what to do with themselves. I am very glad to see them for the same reason; this atmosphere is so heavy, I seem to carry the weight of the world on my head and feel unfitted for every exertion. As to eating, that is a bygone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I have resigned; vegetables are few and hard to have, except horrible cabbage, in which the Romans delight. A little rice still remains, which I take with pleasure, remembering it growing in the rich fields of Lombardy, so green and full of glorious light. That light fell still more 81. This letter was printed in Paris to be circulated in Italy. A prefatory note signed by a friend of Mazzini’s, states that the original was known to have reached the hands of the Pope. The hope is expressed that the publication of this letter, though without the authority of its writer, will yet not displease him, as those who are deceived as to his plans and motives will thus learn his true purposes and feelings, and the letter will one day aid the historian who seeks to know what were the opinions and hopes of the entire people of Italy. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI beautiful on the tall plantations of hemp, but it is dangerous just at present to think of what is made from hemp. This week all the animals are being blessed,82 and they get a gratuitous baptism, too, the while. The lambs one morning were taken out to the church of St. Agnes for this purpose. The little companion of my travels, if he sees this letter, will remember how often we saw her with her lamb in pictures. The horses are being blessed by St. Antonio, and under his harmonizing influence are afterward driven through the city, twelve and even twenty in hand. They are harnessed into light wagons, and men run beside them to guard against accident, in case the good influence of the Saint should fail. This morning came the details of infamous attempts by the Austrian police to exasperate the students of Pavia. The way is to send persons to smoke cigars in forbidden places, who insult those who are obliged to tell them to desist. These traps seem particularly shocking when laid for fiery and sensitive young men. They succeeded: the students were lured, into combat, and a number left dead and wounded on both sides. The University is shut up; the inhabitants of Pavia and Milan have put on mourning; even at the theatre they wear it. The Milanese will not walk in that quarter where the blood of their fellow-citizens has been so wantonly shed. They have demanded a legal investigation of the conduct of the officials. At Piacenza similar attempts have been made to excite the Italians, by smoking in their faces, and crying, “Long live the Emperor!” It is a worthy homage to pay to the Austrian crown, — this offering of cigars and blood. “O this offence is rank; it smells to Heaven.” This morning authentic news is received from Naples. The king, when assured by his own brother that Sicily was in a state of irresistible revolt, and that even the women quelled the troops, — showering on them stones, furniture, boiling oil, such means of warfare as the household may easily furnish to a thoughtful matron, — had, first, a stroke of apoplexy, from, which the loss of a good deal of bad blood relieved him. His mind apparently having become clearer thereby, he has offered his subjects an amnesty and terms of reform, which, it is hoped, will arrive before his troops have begun to bombard the cities in obedience to earlier orders. Comes also to-day the news that the French Chamber of Peers propose an Address to the King, echoing back all the falsehoods of his speech, including those upon reform, and the enormous one that “the peace of Europe is now assured”; but that some members have worthily opposed this address, and spoken truth in an honorable manner. Also, that the infamous sacrifice of the poor little queen of Spain puts on more tragic colors; that it is pretended she has epilepsy, and she is to be made to renounce the throne, which, indeed, has been a terrific curse to her. And Heaven and Earth have looked calmly on, while the king of France has managed all this with the most unnatural of mothers.

82. One of Rome’s singular customs. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI January 27, Friday: Just as Henry Thoreau was in Concord preparing to address the lyceum audience, Karl Marx in Brussels had been completing the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in the German language and Alexis de Tocqueville READ THE FULL TEXT

in Paris had been preparing a prophetic speech he would deliver in the Chamber of Deputies. On this date Tocqueville warned this ruling group that the working classes of Paris were acquiring a set of attitudes which went well beyond the mere overthrowal of laws, or ministries, or governments, extending even into “the overthrow of society, breaking down the bases on which it now rests.” The French political system was resting, he offered, on too narrow a base, and that base was going to widen itself, if necessary through another revolution.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: January 27. This morning comes the plan of the Address of the Chamber of Deputies to the King: it contains some passages that are keenest satire upon him, as also some remarks which have been made, some words of truth spoken in the Chamber of Peers, that must have given him some twinges of nervous shame as he read. M. Guizot’s speech on the affairs of Switzerland shows his usual shabbiness and falsehood. Surely never prime minister stood in so mean a position as he: one like Metternich seems noble and manly in comparison; for if there is a cruel, atheistical, treacherous policy, there needs not at least continual evasion to avoid declaring in words what is so glaringly manifest in fact. There is news that the revolution has now broken out in Naples; that neither Sicilians nor Neapolitans will trust the king, but demand his abdication; and that his bad demon, Coclo, has fled, carrying two hundred thousand ducats of gold. But in particulars this news is not yet sure, though, no doubt, there is truth, at the bottom. Aggressions on the part of the Austrians continue in the North. The advocates Tommaso and Manin (a light thus reflected on the name of the last Doge), having dared to declare formally the necessity of reform, are thrown into prison. Every day the cloud swells, and the next fortnight is likely to bring important tidings.

Senator Daniel Webster argued in regard to the “Dorr Rebellion” in Rhode Island, before the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Two very similar cases had been combined. One case was that of Martin Luther v. Luther M. Borden and others, which had come before the court by writ of error from the Circuit Court of Rhode Island. A jury, under the rulings of the court (Mr. Justice Story), had found in that case for the defendants, and this was what was being appealed. The other case was that of Rachel Luther v. Luther M. Borden and others, which had come before the higher court because the lower court opinion had been split. The first case was argued by Mr. Hallet and Attorney-General Clifford for the plaintiffs in error, and by Mr. Whipple and Mr. Webster for the defendants in error. Chief Justice Roger Taney would deliver the opinion of the Supreme Court, affirming the judgment of the lower court in the first case but dismissing the second case for want of jurisdiction. Here is Webster’s argument: There is something novel and extraordinary in the case now before the court. All will admit that it is not such a one as is usually presented for judicial consideration. It is well known, that in the years 1841 and 1842 political agitation existed in Rhode Island. Some of the citizens of that State undertook to form a new constitution of government, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI beginning their proceedings towards that end by meetings of the people, held without authority of law, and conducting those proceedings through such forms as led them, in 1842, to say that they had established a new constitution and form of government, and placed Mr. Thomas W. Dorr at its head. The previously existing, and then existing, government of Rhode Island treated these proceedings as nugatory, so far as they went to establish a new constitution; and criminal, so far as they proposed to confer authority upon any persons to interfere with the acts of the existing government, or to exercise powers of legislation, or administration of the laws. All will remember that the state of things approached, if not actual conflict between men in arms, at least the “perilous edge of battle.” Arms were resorted to, force was used, and greater force threatened. In June, 1842, this agitation subsided. The new government, as it called itself, disappeared from the scene of action. The former government, the Charter government, as it was sometimes styled, resumed undisputed control, went on in its ordinary course, and the peace of the State was restored. But the past had been too serious to be forgotten. The legislature of the State had, at an early stage of the troubles, found it necessary to pass special laws for the punishment of the persons concerned in these proceedings. It defined the crime of treason, as well as smaller offences, and authorized the declaration of martial law. Governor King, under this authority, proclaimed the existence of treason and rebellion in the State, and declared the State under martial law. This having been done, and the ephemeral government of Mr. Dorr having disappeared, the grand juries of the State found indictments against several persons for having disturbed the peace of the State, and one against Dorr himself for treason. This indictment came on in the Supreme Court of Rhode Island in 1844, before a tribunal admitted on all hands to be the legal judicature of the State. He was tried by a jury of Rhode Island, above all objection, and after all challenge. By that jury, under the instructions of the court, he was convicted of treason, and sentenced to imprisonment for life. Now an action is brought in the courts of the United States, and before your honors, by appeal, in which it is attempted to prove that the characters of this drama have been oddly and wrongly cast; that there has been a great mistake in the courts of Rhode Island. It is alleged, that Mr. Dorr, instead of being a traitor or an insurrectionist, was the real governor of the State at the time; that the force used by him was exercised in defence of the constitution and laws, and not against them; that he who opposed the constituted authorities was not Mr. Dorr, but Governor King; and that it was he who should have been indicted, and tried, and sentenced. This is rather an important mistake, to be sure, if it be a mistake. “Change places,” cries poor Lear, “change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice and which the thief?” So our learned opponents say, “Change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the governor and which the rebel?” The aspect of the case is, as I have said, novel. It may perhaps give vivacity and variety to judicial investigations. It may relieve the drudgery of perusing briefs, demurrers, and pleas in bar, bills in equity and answers, and introduce topics which give sprightliness, freshness, and something of an uncommon public interest to proceedings in courts of law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI However difficult it may be, and I suppose it to be wholly impossible, that this court should take judicial cognizance of the questions which the plaintiff has presented to the court below, yet I do not think it a matter of regret that the cause has come hither. It is said, and truly said, that the case involves the consideration and discussion of what are the true principles of government in our American system of public liberty. This is very right. The case does involve these questions, and harm can never come from their discussion, especially when such discussion is addressed to reason and not to passion; when it is had before magistrates and lawyers, and not before excited masses out of doors. I agree entirely that the case does raise considerations, somewhat extensive, of the true character of our American system of popular liberty; and although I am constrained to differ from the learned counsel who opened the cause for the plaintiff in error, on the principles and character of that American liberty, and upon the true characteristics of that American system on which changes of the government and constitution, if they become necessary, are to be made, yet I agree with him that this case does present them for consideration. Now, there are certain principles of public liberty, which, though they do not exist in all forms of government, exist, nevertheless, to some extent, in different forms of government. The protection of life and property, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, the right of open trial, these are principles of public liberty existing in their best form in the republican institutions of this country, but, to the extent mentioned, existing also in the constitution of England. Our American liberty, allow me to say, therefore, has an ancestry, a pedigree, a history. Our ancestors brought to this continent all that was valuable, in their judgment, in the political institutions of England, and left behind them all that was without value, or that was objectionable. During the colonial period they were closely connected of course with the colonial system; but they were Englishmen, as well as colonists, and took an interest in whatever concerned the mother country, especially in all great questions of public liberty in that country. They accordingly took a deep concern in the Revolution of 1688. The American colonists had suffered from the tyranny of James the Second. Their charters had been wrested from them by mockeries of law, and by the corruption of judges in the city of London; and in no part of England was there more gratification, or a more resolute feeling, when James abdicated and William came over, than in the American colonies. All know that Massachusetts immediately overthrew what had been done under the reign of James, and took possession of the colonial fort in the harbor of Boston in the name of the new king. When the United States separated from England, by the Declaration of 1776, they departed from the political maxims and examples of the mother country, and entered upon a course more exclusively American. From that day down, our institutions and our history relate to ourselves. Through the period of the Declaration of Independence, of the Confederation, of the Convention, and the adoption of the Constitution, all our public acts are records out of which a knowledge of our system of American liberty is to be drawn. From the Declaration of Independence, the governments of what HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI had been colonies before were adapted to their new condition. They no longer owed allegiance to crowned heads. No tie bound them to England. The whole system became entirely popular, and all legislative and constitutional provisions had regard to this new, peculiar, American character, which they had assumed. Where the form of government was already well enough, they let it alone. Where reform was necessary, they reformed it. What was valuable, they retained; what was essential, they added, and no more. Through the whole proceeding, from 1776 to the latest period, the whole course of American public acts, the whole progress of this American system, was marked by a peculiar conservatism. The object was to do what was necessary, and no more; and to do that with the utmost temperance and prudence. Now, without going into historical details at length, let me state what I understand the American principles to be, on which this system rests. First and chief, no man makes a question, that the people are the source of all political power. Government is instituted for their good, and its members are their agents and servants. He who would argue against this must argue without an adversary. And who thinks there is any peculiar merit in asserting a doctrine like this, in the midst of twenty millions of people, when nineteen millions nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them hold it, as well as himself? There is no other doctrine of government here; and no man imputes to another, and no man should claim for himself, any peculiar merit for asserting what everybody knows to be true, and nobody denies. Why, where else can we look but to the people for political power, in a popular government? We have no hereditary executive, no hereditary branch of the legislature, no inherited masses of property, no system of entails, no long trusts, no long family settlements, no primogeniture. Every estate in the country, from the richest to the poorest, is divided among sons and daughters alike. Alienation is made as easy as possible; everywhere the transmissibility of property is perfectly free. The whole system is arranged so as to produce, as far as unequal industry and enterprise render it possible, a universal equality among men; an equality of rights absolutely, and an equality of condition, so far as the different characters of individuals will allow such equality to be produced. He who considers that there may be, is, or ever has been, since the Declaration of Independence, any person who looks to any other source of power in this country than the people, so as to give peculiar merit to those who clamor loudest in its assertion, must be out of his mind, even more than Don Quixote. His imagination was only perverted. He saw things not as they were, though what he saw were things. He saw windmills, and took them to be giants, knights on horseback. This was bad enough; but whoever says, or speaks as if he thought, that anybody looks to any other source of political power in this country than the people, must have a stronger and wilder imagination, for he sees nothing but the creations of his own fancy. He stares at phantoms. Well, then, let all admit, what none deny, that the only source of political power in this country is the people. Let us admit that they are sovereign, for they are so; that is to say, the aggregate community, the collected will of the people, is sovereign. I confess that I think Chief Justice Jay spoke rather paradoxically than philosophically, when he said that this HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI country exhibited the extraordinary spectacle of many sovereigns and no subjects. The people, he said, are all sovereigns; and the peculiarity of the case is that they have no subjects, except a few colored persons. This must be rather fanciful. The aggregate community is sovereign, but that is not the sovereignty which acts in the daily exercise of sovereign power. The people cannot act daily as the people. They must establish a government, and invest it with so much of the sovereign power as the case requires; and this sovereign power being delegated and placed in the hands of the government, that government becomes what is popularly called THE STATE. I like the old- fashioned way of stating things as they are; and this is the true idea of a state. It is an organized government, representing the collected will of the people, as far as they see fit to invest that government with power. And in that respect it is true, that, though this government possesses sovereign power, it does not possess all sovereign power; and so the State governments, though sovereign in some respects, are not so in all. Nor could it be shown that the powers of both, as delegated, embrace the whole range of what might be called sovereign power. We usually speak of the States as sovereign States. I do not object to this. But the Constitution never so styles them, nor does the Constitution speak of the government here as the general or the federal government. It calls this government the United States; and it calls the State governments State governments. Still the fact is undeniably so; legislation is a sovereign power, and is exercised by the United States government to a certain extent, and also by the States, according to the forms which they themselves have established, and subject to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States. Well, then, having agreed that all power is originally from the people, and that they can confer as much of it as they please, the next principle is, that, as the exercise of legislative power and the other powers of government immediately by the people themselves is impracticable, they must be exercised by REPRESENTATIVES of the people; and what distinguishes American governments as much as any thing else from any governments of ancient or of modern times, is the marvellous felicity of their representative system. It has with us, allow me to say, a somewhat different origin from the representation of the commons in England, though that has been worked up to some resemblance of our own. The representative system in England had its origin, not in any supposed rights of the people themselves, but in the necessities and commands of the crown. At first, knights and burgesses were summoned, often against their will, to a Parliament called by the king. Many remonstrances were presented against sending up these representatives; the charge of paying them was, not unfrequently, felt to be burdensome by the people. But the king wished their counsel and advice, and perhaps the presence of a popular body, to enable him to make greater headway against the feudal barons in the aristocratic and hereditary branch of the legislature. In process of time these knights and burgesses assumed more and more a popular character, and became, by degrees, the guardians of popular rights. The people through them obtained protection against the encroachments of the crown and the aristocracy, till in our day they are understood to be the representatives of the people, charged with the protection HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of their rights. With us it was always just so. Representation has always been of this character. The power is with the people; but they cannot exercise it in masses or per capita; they can only exercise it by their representatives. The whole system with us has been popular from the beginning. Now, the basis of this representation is suffrage. The right to choose representatives is every man’s part in the exercise of sovereign power; to have a voice in it, if he has the proper qualifications, is the portion of political power belonging to every elector. That is the beginning. That is the mode in which power emanates from its source, and gets into the hands of conventions, legislatures, courts of law, and the chair of the executive. It begins in suffrage. Suffrage is the delegation of the power of an individual to some agent. This being so, then follow two other great principles of the American system. 1. The first is, that the right of suffrage shall be guarded, protected, and secured against force and against fraud; and, 2. The second is, that its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law; its qualifications shall be prescribed by previous law; the time and place of its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law; the manner of its exercise, under whose supervision (always sworn officers of the law), is to be prescribed. And then, again, the results are to be certified to the central power by some certain rule, by some known public officers, in some clear and definite form, to the end that two things may be done: first, that every man entitled to vote may vote; second, that his vote may be sent forward and counted, and so he may exercise his part of sovereignty, in common with his fellow-citizens. In the exercise of political power through representatives we know nothing, we never have known any thing, but such an exercise as should take place through the prescribed forms of law. When we depart from that, we shall wander as widely from the American track as the pole is from the track of the sun. I have said that it is one principle of the American system, that the people limit their governments, National and State. They do so; but it is another principle, equally true and certain, and, according to my judgment of things, equally important, that the people often limit themselves. They set bounds to their own power. They have chosen to secure the institutions which they establish against the sudden impulses of mere majorities. All our institutions teem with instances of this. It was their great conservative principle, in constituting forms of government, that they should secure what they had established against hasty changes by simple majorities. By the fifth article of the Constitution of the United States, Congress, two thirds of both houses concurring, may propose amendments of the Constitution; or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the States, may call a convention; and amendments proposed in either of these forms must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions of three fourths of the States. The fifth article of the Constitution, if it was made a topic for those who framed the “people’s constitution” of Rhode Island, could only have been a matter of reproach. It gives no countenance to any of their proceedings, or to any thing like them. On the contrary, it is one remarkable instance of the enactment and application of that great American principle, that HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the constitution of government should be cautiously and prudently interfered with, and that changes should not ordinarily be begun and carried through by bare majorities. But the people limit themselves also in other ways. They limit themselves in the first exercise of their political rights. They limit themselves, by all their constitutions, in two important respects; that is to say, in regard to the qualifications of electors, and in regard to the qualifications of the elected. In every State, and in all the States, the people have precluded themselves from voting for everybody they might wish to vote for; they have limited their own right of choosing. They have said, We will elect no man who has not such and such qualifications. We will not vote ourselves, unless we have such and such qualifications. They have also limited themselves to certain prescribed forms for the conduct of elections. They must vote at a particular place, at a particular time, and under particular conditions, or not at all. It is in these modes that we are to ascertain the will of the American people; and our Constitution and laws know no other mode. We are not to take the will of the people from public meetings, nor from tumultuous assemblies, by which the timid are terrified, the prudent are alarmed, and by which society is disturbed. These are not American modes of signifying the will of the people, and they never were. If any thing in the country, not ascertained by a regular vote, by regular returns, and by regular representation, has been established, it is an exception, and not the rule; it is an anomaly which, I believe, can scarcely be found. It is true that at the Revolution, when all government was immediately dissolved, the people got together, and what did they do? Did they exercise sovereign power? They began an inceptive organization, the object of which was to bring together representatives of the people, who should form a government. This was the mode of proceeding in those States where their legislatures were dissolved. It was much like that had in England upon the abdication of James the Second. He ran away, he abdicated. He threw the great seal into the Thames. I am not aware that, on the 4th of May, 1842, any great seal was thrown into Providence River! But James abdicated, and King William took the government; and how did he proceed? Why, he at once requested all who had been members of the old Parliament, of any regular Parliament in the time of Charles the Second, to assemble. The Peers, being a standing body, could of course assemble; and all they did was to recommend the calling of a convention, to be chosen by the same electors, and composed of the same numbers, as composed a Parliament. The convention assembled, and, as all know, was turned into a Parliament. This was a case of necessity, a revolution. Don’t we call it so? And why? Not merely because a new sovereign then ascended the throne of the Stuarts, but because there was a change in the organization of the government. The legal and established succession was broken. The convention did not assemble under any preceding law. There was a hiatus, a syncope, in the action of the body politic. This was revolution, and the Parliaments that assembled afterwards referred their legal origin to that revolution. Is it not obvious enough, that men cannot get together and count themselves, and say they are so many hundreds and so many thousands, and judge of their own qualifications, and call HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI themselves the people, and set up a government? Why, another set of men, forty miles off, on the same day, with the same propriety, with as good qualifications, and in as large numbers, may meet and set up another government; one may meet at Newport and another at Chepachet, and both may call themselves the people. What is this but anarchy? What liberty is there here, but a tumultuary, tempestuous, violent, stormy liberty, a sort of South American liberty, without power except in its spasms, a liberty supported by arms to-day, crushed by arms to-morrow? Is that our liberty? The regular action of popular power, on the other hand, places upon public liberty the most beautiful face that ever adorned that angel form. All is regular and harmonious in its features, and gentle in its operation. The stream of public authority, under American liberty, running in this channel, has the strength of the Missouri, while its waters are as transparent as those of a crystal lake. It is powerful for good. It produces no tumult, no violence, and no wrong;— “Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong, without rage; without o’erflowing, full.” Another American principle growing out of this, and just as important and well settled as is the truth that the people are the source of power, is, that, when in the course of events it becomes necessary to ascertain the will of the people on a new exigency, or a new state of things or of opinion, the legislative power provides for that ascertainment by an ordinary act of legislation. Has not that been our whole history? It would take me from now till the sun shall go down to advert to all the instances of it, and I shall only refer to the most prominent, and especially to the establishment of the Constitution under which you sit. The old Congress, upon the suggestion of the delegates who assembled at Annapolis in May, 1786, recommended to the States that they should send delegates to a convention to be holden at Philadelphia to form a Constitution. No article of the old Confederation gave them power to do this; but they did it, and the States did appoint delegates, who assembled at Philadelphia, and formed the Constitution. It was communicated to the old Congress, and that body recommended to the States to make provision for calling the people together to act upon its adoption. Was not that exactly the case of passing a law to ascertain the will of the people in a new exigency? And this method was adopted without opposition, nobody suggesting that there could be any other mode of ascertaining the will of the people. My learned friend went through the constitutions of several of the States. It is enough to say, that, of the old thirteen States, the constitutions, with but one exception, contained no provision for their own amendment. In New Hampshire there was a provision for taking the sense of the people once in seven years. Yet there is hardly one that has not altered its constitution, and it has been done by conventions called by the legislature, as an ordinary exercise of legislative power. Now what State ever altered its constitution in any other mode? What alteration has ever been brought in, put in, forced in, or got in anyhow, by resolutions of mass meetings, and then by applying force? In what State has an assembly, calling itself the people, convened without law, without authority, without qualifications, without HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI certain officers, with no oaths, securities, or sanctions of any kind, met and made a constitution, and called it the constitution of the STATE? There must be some authentic mode of ascertaining the will of the people, else all is anarchy. It resolves itself into the law of the strongest, or, what is the same thing, of the most numerous for the moment, and all constitutions and all legislative rights are prostrated and disregarded. But my learned adversary says, that, if we maintain that the people (for he speaks in the name and on behalf of the people, to which I do not object) cannot commence changes in their government but by some previous act of legislation, and if the legislature will not grant such an act, we do in fact follow the example of the Holy Alliance, “the doctors of Laybach,” where the assembled sovereigns said that all changes of government must proceed from sovereigns; and it is said that we mark out the same rule for the people of Rhode Island. Now will any man, will my adversary here, on a moment’s reflection, undertake to show the least resemblance on earth between what I have called the American doctrine, and the doctrine of the sovereigns at Laybach? What do I contend for? I say that the will of the people must prevail, when it is ascertained; but there must be some legal and authentic mode of ascertaining that will; and then the people may make what government they please. Was that the doctrine of Laybach? Was not the doctrine there held this,—that the sovereigns should say what changes shall be made? Changes must proceed from them; new constitutions and new laws emanate from them; and all the people had to do was to submit. That is what they maintained. All changes began with the sovereigns, and ended with the sovereigns. Pray, at about the time that the Congress of Laybach was in session, did the allied powers put it to the people of Italy to say what sort of change they would have? And at a more recent date, did they ask the citizens of Cracow what change they would have in their constitution? Or did they take away their constitution, laws, and liberties, by their own sovereign act? All that is necessary here is, that the will of the people should be ascertained, by some regular rule of proceeding, prescribed by previous law. But when ascertained, that will is as sovereign as the will of a despotic prince, of the Czar of Muscovy, or the Emperor of Austria himself, though not quite so easily made known. A ukase or an edict signifies at once the will of a despotic prince; but that will of the people, which is here as sovereign as the will of such a prince, is not so quickly ascertained or known; and thence arises the necessity for suffrage, which is the mode whereby each man’s power is made to tell upon the constitution of the government, and in the enactment of laws. One of the most recent laws for taking the will of the people in any State is the law of 1845, of the State of New York. It begins by recommending to the people to assemble in their several election districts, and proceed to vote for delegates to a convention. If you will take the pains to read that act, it will be seen that New York regarded it as an ordinary exercise of legislative power. It applies all the penalties for fraudulent voting, as in other elections. It punishes false oaths, as in other cases. Certificates of the proper officers were to be held conclusive, and the will of the people was, in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI this respect, collected essentially in the same manner, supervised by the same officers, under the same guards against force and fraud, collusion and misrepresentation, as are usual in voting for State or United States officers. We see, therefore, from the commencement of the government under which we live, down to this late act of the State of New York, one uniform current of law, of precedent, and of practice, all going to establish the point that changes in government are to be brought about by the will of the people, assembled under such legislative provisions as may be necessary to ascertain that will, truly and authentically. In the next place, may it please your honors, it becomes very important to consider what bearing the Constitution and laws of the United States have upon this Rhode Island question. Of course the Constitution of the United States recognizes the existence of States. One branch of the legislature of the United States is composed of Senators, appointed by the States, in their State capacities. The Constitution of the United States [Article IV, § 4] says that “the United States shall guarantee to each State a republican form of government, and shall protect the several States against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive when the legislature cannot be convened, against domestic violence.” Now, I cannot but think this a very stringent article, drawing after it the most important consequences, and all of them good consequences. The Constitution, in the section cited, speaks of States as having existing legislatures and existing executives; and it speaks of cases in which violence is practised or threatened against the State, in other words, “domestic violence”; and it says the State shall be protected. It says, then, does it not? that the existing government of a State shall be protected. My adversary says, if so, and if the legislature would not call a convention, and if, when the people rise to make a constitution, the United States step in and prohibit them, why, the rights and privileges of the people are checked, controlled. Undoubtedly. The Constitution does not proceed on the ground of revolution; it does not proceed on any right of revolution; but it does go on the idea, that, within and under the Constitution, no new form of government can be established in any State, without the authority of the existing government. Admitting the legitimacy of the argument of my learned adversary, it would not authorize the inference he draws from it, because his own case falls within the same range. He has proved, he thinks, that there was an existing government, a paper government, at least; a rightful government, as he alleges. Suppose it to be rightful, in his sense of right. Suppose three fourths of the people of Rhode Island to have been engaged in it, and ready to sustain it. What then? How is it to be done without the consent of the previous government? How is the fact, that three fourths of the people are in favor of the new government, to be legally ascertained? And if the existing government deny that fact, and if that government hold on, and will not surrender till displaced by force, and if it is threatened by force, then the case of the Constitution arises, and the United States must aid the government that is in, because an attempt to displace a government by force is “domestic violence.” It is the exigency provided for by the Constitution. If the existing government maintain its post, though three HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fourths of the State have adopted the new constitution, is it not evident enough that the exigency arises in which the constitutional power here must go to the aid of the existing government? Look at the law of 28th February, 1795 [Statutes at Large, Volume I, page 424]. Its words are, “And in case of an insurrection in any State, against the government thereof, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States, on application of the legislature of such State, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), to call forth such number of the militia of any other State or States, as may be applied for, as he may judge sufficient to suppress such insurrection.” Insurrection against the existing government is, then, the thing to be suppressed. But the law and the Constitution, the whole system of American institutions, do not contemplate a case in which a resort will be necessary to proceedings aliunde, or outside of the law and the Constitution, for the purpose of amending the frame of government. They go on the idea that the States are all republican, that they are all representative in their forms, and that these popular governments in each State, the annually created creatures of the people, will give all proper facilities and necessary aids to bring about changes which the people may judge necessary in their constitutions. They take that ground and act on no other supposition. They assume that the popular will in all particulars will be accomplished. And history has proved that the presumption is well founded. This, may it please your honors, is the view I take of what I have called the American system. These are the methods of bringing about changes in government. Now, it is proper to look into this record, and see what the questions are that are presented by it, and consider,— 1. Whether the case is one for judicial investigation at all; that is, whether this court can try the matters which the plaintiff has offered to prove in the court below; and, 2. In the second place, whether many things which he did offer to prove, if they could have been and had been proved, were not acts of criminality, and therefore no justification; and, 3. Whether all that was offered to be proved would show that, in point of fact, there had been established and put in operation any new constitution, displacing the old charter government of Rhode Island. The declaration is in trespass. The writ was issued on the 8th of October, 1842, in which Martin Luther complains that Luther M. Borden and others broke into his house in Warren, Rhode Island, on the 29th of June, 1842, and disturbed his family and committed other illegal acts. The defendant answers, that large numbers of men were in arms, in Rhode Island, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of the State, and making war upon it; and that, for the preservation of the government and people, martial law had been proclaimed by the Governor, under an act of the legislature, on the 25th of June, 1842. The plea goes on to aver, that the plaintiff was aiding and abetting this attempt to overthrow the government, and that the defendant was under the military authority of John T. Child, and was ordered by him to arrest the plaintiff; for which purpose he applied at the door of his house, and being refused entrance he forced the door. The action is thus for an alleged trespass, and the plea is HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI justification under the law of Rhode Island. The plea and replications are as usual in such cases in point of form. The plea was filed at the November term of 1842, and the case was tried at the November term of 1843, in the Circuit Court in Rhode Island. In order to make out a defence, the defendant offered the charter of Rhode Island, the participation of the State in the Declaration of Independence, its uniting with the Confederation in 1778, its admission into the Union in 1790, its continuance in the Union and its recognition as a State down to May, 1843, when the constitution now in force was adopted. Here let it be particularly remarked, that Congress admitted Rhode Island into the Constitution under this identical old charter government, thereby giving sanction to it as a republican form of government. The defendant then refers to all the laws and proceedings of the Assembly, till the adoption of the present constitution of Rhode Island. To repel the case of the defendant, the plaintiff read the proceedings of the old legislature, and documents to show that the idea of changing the government had been entertained as long ago as 1790. He read also certain resolutions of the Assembly in 1841, memorials praying changes in the constitution, and other documents to the same effect. He next offered to prove that suffrage associations were formed throughout the State in 1840 and 1841, and that steps were taken by them for holding public meetings; and to show the proceedings had at those meetings. In the next place, he offered to prove that a mass convention was held at Newport, attended by over four thousand persons, and another at Providence, at which over six thousand attended, at which resolutions were passed in favor of the change. Then he offered to prove the election of delegates; the meeting of the convention in October, 1841, and the draughting of the Dorr constitution; the reassembling in 1841, the completion of the draught, its submission to the people, their voting upon it, its adoption, and the proclamation on the 13th of January, 1842, that the constitution so adopted was the law of the land. That is the substance of what was averred as to the formation of the Dorr constitution. The plaintiff next offered to prove that the constitution was adopted by a large majority of the qualified voters of the State; that officers were elected under it in April, 1842; that this new government assembled on the 3d of May; and he offered a copy of its proceedings. He sets forth that the court refused to admit testimony upon these subjects, and to these points; and ruled that the old government and laws of the State were in full force and power, and then existing, when the alleged trespass was made, and that they justified the acts of the defendants, according to their plea. I will give a few references to other proceedings of this new government. The new constitution was proclaimed on the 13th of January, 1842, by some of the officers of the convention. On the 13th of April, officers were appointed under it, and Mr. Dorr was chosen governor. On Tuesday, the 3d of May, the new legislature met, was organized, and then, it is insisted, the new constitution became the law of the land. The legislature sat through that whole day, morning and evening; adjourned; met the next day, and sat through all that day, morning and evening, and did a great deal of paper business. It went through the forms of choosing a Supreme Court, and transacting other business of a similar kind, and on the evening of the 4th of May it HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI adjourned, to meet again on the first Monday of July, in Providence, “And word spake never more.” It never reassembled. This government, then, whatever it was, came into existence on the third day of May, and went out of existence on the fourth day of May. I will now give some references concerning the new constitution authorized by the government, the old government, and which is now the constitution of Rhode Island. It was framed in November, 1842. It was voted upon by the people on the 21st, 22d, and 23d days of November, was then by them accepted, and became by its own provisions the constitution of Rhode Island on the first Tuesday of May, 1843. Now, what, in the mean time, had become of Mr. Dorr’s government? According to the principle of its friends, they are forced to admit that it was superseded by the new, that is to say, the present government, because the people accepted the new government. But there was no new government till May, 1843. According to them, then, there was an interregnum of a whole year. If Mr. Dorr had had a government, what became of it? If it ever came in, what put it out of existence? Why did it not meet on the day to which it had adjourned? It was not displaced by the new constitution, because that had not been agreed upon in convention till November. It was not adopted by the people till the last of November, and it did not go into operation till May. What then had become of Mr. Dorr’s government? I think it is important to note that the new constitution, established according to the prescribed forms, came thus into operation in May, 1843, and was admitted by all to be the constitution of the State. What then happened in the State of Rhode Island? I do not mean to go through all the trials that were had after this ideal government of Mr. Dorr ceased to exist; but I will ask attention to the report of the trial of Dorr for treason, which took place in 1844, before all the judges of the Supreme Court of the State. He was indicted in August, 1842, and the trial came on in March, 1844. The indictment was found while the charter government was in force, and the trial was had under the new constitution. He was found guilty of treason. And I turn to the report of the trial now, to call attention to the language of the court in its charge, as delivered by Chief Justice Durfee. I present the following extract from that charge:— “It may be, Gentlemen, that he really believed himself to be the governor of the State, and that he acted throughout under this delusion. However this may go to extenuate the offence, it does not take from it its legal guilt. It is no defence to an indictment for the violation of any law for the defendant to come into court and say, ’I thought that I was but exercising a constitutional right, and I claim an acquittal on the ground of mistake,’ Were it so, there would be an end to all law and all government. Courts and juries would have nothing to do but to sit in judgment upon indictments, in order to acquit or excuse. The accused has only to prove that he has been systematic in committing crime, and that he thought that he had a right to commit it; and, according to this doctrine, you HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI must acquit. The main ground upon which the prisoner sought for a justification was, that a constitution had been adopted by a majority of the male adult population of this State, voting in their primary or natural capacity or condition, and that he was subsequently elected, and did the acts charged, as governor under it. He offered the votes themselves to prove its adoption, which were also to be followed by proof of his election. This evidence we have ruled out. Courts and juries, Gentlemen, do not count votes to determine whether a constitution has been adopted or a governor elected, or not. Courts take notice, without proof offered from the bar, what the constitution is or was, and who is or was the governor of their own State. It belongs to the legislature to exercise this high duty. It is the legislature which, in the exercise of its delegated sovereignty, counts the votes and declares whether a constitution be adopted or a governor elected, or not; and we cannot revise and reverse their acts in this particular, without usurping their power. Were the votes on the adoption of our present constitution now offered here to prove that it was or was not adopted; or those given for the governor under it, to prove that he was or was not elected; we could not receive the evidence ourselves, we could not permit it to pass to the jury. And why not? Because, if we did so, we should cease to be a mere judicial, and become a political tribunal, with the whole sovereignty in our hands. Neither the people nor the legislature would be sovereign. We should be sovereign, or you would be sovereign; and we should deal out to parties litigant, here at our bar, sovereignty to this or that, according to rules or laws of our own making, and heretofore unknown in courts. “In what condition would this country be, if appeals could be thus taken to courts and juries? This jury might decide one way, and that another, and the sovereignty might be found here to-day, and there tomorrow. Sovereignty is above courts or juries, and the creature cannot sit in judgment upon its creator. Were this instrument offered as the constitution of a foreign state, we might, perhaps, under some circumstances, require proof of its existence; but, even in that case, the fact would not be ascertained by counting the votes given at its adoption, but by the certificate of the secretary of state, under the broad seal of the state. This instrument is not offered as a foreign constitution, and this court is bound to know what the constitution of the government is under which it acts, without any proof even of that high character. We know nothing of the existence of the so-called ’people’s constitution’ as law, and there is no proof before you of its adoption, and of the election of the prisoner as governor under it; and you can return a verdict only on the evidence that has passed to you.” Having thus, may it please your honors, attempted to state the questions as they arise, and having referred to what has taken HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI place in Rhode Island, I shall present what further I have to say in three propositions:— 1st. I say, first, that the matters offered to be proved by the plaintiff in the court below are not of judicial cognizance; and proof of them, therefore, was properly rejected by the court. 2d. If all these matters could be, and had been, legally proved, they would have constituted no defence, because they show nothing but an illegal attempt to overthrow the government of Rhode Island. 3d. No proof was offered by the plaintiff to show that, in fact, another government had gone into operation, by which the Charter government had become displaced. And first, these matters are not of judicial cognizance. Does this need arguing? Are the various matters of fact alleged, the meetings, the appointment of committees, the qualifications of voters,—is there any one of all these matters of which a court of law can take cognizance in a case in which it is to decide on sovereignty? Are fundamental changes in the frame of a government to be thus proved? The thing to be proved is a change of the sovereign power. Two legislatures existed at the same time, both claiming power to pass laws. Both could not have a legal existence. What, then, is the attempt of our adversaries? To put down one sovereign government, and to put another up, by facts and proceedings in regard to elections out of doors, unauthorized by any law whatever. Regular proceedings for a change of government may in some cases, perhaps, be taken notice of by a court; but this court must look elsewhere than out of doors, and to public meetings, irregular and unauthorized, for the decision of such a question as this. It naturally looks to that authority under which it sits here, to the provisions of the Constitution which have created this tribunal, and to the laws by which its proceedings are regulated. It must look to the acts of the government of the United States, in its various branches. This Rhode Island disturbance, as everybody knows, was brought to the knowledge of the President of the United States [John Tyler] by the public authorities of Rhode Island; and how did he treat it? The United States have guaranteed to each State a republican form of government. And a law of Congress has directed the President, in a constitutional case requiring the adoption of such a proceeding, to call out the militia to put down domestic violence, and suppress insurrection. Well, then, application was made to the President of the United States, to the executive power of the United States. For, according to our system, it devolves upon the executive to determine, in the first instance, what are and what are not governments. The President recognizes governments, foreign governments, as they appear from time to time in the occurrences of this changeful world. And the Constitution and the laws, if an insurrection exists against the government of any State, rendering it necessary to appear with an armed force, make it his duty to call out the militia and suppress it. Two things may here be properly considered. The first is, that the Constitution declares that the United States shall protect every State against domestic violence; and the law of 1795, making provision for carrying this constitutional duty into HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI effect in all proper cases, declares, that, “in case of an insurrection in any State against the government thereof, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call out the militia of other States to suppress such insurrection.” These constitutional and legal provisions make it the indispensable duty of the President to decide, in cases of commotion, what is the rightful government of the State. He cannot avoid such decision. And in this case he decided, of course, that the existing government, the charter government, was the rightful government. He could not possibly have decided otherwise. In the next place, if events had made it necessary to call out the militia, and the officers and soldiers of such militia, in protecting the existing government, had done precisely what the defendants in this case did, could an action have been maintained against them? No one would assert so absurd a proposition. In reply to the requisition of the Governor, the President stated that he did not think it was yet time for the application of force; but he wrote a letter to the Secretary of War, in which he directed him to confer with the Governor of Rhode Island; and, whenever it should appear to them to be necessary, to call out from Massachusetts and Connecticut a militia force sufficient to terminate at once this insurrection, by the authority of the government of the United States. We are at no loss, therefore, to know how the executive government of the United States treated this insurrection. It was regarded as fit to be suppressed. That is manifest from the President’s letters to the Secretary of War and to Governor King. Now, the eye of this court must be directed to the proceedings of the general government, which had its attention called to the subject, and which did institute proceedings respecting it. And the court will learn from the proceedings of the executive branch of the government, and of the two chambers above us, how the disturbances in Rhode Island were regarded; whether they were looked upon as the establishment of any government, or as a mere pure, unauthorized, unqualified insurrection against the authority of the existing government of the State. I say, therefore, that, upon that ground, these facts are not facts which this court can inquire into, or which the court below could try; because they are facts going to prove (if they prove any thing) the establishment of a new sovereignty; and that is a question to be settled elsewhere and otherwise. From the very nature of the case, it is not a question to be decided by judicial inquiry. Take, for example, one of the points which it involves. My adversary offered to prove that the constitution was adopted by a majority of the people of Rhode Island; by a large majority, as he alleges. What does this offer call on your honors to do? Why, to ascertain, by proof, what is the number of citizens of Rhode Island, and how many attended the meetings at which the delegates to the convention were elected; and then you have to add them all up, and prove by testimony the qualifications of every one of them to be an elector. It is enough to state such a proposition to show its absurdity. As none such ever was sustained in a court of law, so none can be or ought to be sustained. Observe that minutes of proceedings can be no proof, for they were made by no authentic persons; registers were kept by no warranted officers; chairmen and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI moderators were chosen without authority. In short, there are no official records; there is no testimony in the case but parol. Chief Justice Durfee has stated this so plainly, that I need not dwell upon it. But, again, I say you cannot look into the facts attempted to be proved, because of the certainty of the continuance of the old government till the new and legal constitution went into effect on the 3d of May, 1843. To prove that there was another constitution of two days’ duration would be ridiculous. And I say that the decision of Rhode Island herself, by her legislature, by her executive, by the adjudication of her highest court of law, on the trial of Dorr, has shut up the whole case. Do you propose,—I will not put it in that form,—but would it be proper for this court to reverse that adjudication? That declares that the judges of Rhode Island know nothing of the “People’s Constitution.” Is it possible, then, for this court, or for the court below, to know any thing of it? It appears to me that, if there were nothing else in the case, the proceedings of Rhode Island herself must close everybody’s mouth, in the court and out of it. Rhode Island is competent to decide the question herself, and everybody else ought to be bound by her decision. And she has decided it. And it is but a branch of this to say, according to my second proposition,— 2. That if every thing offered had been proved, if in the nature of the case these facts and proceedings could have been received as proof, the court could not have listened to them, because every one of them is regarded by the State in which they took place as a criminal act. Who can derive any authority from acts declared to be criminal? The very proceedings which are now set up here show that this pretended constitution was founded upon acts which the legislature of the State had provided punishment for, and which the courts of the State have punished. All, therefore, which the plaintiff has attempted to prove, are acts which he was not allowed to prove, because they were criminal in themselves, and have been so treated and punished, so far as the State government, in its discretion, has thought proper to punish them. 3. Thirdly, and lastly, I say that there is no evidence offered, nor has any distinct allegation been made, that there was an actual government established and put in operation to displace the Charter government, even for a single day. That is evident enough. You find the whole embraced in those two days, the 3d and 4th of May. The French revolution was thought to be somewhat rapid. That took three days. But this work was accomplished in two. It is all there, and what is it? Its birth, its whole life, and its death were accomplished in forty-eight hours. What does it appear that the members of this government did? Why, they voted that A should be treasurer, and C, secretary, and Mr. Dorr, governor; and chose officers of the Supreme Court. But did ever any man under that authority attempt to exercise a particle of official power? Did any man ever bring a suit? Did ever an officer make an arrest? Did any act proceed from any member of this government, or from any agent of it, to touch a citizen of Rhode Island in his person, his safety, or his property, so as to make the party answerable upon an indictment or in a civil suit? Never. It never performed one single act of government. It never did a thing in the world! All was patriotism, and all HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI was paper; and with patriotism and with paper it went out on the 4th of May, admitting itself to be, as all must regard it, a contemptible sham! I have now done with the principles involved in this case, and the questions presented on this record. In regard to the other case, I have but few words to say. And, first, I think it is to be regretted that the court below sent up such a list of points on which it was divided. I shall not go through them, and shall leave it to the court to say whether, after they shall have disposed of the first cause, there is any thing left. I shall only draw attention to the subject of martial law; and in respect to that, instead of going back to martial law as it existed in England at the time the charter of Rhode Island was granted, I shall merely observe that martial law confers power of arrest, of summary trial, and prompt execution; and that when it has been proclaimed, the land becomes a camp, and the law of the camp is the law of the land. Mr. Justice Story defines martial law to be the law of war, a resort to military authority in cases where the civil law is not sufficient; and it confers summary power, not to be used arbitrarily or for the gratification of personal feelings of hatred or revenge, but for the preservation of order and of the public peace. The officer clothed with it is to judge of the degree of force that the necessity of the case may demand; and there is no limit to this, except such as is to be found in the nature and character of the exigency. I now take leave of this whole case. That it is an interesting incident in the history of our institutions, I freely admit. That it has come hither is a subject of no regret to me. I might have said, that I see nothing to complain of in the proceedings of what is called the Charter government of Rhode Island, except that it might perhaps have discreetly taken measures at an earlier period for revising the constitution. If in that delay it erred, it was the error into which prudent and cautious men would fall. As to the enormity of freehold suffrage, how long is it since Virginia, the parent of States, gave up her freehold suffrage? How long is it since nobody voted for governor in New York without a freehold qualification? There are now States in which no man can vote for members of the upper branch of the legislature who does not own fifty acres of land. Every State requires more or less of a property qualification in its officers and electors; and it is for discreet legislation, or constitutional provisions, to determine what its amount shall be. Even the Dorr constitution had a property qualification. According to its provisions, for officers of the State, to be sure, anybody could vote; but its authors remembered that taxation and representation go together, and therefore they declared that no man, in any town, should vote to lay a tax for town purposes who had not the means to pay his portion. It said to him, You cannot vote in the town of Providence to levy a tax for repairing the streets of Providence; but you may vote for governor, and for thirteen representatives from the town of Providence, and send them to the legislature, and there they may tax the people of Rhode Island at their sovereign will and pleasure. I believe that no harm can come of the Rhode Island agitation in 1841, but rather good. It will purify the political atmosphere from some of its noxious mists, and I hope it will HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI clear men’s minds from unfounded notions and dangerous delusions. I hope it will bring them to look at the regularity, the order, with which we carry on what, if the word were not so much abused, I would call our glorious representative system of popular government. Its principles will stand the test of this crisis, as they have stood the test and torture of others. They are exposed always, and they always will be exposed, to dangers. There are dangers from the extremes of too much and of too little popular liberty; from monarchy, or military despotism, on one side, and from licentiousness and anarchy on the other. This always will be the case. The classical navigator had been told that he must pass a narrow and dangerous strait: “Dextrum Scylla latus, laevum implacata Charybdis, Obsidet.” Forewarned he was alive to his danger, and knew, by signs not doubtful, where he was, when he approached its scene: “Et gemitum ingentem pelagi, pulsataque saxa, Audimus longe, fractasque ad litora voces; Exsultantque vada, atque aestu miscentur arenae. ... Nimirum haec ilia Charybdis!” The long-seeing sagacity of our fathers enables us to know equally well where we are, when we hear the voices of tumultuary assemblies, and see the turbulence created by numbers meeting and acting without the restraints of law; and has most wisely provided constitutional means of escape and security. When the established authority of government is openly contemned; when no deference is paid to the regular and authentic declarations of the public will; when assembled masses put themselves above the law, and, calling themselves the people, attempt by force to seize on the government; when the social and political order of the state is thus threatened with overthrow, and the spray of the waves of violent popular commotion lashes the stars,—our political pilots may well cry out: “Nimirum haec illa Charybdis!” The prudence of the country, the sober wisdom of the people, has thus far enabled us to carry this Constitution, and all our constitutions, through the perils which have surrounded them, without running upon the rocks on one side, or being swallowed up in the eddying whirlpools of the other. And I fervently hope that this signal happiness and good fortune will continue, and that our children after us will exercise a similar prudence, and wisdom, and justice; and that, under the Divine blessing, our system of free government may continue to go on, with equal prosperity, to the end of time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI March 29, Wednesday: John Jacob Astor died in New-York, with an estate of $20,000,000 from which he had designated $350,000 to found a public library.

Due to an ice jam upriver on the Niagara, for 30 hours local people were presented with a curious image. No water was going over the Falls.

Arthur Buckminster Fuller, after leaving the Cambridge Divinity School of Harvard College, was ordained as pastor of the Unitarian Society in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the revolutions of that springtime season on the Italian peninsula: Rome, March 29, 1848. It is long since I have written. My health entirely gave way beneath the Roman winter. The rain was constant, commonly falling in torrents from the 16th of December to the 19th of March. Nothing could surpass the dirt, the gloom, the desolation, of Rome. Let no one fancy he has seen her who comes here only in the winter. It is an immense mistake to do so. I cannot sufficiently rejoice that I did not first see Italy in the winter. The climate of Rome at this time of extreme damp I have found equally exasperating and weakening. I have had constant nervous headache without strength to bear it, nightly fever, want of appetite. Some constitutions bear it better, but the complaint of weakness and extreme dejection of spirits is general among foreigners in the wet season. The English say they become acclimated in two or three years, and cease to suffer, though HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI never so strong as at home. Now this long dark dream — to me the most idle and most suffering season of my life — seems past. The Italian heavens wear again their deep blue; the sun shines gloriously; the melancholy lustres are stealing again over the Campagna, and hundreds of larks sing unwearied above its ruins. Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring, — with the emotions which are swelling the hearts of men. The morning sun is greeted by the trumpets of the Roman legions marching out once more, now not to oppress but to defend. The stars look down on their jubilees over the good news which nightly reaches them from their brothers of Lombardy. This week has been one of nobler, sweeter feeling, of a better hope and faith, than Rome in her greatest days ever knew. How much has happened since I wrote! First, the victorious resistance of Sicily and the revolution of Naples. This has led us yet only to half-measures, but even these have been of great use to the progress of Italy. The Neapolitans will probably have to get rid at last of the stupid crowned head who is at present their puppet; but their bearing with him has led to the wiser sovereigns granting these constitutions, which, if eventually inadequate to the wants of Italy, will be so useful, are so needed, to educate her to seek better, completer forms of administration. In the midst of all this serious work came the play of Carnival, in which there was much less interest felt than usual, but enough to dazzle and captivate a stranger. One thing, however, has been omitted in the description of the Roman Carnival; i.e. that it rains every day. Almost every day came on violent rain, just as the tide of gay masks was fairly engaged in the Corso. This would have been well worth bearing once or twice, for the sake of seeing the admirable good humor of this people. Those who had laid out all their savings in the gayest, thinnest dresses, on carriages and chairs for the Corso, found themselves suddenly drenched, their finery spoiled, and obliged to ride and sit shivering all the afternoon. But they never murmured, never scolded, never stopped throwing their flowers. Their strength of constitution is wonderful. While I, in my shawl and boa, was coughing at the open window from the moment I inhaled the wet sepulchral air, the servant-girls of the house had taken off their woollen gowns, and, arrayed in white muslins and roses, sat in the drenched street beneath the drenching rain, quite happy, and have suffered nothing in consequence. The Romans renounced the Moccoletti, ostensibly as an expression of sympathy for the sufferings of the Milanese, but really because, at that time, there was great disturbance about the Jesuits, and the government feared that difficulties would arise in the excitement of the evening. But, since, we have had this entertainment in honor of the revolutions of France and Austria, and nothing could be more beautiful. The fun usually consists in all the people blowing one another’s lights out. We had not this; all the little tapers were left to blaze, and the long Corso swarmed with tall fire-flies. Lights crept out over the surface of all the houses, and such merry little twinkling lights, laughing and flickering with each slightest movement of those who held them! Up and down the Corso they twinkled, they swarmed, they streamed, while a surge of gay triumphant sound ebbed and flowed beneath that glittering surface. Here and there HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI danced men carrying aloft moccoli, and clanking chains, emblem of the tyrannic power now vanquished by the people; — the people, sweet and noble, who, in the intoxication of their joy, were guilty of no rude or unkindly word or act, and who, no signal being given as usual for the termination of their diversion, closed, of their own accord and with one consent, singing the hymns for Pio, by nine o’clock, and retired peacefully to their homes, to dream of hopes they yet scarce understand. This happened last week. The news of the dethronement of Louis Philippe reached us just after the close of the Carnival. It was just a year from my leaving Paris. I did not think, as I looked with such disgust on the empire of sham he had established in France, and saw the soul of the people imprisoned and held fast as in an iron vice, that it would burst its chains so soon. Whatever be the result, France has done gloriously; she has declared that she will not be satisfied with pretexts while there are facts in the world, — that to stop her march is a vain attempt, though the onward path be dangerous and difficult. It is vain to cry, Peace! peace! when there is no peace. The news from France, in these days, sounds ominous, though still vague. It would appear that the political is being merged in the social struggle: it is well. Whatever blood is to be shed, whatever altars cast down, those tremendous problems MUST be solved, whatever be the cost! That cost cannot fail to break many a bank, many a heart, in Europe, before the good can bud again out of a mighty corruption. To you, people of America, it may perhaps be given to look on and learn in time for a preventive wisdom. You may learn the real meaning of the words FRATERNITY, EQUALITY: you may, despite the apes of the past who strive to tutor you, learn the needs of a true democracy. You may in time learn to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy of a nation, the only really nobles, — the LABORING CLASSES. And Metternich, too, is crushed; the seed of the woman has had his foot on the serpent. I have seen the Austrian arms dragged through the streets of Rome and burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The Italians embraced one another, and cried, Miracolo! Providenza! the modern Tribune Ciceronacchio fed the flame with faggots; Adam Mickiewicz, the great poet of Poland, long exiled from his country or the hopes of a country, looked on, while Polish women, exiled too, or who perhaps, like one nun who is here, had been daily scourged by the orders of a tyrant, brought little pieces that had been scattered in the street and threw them into the flames, — an offering received by the Italians with loud plaudits. It was a transport of the people, who found no way to vent their joy, but the symbol, the poesy, natural to the Italian mind. The ever-too-wise “upper classes” regret it, and the Germans choose to resent it as an insult to Germany; but it was nothing of the kind; the insult was to the prisons of Spielberg, to those who commanded the massacres of Milan, — a base tyranny little congenial to the native German heart, as the true Germans of Germany are at this moment showing by their resolves, by their struggles. When the double-headed eagle was pulled down from above the lofty portal of the Palazzo di Venezia, the people placed there in its stead one of white and gold, inscribed with the name ALTA ITALIA, and quick upon the emblem followed the news that Milan was fighting against her tyrants, — that Venice had driven them out and freed from their prisons the courageous Protestants in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI favor of truth, Tommaso and Manin, — that Manin, descendant of the last Doge, had raised the republican banner on the Place St. Mark, — and that Modena, that Parma, were driving out the unfeeling and imbecile creatures who had mocked Heaven and man by the pretence of government there. With indescribable rapture these tidings were received in Rome. Men were seen dancing, women weeping with joy along the street. The youth rushed to enroll themselves in regiments to go to the frontier. In the Colosseum their names were received. Father Gavazzi, a truly patriotic monk, gave them the cross to carry on a new, a better, because defensive, crusade. Sterbini, long exiled, addressed them. He said: “Romans, do you wish to go; do you wish to go with all your hearts? If so, you may, and those who do not wish to go themselves may give money. To those who will go, the government gives bread and fifteen baiocchi a day.” The people cried: “We wish to go, but we do not wish so much; the government is very poor; we can live on a paul a day.” The princes answered by giving, one sixty thousand, others twenty, fifteen, ten thousand dollars. The people responded by giving at the benches which are opened in the piazzas literally everything; street-pedlers gave the gains of each day; women gave every ornament, — from the splendid necklace and bracelet down to the poorest bit of coral; servant-girls gave five pauls, two pauls, even half a paul, if they had no more. A man all in rags gave two pauls. “It is,” said he, “all I have.” “Then,” said Torlonia, “take from me this dollar.” The man of rags thanked him warmly, and handed that also to the bench, which refused to receive it. “No! that must stay with you,” shouted all present. These are the people whom the traveller accuses of being unable to rise above selfish considerations; — a nation rich and glorious by nature, capable, like all nations, all men, of being degraded by slavery, capable, as are few nations, few men, of kindling into pure flame at the touch of a ray from the Sun of Truth, of Life. The two or three days that followed, the troops were marching about by detachments, followed always by the people, to the Ponte Molle, often farther. The women wept; for the habits of the Romans are so domestic, that it seemed a great thing to have their sons and lovers gone even for a few months. The English — or at least those of the illiberal, bristling nature too often met here, which casts out its porcupine quills against everything like enthusiasm (of the more generous Saxon blood I know some noble examples) — laughed at all this. They have said that this people would not fight; when the Sicilians, men and women, did so nobly, they said: “O, the Sicilians are quite unlike the Italians; you will see, when the struggle comes on in Lombardy, they cannot resist the Austrian force a moment.” I said: “That force is only physical; do not you think a sentiment can sustain them?” They replied: “All stuff and poetry; it will fade the moment their blood flows.” When the news came that the Milanese, men and women, fight as the Sicilians did, they said: “Well, the Lombards are a better race, but these Romans are good for nothing. It is a farce for a Roman to try to walk even; they never walk a mile; they will not be able to support the first day’s march of thirty miles, and not have their usual minéstra to eat either.” Now the troops were not willing to wait for the government to make the necessary arrangements for their march, so at the first night’s station — Monterosi — they did not find HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI food or bedding; yet the second night, at Civita Castellana, they were so well alive as to remain dancing and vivaing Pio Nono in the piazza till after midnight. No, Gentlemen, soul is not quite nothing, if matter be a clog upon its transports. The Americans show a better, warmer feeling than they did; the meeting in New York was of use in instructing the Americans abroad! The dinner given here on Washington’s birthday was marked by fine expressions of sentiment, and a display of talent unusual on such occasions. There was a poem from Mr. Story of Boston, which gave great pleasure; a speech by Mr. Hillard, said to be very good, and one by Rev. Mr. Hedge of Bangor, exceedingly admired for the felicity of thought and image, and the finished beauty of style. Next week we shall have more news, and I shall try to write and mention also some interesting things want of time obliges me to omit in this letter. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Spring: Margaret Fuller was preparing to leave Rome in order to conceal her swelling abdomen when she received a letter from Waldo Emerson advising her that Mrs. Lidian Emerson had objected to her staying at their home in Concord upon her return to the USA. Emerson mentioned that Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown’s home across the road remained a possibility.

April 1, Saturday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: April 1. Yesterday I passed at Ostia and Castle Fusano. A million birds sang; the woods teemed with blossoms; the sod grew green hourly over the graves of the mighty Past; the surf rushed in on a fair shore; the Tiber majestically retreated to carry inland her share from the treasures of the deep; the sea-breezes burnt my face, but revived my heart. I felt the calm of thought, the sublime hopes of the future, nature, man, — so great, though so little, — so dear, though incomplete. Returning to Rome, I find the news pronounced official, that the viceroy Ranieri has capitulated at Verona; that Italy is free, independent, and one. I trust this will prove no April-foolery, no premature news; it seems too good, too speedy a realization of hope, to have come on earth, and can only be answered in the words of the proclamation made yesterday by Pius IX.: — “The events which these two months past have seen rush after one another in rapid succession, are no human work. Woe to him who, in this wind, which shakes and tears up alike the lofty cedars and humble shrubs, hears not the voice of God! Woe to human pride, if to the fault or merit of any man whatsoever it refer these wonderful changes, instead of adoring the mysterious designs of Providence.”

In the same month, this is the sort of private correspondence that she was generating: Rome, April, 1848. The gods themselves walk on earth, here in the Italian spring. Day after day of sunny weather lights up the flowery woods and Arcadian glades. The fountains, hateful during the endless HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

rains, charm again. At Castle Turano I found heaths, as large HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI as our pear-trees, in full flower. Such wealth of beauty is irresistible, but ah! the drama of my life is very strange: the ship plunges deeper as it rises higher. You would be amazed, could you know how different is my present phase of life from that in which you knew me; but you would love me no less; it is the same planet that shows such different climes. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

April 19, Wednesday: The Illinois and Michigan Canal officially opened.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on noble sentiment and the loss of the Pope: Rome, April 19, 1848. In closing my last, I hoped to have some decisive intelligence to impart by this time, as to the fortunes of Italy. But though everything, so far, turns in her favor, there has been no decisive battle, no final stroke. It pleases me much, as the news comes from day to day, that I passed so leisurely last summer over that part of Lombardy now occupied by the opposing forces, that I have in my mind the faces both of the Lombard and Austrian leaders. A number of the present members of the Provisional Government of Milan I knew while there; they are men of twenty-eight and thirty, much more advanced in thought than the Moderates of Rome, Naples, Tuscany, who are too much fettered with a bygone state of things, and not on a par in thought, knowledge, preparation for the great future, with the rest of the civilized world at this moment. The papers that emanate from the Milanese government are far superior in tone to any that have been uttered by the other states. Their protest in favor of their rights, their addresses to the Germans at large and the countries under the dominion of Austria, are full of nobleness and thoughts sufficiently great for the use of the coming age. These addresses I translate, thinking they may not in other form reach America. “THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF MILAN TO THE GERMAN NATION. “We hail you as brothers, valiant, learned, generous Germans! “This salutation from a people just risen after a terrible struggle to self-consciousness and to the exercise of its rights, ought deeply to move your magnanimous hearts. “We deem ourselves worthy to utter that great word Brotherhood, which effaces among nations the traditions of all ancient hate, and we proffer it over the new-made graves of our fellow- citizens, who have fought and died to give us the right to proffer it without fear or shame. “We call brothers men of all nations who believe and hope in the improvement of the human family, and seek the occasion to further it; but you, especially, we call brothers, you Germans, with whom, we have in common so many noble sympathies, — the love of the arts and higher studies, the delight of noble contemplation, — with whom also we have much correspondence in our civil destinies. “With you are of first importance the interests of the great country, Germany, — with us, those of the great country, Italy. “We were induced to rise in arms against Austria, (we mean, not the people, but the government of Austria,) not only by the need HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of redeeming ourselves from the shame and grief of thirty-one years of the most abject despotism, but by a deliberate resolve to take our place upon the plane of nations, to unite with our brothers of the Peninsula, and take rank with them under the great banner raised by Pius IX., on which is written, THE INDEPENDENCE OF ITALY. “Can you blame us, independent Germans? In blaming us, you would sink beneath your history, beneath your most honored and recent declarations. “We have chased the Austrian from our soil; we shall give ourselves no repose till we have chased him from all parts of Italy. No this enterprise we are all sworn; for this fights our army enrolled in every part of the Peninsula, — an array of brothers led by the king of Sardinia, who prides himself on being the sword of Italy. “And the Austrian is not more our enemy than yours. “The Austrian — we speak still of the government, and not of the people — has always denied and contradicted the interests of the whole German nation, at the head of an assemblage of races differing in language, in customs, in institutions. When it was in his power to have corrected the errors of time and a dynastic policy, by assuming the high mission of uniting them by great moral interests, he preferred to arm one against the other, and to corrupt them all. “Fearing every noble instinct, hostile to every grand idea, devoted to the material interests of an oligarchy of princes spoiled by a senseless education, of ministers who had sold their consciences, of speculators who subjected and sacrificed everything to gold, the only aim of such a government was to sow division everywhere. What wonder if everywhere in Italy, as in Germany, it reaps harvests of hate and ignominy. Yes, of hate! To this the Austrian has condemned us, to know hate and its deep sorrows. But we are absolved in the sight of God, and by the insults which have been heaped upon us for so many years, the unwearied efforts to debase us, the destruction of our villages, the cold-blooded slaughter of our aged people, our priests, our women, our children. And you, — you shall be the first to absolve us, you, virtuous among the Germans, who certainly have shared our indignation when a venal and lying press accused us of being enemies to your great and generous nation, and we could not answer, and were constrained to devour in silence the shame of an accusation which wounded us to the heart. “We honor you, Germans! we pant to give you glorious evidence of this. And, as a prelude to the friendly relations we hope to form with your governments, we seek to alleviate as much as possible the pains of captivity to some officers and soldiers belonging to various states of the Germanic Confederation, who fought in the Austrian army. These we wish to send back to you, and are occupied by seeking the means to effect this purpose. We honor you so much, that we believe you capable of preferring to the bonds of race and language the sacred titles of misfortune and of right. “Ah! answer to our appeal, valiant, wise, and generous Germans! Clasp the hand, which we offer you with the heart of a brother and friend; hasten to disavow every appearance of complicity with a government which the massacres of Galicia and Lombardy have blotted from the list of civilized and Christian governments. It would be a beautiful thing for you to give this HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI example, which will be new in history and worthy of these miraculous times, — the example of a strong and generous people casting aside other sympathies, other interests, to answer the invitation of a regenerate people, to cheer it in its new career, obedient to the great principles of justice, of humanity, of civil and Christian brotherhood.” “THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF MILAN TO THE NATIONS SUBJECT TO THE RULE OF THE HOUSE OF AUSTRIA. “From your lands have come three armies which have brought war into ours; your speech is spoken by those hostile bands who come to us with fire and sword; nevertheless we come to you as to brothers. “The war which calls for our resistance is not your war; you are not our enemies: you are only instruments in the hand of our foe, and this foe, brothers, is common to us all. “Before God, before men, solemnly we declare it, — our only enemy is the government of Austria. “And that government which for so many years has labored to cancel, in the races it has subdued, every vestige of nationality, which takes no heed of their wants or prayers, bent only on serving miserable interests and more miserable pride, fomenting always antipathies conformably with the ancient maxim of tyrants, Divide and govern, — this government has constituted itself the adversary of every generous thought, the ally and patron of all ignoble causes, the government declared by the whole civilized world paymaster of the executioners of Galicia. “This government, after having pertinaciously resisted the legal expression of moderate desires, — after having defied with ludicrous hauteur the opinion of Europe, has found itself in its metropolis too weak to resist an insurrection of students, and has yielded, — has yielded, making an assignment on time, and throwing to you, brothers, as an alms-gift to the importunate beggar, the promise of institutions which, in these days, are held essential conditions of life for a civilized nation. “But you have not confided in this promise; for the youth of Vienna, which feels the inspiring breath of this miraculous time, is impelled on the path of progress; and therefore the Austrian government, uncertain of itself and of your dispositions, took its old part of standing still to wait for events, in the hope of turning them to its own profit. “In the midst of this it received the news of our glorious revolution, and it thought to have found in this the best way to escape from its embarrassment. First it concealed that news; then made it known piecemeal, and disfigured by hypocrisy and hatred. We were a handful of rebels thirsting for German blood. We make a war of stilettos, we wish the destruction of all Germany. But for us answers the admiration of all Italy, of all Europe, even the evidence of your own people whom we are constrained to hold prisoners or hostages, who will unanimously avow that we have shown heroic courage in the fight, heroic moderation in victory. “Yes! we have risen as one man against the Austrian government, to become again a nation, to make common cause with our Italian brothers, and the arms which we have assumed for so great an object we shall not lay down till we have attained it. Assailed by a brutal executor of brutal orders, we have combated in a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI just war; betrayed, a price set on our heads, wounded in the most vital parts, we have not transgressed the bounds of legitimate defence. The murders, the depredations of the hostile band, irritated against us by most wicked arts, have excited our horror, but never a reprisal. The soldier, his arms once laid down, was for us only an unfortunate. “But behold how the Austrian government provokes you against us, and bids you come against us as a crusade! A crusade! The parody would be ludicrous if it were not so cruel. A crusade against a people which, in the name of Christ, under a banner blessed by the Vicar of Christ, and revered by all the nations, fights to secure its indefeasible rights. “Oh! if you form against us this crusade, — we have already shown the world what a people can do to reconquer its liberty, its independence, — we will show, also, what it can do to preserve them. If, almost unarmed, we have put to flight an army inured to war, — surely, brothers, that army wanted faith in the cause for which it fought, — can we fear that our courage will grow faint after our triumph, and when aided by all our brothers of Italy? Let the Austrian government send against us its threatened battalions, they will find in our breasts a barrier more insuperable than the Alps. Everything will be a weapon to us; from every villa, from every field, from every hedge, will issue defenders of the national cause; women and children will fight like men; men will centuple their strength, their courage; and we will all perish amid the ruins of our city, before receiving foreign rule into this land which at last we call ours. “But this must not be. You, our brothers, must not permit it to be; your honor, your interests, do not permit it. Will you fight in a cause which you must feel to be absurd and wicked? You sink to the condition of hirelings, and do you not believe that the Austrian government, should it conquer us and Italy, would turn against you the arms you had furnished for the conquest? Do you not believe it would act as after the struggle with Napoleon? And are you not terrified by the idea of finding yourself in conflict with all civilized Europe, and constrained to receive, to feast as your ally, the Autocrat of Russia, that perpetual terror to the improvement and independence of Europe? It is not possible for the house of Lorraine to forget its traditions; it is not possible that it should resign itself to live tranquil in the atmosphere of Liberty. You can only constrain it by sustaining yourself, with the Germanic and Slavonian nationalities, and with this Italy, which longs only to see the nations harmonize with that resolve which she has finally taken, that she may never more be torn in pieces. “Think of us, brothers. This is for you and for us a question of life and of death; it is a question on which depends, perhaps, the peace of Europe. “For ourselves, we have already weighed the chances of the struggle, and subordinated them all to this final resolution, that we will be free and independent, with our brothers of Italy. “We hope that our words will induce you to calm counsels; if not, you will find us on the field of battle generous and loyal enemies, as now we profess ourselves your generous and loyal brothers. (Signed,) “CASATI, President, DURINI, STRIGELLI, BERETTA, GRAPPI, TURRONI, REZZONICO, CARBONERA, BORROMEO, P. LITTA, GIULINI, GUERRIERI, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI PORRO, MORRONI, AB. ANELLI, CORRENTI, Sec.-Gen.” These are the names of men whose hearts glow with that generous ardor, the noble product of difficult times. Into their hearts flows wisdom from on high, — thoughts great, magnanimous, brotherly. They may not all remain true to this high vocation, but, at any rate, they will have lived a period of true life. I knew some of these men when in Lombardy; of old aristocratic families, with all the refinement of inheritance and education, they are thoroughly pervaded by principles of a genuine democracy of brotherhood and justice. In the flower of their age, they have before them a long career of the noblest usefulness, if this era follows up its present promise, and they are faithful to their present creed, and ready to improve and extend it. Every day produces these remarkable documents. So many years as we have been suffocated and poisoned by the atmosphere of falsehood in official papers, how refreshing is the tone of noble sentiment in Lamartine! What a real wisdom and pure dignity in the letter of Béranger! He was always absolutely true, — an oasis in the pestilential desert of Humbug; but the present time allowed him a fine occasion. The Poles have also made noble manifestations. Their great poet, Adam Mickiewicz, has been here to enroll the Italian Poles, publish the declaration of faith in which they hope to re-enter and re-establish their country, and receive the Pope’s benediction on their banner. In their declaration of faith are found these three articles: — “Every one of the nation a citizen, — every citizen equal in rights and before authorities. “To the Jew, our elder brother, respect, brotherhood, aid on the way to his eternal and terrestrial good, entire equality in political and civil rights. “To the companion of life, woman, citizenship, entire equality of rights.” This last expression of just thought the Poles ought to initiate, for what other nation has had such truly heroic women? Women indeed, — not children, servants, or playthings. Mickiewicz, with the squadron that accompanied him from Rome, was received with the greatest enthusiasm at Florence. Deputations from the clubs and journals went to his hotel and escorted him to the Piazza del Gran Dúca, where, amid an immense concourse of people, some good speeches were made. A Florentine, with a generous forgetfulness of national vanity, addressed him as the Dante of Poland, who, more fortunate than the great bard and seer of Italy, was likely to return to his country to reap the harvest of the seed he had sown. “O Dante of Poland! who, like our Alighieri, hast received from Heaven sovereign genius, divine song, but from earth sufferings and exile, — more happy than our Alighieri, thou hast reacquired a country; already thou art meditating on the sacred harp the patriotic hymn of restoration and of victory. The pilgrims of Poland have become the warriors of their nation. Long live Poland, and the brotherhood of nations!” When this address was finished, the great poet appeared on the balcony to answer. The people received him with a tumult of applause, followed by a profound silence, as they anxiously HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI awaited his voice. Those who are acquainted with the powerful eloquence, the magnetism, of Mickiewicz as an orator, will not be surprised at the effect produced by this speech, though delivered in a foreign language. It is the force of truth, the great vitality of his presence, that loads his words with such electric power. He spoke as follows: — “People of Tuscany! Friends! Brothers! We receive your shouts of sympathy in the name of Poland; not for us, but for our country. Our country, though distant, claims from you this sympathy by its long martyrdom. The glory of Poland, its only glory, truly Christian, is to have suffered more than all the nations. In other countries the goodness, the generosity of heart, of some sovereigns protected the people; as yours has enjoyed the dawn of the era now coming, under the protection of your excellent prince. [Viva Leopold II.!] But conquered Poland, slave and victim, of sovereigns who were her sworn enemies and executioners, — Poland, abandoned by the governments and the nations, lay in agony on her solitary Golgotha. She was believed slain, dead, burred. ‘We have slain her,’ shouted the despots; ‘she is dead!’ [No, no! long live Poland!] ‘The dead cannot rise again,’ replied the diplomatists; ‘we may now be tranquil.’ [A universal shudder of feeling in the crowd.] There came a moment in which the world doubted of the mercy and justice of the Omnipotent. There was a moment in which the nations thought that the earth might be for ever abandoned by God, and condemned to the rule of the demon, its ancient lord. The nations forgot that Jesus Christ came down from heaven to give liberty and peace to the earth. The nations had forgotten all this. But God is just. The voice of Pius IX. roused Italy. [Long live Pius IX.!] The people of Paris have driven out the great traitor against the cause of the nations. [Bravo! Viva the people of Paris!] Very soon will be heard the voice of Poland. Poland will rise again! [Yes, yes! Poland will rise again!] Poland will call to life all the Slavonic races, — the Croats, the Dalmatians, the Bohemians, the Moravians, the Illyrians. These will form the bulwark against the tyrant of the North. [Great applause.] They will close for ever the way against the barbarians of the North, — destroyers of liberty and of civilization. Poland is called to do more yet: Poland, as crucified nation, is risen again, and called to serve her sister nations. The will of God is, that Christianity should become in Poland, and through Poland elsewhere, no more a dead letter of the law, but the living law of states and civil associations; — [Great applause;] — that Christianity should be manifested by acts, the sacrifices of generosity and liberality. This Christianity is not new to you, Florentines; your ancient republic knew and has acted upon it: it is time that the same spirit should make to itself a larger sphere. The will of God is that the nations should act towards one another as neighbors, — as brothers. [A tumult of applause.] And you, Tuscans, have to-day done an act of Christian brotherhood. Receiving thus foreign, unknown pilgrims, who go to defy the greatest powers of the earth, you have in us saluted only what is in us of spiritual and immortal, — our faith and our patriotism. [Applause.] We thank you; and we will now go into the church to thank God.” “All the people then followed the Poles to the church of Santa Cróce, where was sung the Benedictus Dominus, and amid the memorials of the greatness of Italy collected in that temple was forged HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI more strongly the chain of sympathy and of union between two nations, sisters in misfortune and in glory.” This speech and its reception, literally translated from the journal of the day, show how pleasant it is on great occasions to be brought in contact with this people, so full of natural eloquence and of lively sensibility to what is great and beautiful. It is a glorious time too for the exiles who return, and reap even a momentary fruit of their long sorrows. Mazzini has been able to return from his seventeen years’ exile, during which there was no hour, night or day, that the thought of Italy was banished from his heart, — no possible effort that he did not make to achieve the emancipation of his people, and with it the progress of mankind. He returns, like Wordsworth’s great man, “to see what he foresaw.” He will see his predictions accomplishing yet for a long time, for Mazzini has a mind far in advance of his times in general, and his nation in particular, — a mind that will be best revered and understood when the “illustrious Gioberti” shall be remembered as a pompous verbose charlatan, with just talent enough to catch the echo from the advancing wave of his day, but without any true sight of the wants of man at this epoch. And yet Mazzini sees not all: he aims at political emancipation; but he sees not, perhaps would deny, the bearing of some events, which even now begin to work their way. Of this, more anon; but not to-day, nor in the small print of the Tribune. Suffice it to say, I allude to that of which the cry of Communism, the systems of Fourier, &c., are but forerunners. Mazzini sees much already, — at Milan, where he is, he has probably this day received the intelligence of the accomplishment of his foresight, implied in his letter to the Pope, which angered Italy by what was thought its tone of irreverence and doubt, some six months since. To-day is the 7th of May, for I had thrown aside this letter, begun the 19th of April, from a sense that there was something coming that would supersede what was then to say. This something has appeared in a form that will cause deep sadness to good hearts everywhere. Good and loving hearts, that long for a human form which they can revere, will be unprepared and for a time must suffer much from the final dereliction of Pius IX. to the cause of freedom, progress, and of the war. He was a fair image, and men went nigh to idolize it; this they can do no more, though they may be able to find excuse for his feebleness, love his good heart no less than before, and draw instruction from the causes that have produced his failure, more valuable than his success would have been. Pius IX., no one can doubt who has looked on him, has a good and pure heart; but it needed also, not only a strong, but a great mind, “To comprehend his trust, and to the same Keep faithful, with a singleness of aim.” A highly esteemed friend in the United States wrote to express distaste to some observations in a letter of mine to the Tribune on first seeing the Pontiff a year ago, observing, “To say that he had not the expression of great intellect was uncalled for” Alas! far from it; it was an observation that rose inevitably on knowing something of the task before Pius IX., and the hopes he had excited. The problem he had to solve was one of such HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI difficulty, that only one of those minds, the rare product of ages for the redemption of mankind, could be equal to its solution. The question that inevitably rose on seeing him was, “Is he such a one?” The answer was immediately negative. But at the same time, he had such an aspect of true benevolence and piety, that a hope arose that Heaven would act through him, and impel him to measures wise beyond his knowledge. This hope was confirmed by the calmness he showed at the time of the conspiracy of July, and the occupation of Ferrara by the Austrians. Tales were told of simple wisdom, of instinct, which he obeyed in opposition to the counsels of all his Cardinals. Everything went on well for a time. But tokens of indubitable weakness were shown by the Pope in early acts of the winter, in the removal of a censor at the suggestion of others, in his speech, to the Consistory, in his answer to the first address of the Council. In these he declared that, when there was conflict between the priest and the man, he always meant to be the priest; and that he preferred the wisdom of the past to that of the future. Still, times went on bending his predeterminations to the call of the moment. He acted wiselier than he intended; as, for instance, three weeks after declaring he would not give a constitution to his people, he gave it, — a sop to Cerberus, indeed, — a poor vamped-up thing that will by and by have to give place to something more legitimate, but which served its purpose at the time as declaration of rights for the people. When the news of the revolution of Vienna arrived, the Pope himself cried Viva Pio Nono! and this ebullition of truth in one so humble, though opposed to his formal declarations, was received by his people with that immediate assent which truth commands. The revolution of Lombardy followed. The troops of the line were sent thither; the volunteers rushed to accompany them. In the streets of Rome was read the proclamation of Charles Albert, in which he styles himself the servant of Italy and of Pius IX. The priests preached the war, and justly, as a crusade; the Pope blessed their banners. Nobody dreamed, or had cause to dream, that these movements had not his full sympathy; and his name was in every form invoked as the chosen instrument of God to inspire Italy to throw off the oppressive yoke of the foreigner, and recover her rights in the civilized world. At the same time, however, the Pope was seen to act with great blindness in the affair of the Jesuits. The other states of Italy drove them out by main force, resolved not to have in the midst of the war a foe and spy in the camp. Rome wished to do the same, but the Pope rose in their defence. He talked as if they were assailed as a religious body, when he could not fail, like everybody else, to be aware that they were dreaded and hated solely as agents of despotism. He demanded that they should be assailed only by legal means, when none such were available. The end was in half-measures, always the worst possible. He would not entirely yield, and the people would not at all. The Order was ostensibly dissolved; but great part of the Jesuits really remain here in disguise, a constant source of irritation and mischief, which, if still greater difficulties had not arisen, would of itself have created enough. Meanwhile, in the earnestness of the clergy about the pretended loss of the head of St. Andrew, in the ceremonies of the holy week, which at this juncture excited no real interest, was much matter for thought HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to the calm observer as to the restlessness of the new wine, the old bottles being heard to crack on every side, and hour by hour. Thus affairs went on from day to day, — the Pope kissing the foot of the brazen Jupiter and blessing palms of straw at St. Peter’s; the Circolo Romano erecting itself into a kind of Jacobin Club, dictating programmes for an Italian Diet-General, and choosing committees to provide for the expenses of the war; the Civic Guard arresting people who tried to make mobs as if famishing, and, being searched, were found well provided both with arms and money; the ministry at their wits’ end, with their trunks packed up ready to be off at a moment’s warning, — when the report, it is not yet known whether true or false, that one of the Roman Civic Guard, a well-known artist engaged in the war of Lombardy, had been taken and hung by the Austrians as a brigand, roused the people to a sense of the position of their friends, and they went to the Pope to demand that he should take a decisive stand, and declare war against the Austrians. The Pope summoned, a consistory; the people waited anxiously, for expressions of his were reported, as if the troops ought not to have thought of leaving the frontier, while every man, woman, and child in Rome knew, and every letter and bulletin declared, that all their thought was to render active aid to the cause of Italian independence. This anxious doubt, however, had not prepared at all for the excess to which they were to be disappointed. The speech of the Pope declared, that he had never any thought of the great results which had followed his actions; that he had only intended local reforms, such as had previously been suggested by the potentates of Europe; that he regretted the misuse which had been made of his name; and wound up by lamenting over the war, — dear to every Italian heart as the best and holiest cause in which for ages they had been called to embark their hopes, — as if it was something offensive to the spirit of religion, and which he would fain see hushed up, and its motives smoothed out and ironed over. A momentary stupefaction followed this astounding performance, succeeded by a passion of indignation, in which the words traitor and imbecile were associated with the name that had been so dear to his people. This again yielded to a settled grief: they felt that he was betrayed, but no traitor; timid and weak, but still a sovereign whom they had adored, and a man who had brought them much good, which could not be quite destroyed by his wishing to disown it. Even of this fact they had no time to stop and think; the necessity was too imminent of obviating the worst consequences of this ill; and the first thought was to prevent the news leaving Rome, to dishearten the provinces and army, before they had tried to persuade the Pontiff to wiser resolves, or, if this could not be, to supersede his power. I cannot repress my admiration at the gentleness, clearness, and good sense with which the Roman people acted under these most difficult circumstances. It was astonishing to see the clear understanding which animated the crowd, as one man, and the decision with which they acted to effect their purpose. Wonderfully has this people been developed within a year! The Pope, besieged by deputations, who mildly but firmly showed him that, if he persisted, the temporal power must be placed in other hands, his ears filled with reports of Cardinals, “such venerable persons,” as he pathetically styles them, would not HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI yield in spirit, though compelled to in act. After two days’ struggle, he was obliged to place the power in the hands of the persons most opposed to him, and nominally acquiesce in their proceedings, while in his second proclamation, very touching from the sweetness of its tone, he shows a fixed misunderstanding of the cause at issue, which leaves no hope of his ever again being more than a name or an effigy in their affairs. His people were much affected, and entirely laid aside their anger, but they would not be blinded as to the truth. While gladly returning to their accustomed habits of affectionate homage toward the Pontiff, their unanimous sense and resolve is thus expressed in an able pamphlet of the day, such as in every respect would have been deemed impossible to the Rome of 1847: — “From the last allocution of Pius result two facts of extreme gravity; — the entire separation between the spiritual and temporal power, and the express refusal of the Pontiff to be chief of an Italian Republic. But far from drawing hence reason for discouragement and grief, who looks well at the destiny of Italy may bless Providence, which breaks or changes the instrument when the work is completed, and by secret and inscrutable ways conducts us to the fulfilment of our desires and of our hopes. “If Pius IX. refuses, the Italian people does not therefore draw back. Nothing remains to the free people of Italy, except to unite in one constitutional kingdom, founded on the largest basis; and if the chief who, by our assemblies, shall be called to the highest honor, either declines or does not answer worthily, the people will take care of itself. “Italians! down with all emblems of private and partial interests. Let us unite under one single banner, the tricolor, and if he who has carried it bravely thus far lets it fall from his hand, we will take it one from the other, twenty-four millions of us, and, till the last of us shall have perished under the banner of our redemption, the stranger shall not return into Italy. “Viva Italy! viva the Italian people!”83 These events make indeed a crisis. The work begun by Napoleon is finished. There will never more be really a Pope, but only the effigy or simulacrum of one. The loss of Pius IX. is for the moment a great one. His name had real moral weight, — was a trumpet appeal to sentiment. It is not the same with any man that is left. There is not one that can be truly a leader in the Roman dominion, not one who has even great intellectual weight. The responsibility of events now lies wholly with the people, and that wave of thought which has begun to pervade them. Sovereigns and statesmen will go where they are carried; it is probable power will be changed continually from, hand to hand, and government become, to all intents and purposes, representative. Italy needs now quite to throw aside her stupid king of Naples, who hangs like a dead weight on her movements. The king of Sardinia and the Grand Duke of Tuscany will be trusted while they keep their present course; but who can feel sure of any sovereign, now that Louis Philippe has shown himself 83. Close of “A Comment by Pio Angelo Fierortino on the Allocution of Pius IX. spoken in the Secret Consistory of 29th April, 1848,” dated Italy, 30th April, 1st year of the Redemption of Italy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI so mad and Pius IX. so blind? It seems as if fate was at work to bewilder and cast down the dignities of the world and democratize society at a blow. In Rome there is now no anchor except the good sense of the people. It seems impossible that collision should not arise between him who retains the name but not the place of sovereign, and the provisional government which calls itself a ministry. The Count Mamiani, its new head, is a man of reputation as a writer, but untried as yet as a leader or a statesman. Should agitations arise, the Pope can no longer calm them by one of his fatherly looks. All lies in the future; and our best hope must be that the Power which has begun so great a work will find due means to end it, and make the year 1850 a year of true jubilee to Italy; a year not merely of pomps and tributes, but of recognized rights and intelligent joys; a year of real peace, — peace, founded not on compromise and the lying etiquettes of diplomacy, but on truth and justice. Then this sad disappointment in Pius IX. may be forgotten, or, while all that was lovely and generous in his life is prized and reverenced, deep instruction may be drawn from his errors as to the inevitable dangers of a priestly or a princely environment, and a higher knowledge may elevate a nobler commonwealth than the world has yet known. Hoping this era, I remain at present here. Should my hopes be dashed to the ground, it will not change my faith, but the struggle for its manifestation is to me of vital interest. My friends write to urge my return; they talk of our country as the land of the future. It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes, which gave all of hope with which I can sympathize for that future, is more alive here at present than in America. My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity, a nobler spirit is struggling, — a spirit which cheers and animates mine. I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood. This is what makes my America. I do not deeply distrust my country. She is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirit of our fathers flames no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes. It will not be so long; bodies cannot live when the soul gets too overgrown with gluttony and falsehood. But it is not the making a President out of the Mexican war that would make me wish to come back. Here things are before my eyes worth recording, and, if I cannot help this work, I would gladly be its historian. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

April 29, Saturday: In Italy, after the rioting, Margaret Fuller visited Monte Cavallo in Gaeta to see the “broken windows and burnt door” of the papal palace. She heard children at play, chanting “Morte al Papa.”

The death of the 1st child of Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton and Rosina Doyle Wheeler Bulwer, Lady Emily Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

May 13, Saturday: John Mitchel was charged under the new Treason Felony Act and taken to Dublin’s Newgate prison to await trial. IRELAND

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: May 13. Returning from a little tour in the Alban Mount, where everything looks so glorious this glorious spring, I find a temporary quiet. The Pope’s brothers have come to sympathize with him; the crowd sighs over what he has done, presents him with great bouquets of flowers, and reads anxiously the news from the north and the proclamations of the new ministry. Meanwhile the nightingales sing; every tree and plant is in flower, and the sun and moon shine as if paradise were already re-established on earth. I go to one of the villas to dream it is so, beneath the pale light of the stars.

September 4, Monday: Mary Rotch died on this evening at the age of 70, bequeathing $60,000 of the family fortune and the New Bedford home in which they had been living with its furnishings to her companion Mary Gifford, and the balance to her lawyer Thomas Dawes Eliot (her surviving brother William Rotch, Jr. and sister Mrs. Elizabeth Rodman were both already very wealthy; Margaret Fuller, in Italy with her newborn Angelino, had been hoping to be mentioned in this will, needing that some of this old whaling money would be diverted her way in the form of an annuity — but by the very nature of these matters regardless of how much money has accumulated there’s never enough to satisfice each and every one of the hopers).

September 5, Tuesday: In Rieti, Italy, Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli was born to Sarah Margaret Fuller, the marchésa d’Ossoli (but, possibly out of wedlock): “Nino,” “Angelino.” In Italy then as now, it was possible to give the baby its father’s name and title despite the fact that the parents were not married. A complex legal document was prepared by the father, in Latin on parchment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI October 25, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics” was published on Broadway in Manhattan by G.P. Putnam (bearing the date October 21st).

A FABLE FOR CRITICS

He had farted our nation’s first attempt at literary self-examination!84

In this curious piece he satirized the Margaret Fuller who had had the temerity to remark on how “stereotyped” Lowell’s attempts at poetry were, and who had predicted (accurately enough, it now seems!) that “posterity would not remember him” for his literary endeavors. In this curious piece Lowell also satirized Henry Thoreau

84. His was a busy pen in this year of 1848: in one year appeared his POEMS: SECOND SERIES, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL, and the first series of THE BIGELOW PAPERS. It really is too bad that none of this work has survived the test of time by remaining highly regarded! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI and Ellery Channing, depicting them as Waldo Emerson impersonators:85 • His dismissal of Bronson Alcott as a writer who does follow the first rule of writing –that to learn to write one must write and write and write– but who will never be able to write intelligibly because he lives on some other planet:

Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato’s, when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening; So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis; And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better — Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter He seems piling words, but there‘s royal dust hid In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid. While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night, And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write; In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

• His uncritical adulation of Nathaniel Hawthorne: There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; ’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek— He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck; When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, So, to fill out her model, a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared, And she could not have hit a more excellent plan For making him fully and perfectly man.

• His dismissal of Edgar Allan Poe as a man whose intellect has overruled his affect:1 There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,... HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

• His abrupt categorical trashing of “Miranda” (Margaret Fuller): But here comes Miranda. Zeus! where shall I flee to? She has such a penchant for bothering me, too! She always keeps asking if I don't observe a Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva. ... She will take an old notion and make it her own, By saying it o'er in her sibylline tone; Or persuade you 't is something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; And she may well defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. ... Here Miranda came up and said: Phœbus, you know That the infinite soul has its infinite woe, As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl, Since the day I was born, with the infinite soul. • His dismissal of Waldo Emerson as a man who worships himself in place of God: All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got To I don’t (nor do they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, ’t is odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. ’T is refreshing to old-fashioned people like me To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, In whose mind all creation is duly respected As parts of himself — just a little projected; And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun, A convert to — nothing but Emerson. • His dismissal of Henry Thoreau as a low-rent Waldo clone: There comes [Thoreau], for instance; to see him’s rare sport, Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short; How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face, To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace! He follows as close as a stick to a rocket, His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket. Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone? Besides ’t is no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,— ______has picked up all the windfalls before.

85.The year 1848 was to be, according to his biographers, his annus mirabilis, for in the course of the year a total of four volumes would see publication: not only his A FABLE FOR CRITICS but also his POEMS: SECOND SERIES, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL, and the first series of THE BIGELOW PAPERS. In one of these volumes he managed to accurately anticipate, some 14 years in advance, what would be Emerson’s attitude toward the Civil War: Ez fer the war, I go agin it,— I mean to say I kind o’ du,— Thet is, I mean thet, bein’ in it, The best way wuz to fight it thru; Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart,— But civlyzation doos git forrid Sometimes upon a powder-cart. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

READER! walk up at once (it will soon be too late) and buy at a perfectly ruinous rate A FABLE FOR CRITICS: OR, BETTER,

(I like, as a thing that the reader’s first fancy may strike, an old-fashioned title-page, such as presents a tabular view of the volume’s contents)

A GLANCE

AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES (Mrs. Malaprop’s word)

FROM THE TUB OF DIOGENES; A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY, THAT IS, A SERIES OF JOKES BY A WONDERFUL QUIZ

who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace, on the top of the tub. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse the Lord knows, Is some of it pr— No, ’t is not even prose; I’m speaking of metres; some poems have welled From those rare depths of soul that have ne’er been excelled; They‘re not epics, but that does n’t matter a pin, In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak, If you‘ve once found the way, you‘ve achieved the grand stroke; In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, But thrown in a heap with a crush and a clatter; Now it is not one thing nor another alone Makes a poem, but rather the general tone, The something pervading, uniting the whole, The before unconceived, unconceivable soul, So that just in removing this trifle or that, you Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue; Roots, wood, bark, and leaves, singly perfect may be, But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don’t make a tree. “But, to come back to Emerson, (whom by the way, I believe we left waiting,) — his is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t’ other the Exchange; He seems, to my thinking, (although I‘m afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made,) A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist; All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, ’t is odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. ’T is refreshing to old-fashioned people like me, To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, In whose mind all creation is duly respected As parts of himself — just a little projected; And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun, A convert to — nothing but Emerson. So perfect a balance there is in his head, That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead; Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort, He looks at as merely ideas; in short, As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, Of such vast extent that our earth’s a mere dab in it; Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her, Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer; You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion, With the quiet precision of science he‘ll sort ’em, But you can’t help suspecting the whole a post mortem. “There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style, Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle; To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer, Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer; He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier, If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar; That he’s more of a man you might say of the one, Of the other he’s more of an Emerson; C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb, — E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one’s two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek; C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass, — E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues, And rims common-sense things with mystical hues, — E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly around him with sharp common sense; HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI C. shows you how every-day matters unite With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night, — While E., in a plain, preternatural way, Makes mysteries matters of mere every day; C. draws all his characters quite à la Fuseli, — Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews; E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe, And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear; — To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords The design of a white marble statue in words. C. labors to get at the centre, and then Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men; E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted, And, given himself, has whatever is wanted. “He has imitators in scores, who omit No part of the man but his wisdom and wit, — Who go carefully o’er the sky-blue of his brain, And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again; If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities, As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute, While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it. “There comes, for instance; to see him’s rare sport, Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short; How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face, To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace He follows as close as a stick to a rocket, His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket. Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone? Besides, ’t is no use, you’ll not find e’en a core, — E. has picked up all the windfalls before. They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em, His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em When they send him a dishfull, and ask him to try ’em, He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em; He wonders why ’t is there are none such his trees on, And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato’s, when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening; So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis; And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better — Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter He seems piling words, but there‘s royal dust hid In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid. While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night, And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write; In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

The famous “Water Celebration” on Boston Common, as the first of Loammi Baldwin III’s upland water reached the Boston metropolitan area from the new Cochituate System. A jet of Lake Cochituate water rose from the fountain in Boston’s Frog Pond. For the next two generations Boston would have an adequate supply of clean water.86

James Pierson Beckwourth and his party of travelers arrived at Los Angeles, California. From there they would continue north to Monterey, which at the time was the capital of California. Jim would take on a job as a courier for a ranch near the present-day city of Santa Maria, north of Los Angeles. On his way there he would come across the remains of a massacre, of the Reed family who had been living in the old Mission of San Miguel, and would lead a posse that would apprehend the murderers.

Niles’ Register published an account of the Women’s Rights Convention that had occurred in Rochester, New York:

WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION. A Convention appointed to be held in Rochester, (N.Y.) to advocate Women's Rights, was organized some weeks ago, in that city in the Unitarian Church. There was quite a respectable attendance, the body of the church being pretty well filled, mostly with females, some of whom seemed to have deeply at heart the professed objects of the meeting, but many more seemed to be drawn thither by motives of curiosity. Soon after the appointed hour the committee (all ladies) reported the following list of officers, who were duly appointed Mrs. ABIGAIL BUSH, President. Mrs. LAURA MURRAY, Vice President. Mrs. CATHARINE A. T. STEBBENS, } Mrs. SARAH L. HALLOWELL, }Sec’taries. Mrs. MARY H. HALLOWELL, }

The officers being appointed, Mr. William C. Nell proposed to read an essay upon Woman's Rights, but the President said it was not then in order to do so, and one of the Secretaries commenced

86. These Framingham MA reservoirs have not been tapped by Boston since 1931. Pollution forced the metropolis to turn first to the Wachusett Reservoir, and then to the Quabban Reservoir some 65 miles inland. The Sudbury Reservoirs are, however, on a standby basis to be utilized in times of emergency, after heavy chlorination. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI reading the minutes of the preliminary meeting, but in so low a tone that she could not be heard by only a few {sic}, when a gentleman in a remote part of the house said the proceedings, to be made interesting, should be understood by all. After one or two more interruptions, Lucretia Mott, who was present, said it was not a fitting excuse for a woman to make that her voice could not be heard. The call for the Secretary to read louder was right, and, with sufficient practice, women could and would make themselves heard in a public assembly. Finally, Mrs. Burtis read the minutes, and they were adopted. The President then called upon Mr. Nell to read his essay, which he did. After the reading, Lucretia Mott stated her objections to a portion of the paper read. She did not believe in holding up woman as a superior to man, because it was untrue -- she was only an equal. When invested with power woman as well as man was tyrannical. Mr. Nell briefly replied. A letter was read from Gerritt Smith, assigning his bodily infirmities and private business as reasons for his non- attendance, but concurring in the objects sought to be accomplished. Mrs. Elizabeth Stanton {Elizabeth Cady Stanton}, of Seneca Falls, read the declaration adopted at the meeting held in that village, and the discussion of this document appeared to be the principal business of the forenoon session. The President having called for remarks for and against the sentiments it embodied, one gentleman said his objection was that there was too much truth in it! Mr. Burtis approved of the declaration, and was glad to see the women asserting their rights. Mr. Colton, of New Haven, briefly stated his objections, which appeared to be of a general nature. Lucretia Mott wished to know what the speaker considered the proper sphere of woman. It was not strange that he thought she should not be in the pulpit, he having been educated in New Haven, Connecticut. He should read his Bible again, as he may have pinned his faith upon the sleeve of some minister. W.C. Bloss, Esq. made some very humorous remarks, which were received with much applause. He then went on to show the different tastes of male and female children, and inquired whether these were not in accordance with the instincts of nature. Mrs. Sanford, of Michigan, made a forcible and eloquent address, in which she contended for the right of women to exercise the elective franchise, and their eligibility to office. It might, she said, be for women to break the bands of slavery, and she urged them to nerve for the effort. One of the consequences of the proposed enfranchisement of women would be less extravagance and waste in dress — fashion would be neglected. They could be as daughters, as wives, and as mothers, dutiful, gentle, and submissive, even if we hang the domestic wreath upon the eagle's talons! Her remarks called forth considerable applause. At the suggestion of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth McClintock read a poetical composition, by Mrs. Chapman, of Boston. Mr. Cutting objected to that part of the declaration which held out the idea that voting was the first right of women. He regarded education as the first right, and it was the peculiar province of women to teach. If mothers teach their sons, wives their husbands, and sisters their brothers, how to vote, it was all the same as though they voted themselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Mr. Sanford deprecated the occupation of so much time by the men. He hoped the ladies would assert their rights. Frederick Douglass went for equal rights of all classes, without regard to sex. After he had finished, the Convention adjourned till two o'clock P.M. When we went in at the afternoon session the house was crowded, and Mrs. Owen was reading a report. Several resolutions were adopted, of which the following was one “That, as obedience and submission to the husband is taught and enjoined in the marriage service, we will hereafter use our endeavors to have such a law entirely abrogated.” Lucretia Mott objected to them, as being too milk and water. She was not only for declaring, but for taking and maintaining her rights, and something more than these tame resolutions was necessary. In the course of her remarks, Lucretia said she was not a theologian, but yet she believed that people were as much inspired now as in former times. Mrs. Roberts made a report in relation to the condition of females who are employed as seamstresses in the city, setting forth the hardships under which they labor, &c. She said they were compelled to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day to earn from thirty-one to thirty-eight cents; that they seldom earned fifty cents, or, if they did, it was by the most extreme exertion. It appeared that those who can endure the most are only able to save some fifty cents per week beyond their board. Mrs. Stanton offered another resolution, asserting that it is duty of those who believe females are oppressed in their wages to pay them better prices. Lucretia Mott thought little good would be done by efforts to improve the physical condition of woman. The axe must be laid to the root of the corrupt tree. A radical change must be effected in her civil condition before much improvement would be visible. “Overturn, overture {sic}, overturn,” must be the motto, until these changes are effected, until all classes are levelled to the same common platform of equality. A slave, however treated, cannot be materially bettered until made free. It is the nature of slavery to debase. Just so it is with women; and, so long as the present usages of society prevailed, nothing would be done by passing resolutions. Mrs. Stanton offered another resolution, asserting that it is the duty of women, whatever their complexion, to assume as soon as possible their true position of equality, in the social circle, in church and in State. Other resolutions were also offered, when Mrs. Owen proposed the appointment of a committee to form a society for redressing the wrongs and hardships of laboring females, but Lucretia Mott thought this was foreign to the objects of the Convention. This has been a remarkable Convention. It was composed of those holding to some one of the various “isms” of the day, and some, we should think, who embraced them all. The only practical good proposed -- the adoption of measures for the relief and amelioration of females -- was almost scouted by the leading ones composing the meeting. The great effort seemed to be to bring out some few, impracticable, absurd, and ridiculous propositions, and the greater their absurdity the better. In short, it was a regular “emeute” of a congregation of females, gathered from various quarters, who seem to be really in earnest in their aim at revolution, and who evince entire confidence HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI that “the day of their deliverance” is at hand. Verily, this is a “progressive” era. -- “Rochester Democrat.”

November 16, Thursday: The Reverend Jared Sparks wrote to the historian Elizabeth F. Ellett, expressing a trepidation which has emphatically been repudiated in the mass of hagiographic invention which has been allowed to accumulate in regard to Thoreau: Traditions have generally a foundation in truth, but they derive numerous accessions in a little time from ignorance, credulity, and a love of the marvellous.

Margaret Fuller wrote to her mother: Rome, November 16, 1848. I am again in Rome, situated for the first time entirely to my mind. I have only one room, but large; and everything about the bed so gracefully and adroitly disposed that it makes a beautiful parlor, — and of course I pay much less. I have the sun all day, and an excellent chimney. It is very high, and has pure air and the most beautiful view all around imaginable. Add, that I am with the dearest, delightful old couple one can imagine, — quick, prompt, and kind, sensible and contented. Having no children, they like to regard me and the Prussian sculptor, my neighbor, as such; yet are too delicate and too busy ever to intrude. In the attic dwells a priest, who insists on making my fire when Antonia is away. To be sure, he pays himself for his trouble by asking a great many questions.... You cannot conceive the enchantment of this place. So much I suffered here last January and February, I thought myself a little weaned; but returning, my heart swelled even to tears with the cry of the poet, “O Rome, my country, city of the soul!” Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. Warned, however, by the last winter, I dared not rent my lodgings for the year. I hope I am acclimated. I have been through what is called the grape-cure, much more charming, certainly, than the water-cure. At present I am very well, but, alas! because I have gone to bed early, and done very little. I do not know if I can maintain any labor. As to my life, I think it is not the will of Heaven it should terminate very soon. I have had another strange escape. I had taken passage in the diligence to come to Rome; two rivers were to be passed, the Turano and the Tiber, but passed by good bridges, and a road excellent when not broken unexpectedly by torrents from the mountains. The diligence sets out between three and four in the morning, long before light. The director sent me word that the Marchioness Crispoldi had taken for herself and family a coach extraordinary, which would start two hours later, and that I could have a place in that if I liked; so I accepted. The weather had been beautiful, but on the eve of the day fixed for my departure, the wind rose, and the rain fell in torrents. I observed that the river, which passed my window, was much swollen, and rushed with great violence. In the night I heard its voice still stronger, and felt glad I had not to set out in the dark. I rose at twilight and was expecting my carriage, and wondering at its delay, when I heard that the great diligence, several miles below, had been seized by a torrent; HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the horses were up to their necks in water, before any one dreamed of danger. The postilion called on all the saints, and threw himself into the water. The door of the diligence could not be opened, and the passengers forced themselves, one after another, into the cold water; it was dark too. Had I been there, I had fared ill. A pair of strong men were ill after it, though all escaped with life. For several days there was no going to Rome; but at last we set forth in two great diligences, with all the horses of the route. For many miles the mountains and ravines were covered with snow; I seemed to have returned to my own country and climate. Few miles were passed before the conductor injured his leg under the wheel, and I had the pain of seeing him suffer all the way, while “Blood of Jesus!” and “Souls in Purgatory!” was the mildest beginning of an answer to the jeers of the postilions upon his paleness. We stopped at a miserable osteria, in whose cellar we found a magnificent relic of Cyclopean architecture, — as indeed in Italy one is paid at every step for discomfort and danger, by some precious subject of thought. We proceeded very slowly, and reached just at night a solitary little inn which marks the site of the ancient home of the Sabine virgins, snatched away to become the mothers of Rome. We were there saluted with, the news that the Tiber also had overflowed its banks, and it was very doubtful if we could pass. But what else to do? There were no accommodations in the house for thirty people, or even for three; and to sleep in the carriages, in that wet air of the marshes, was a more certain danger than to attempt the passage. So we set forth; the moon, almost at the full, smiling sadly on the ancient grandeurs half draped in mist, and anon drawing over her face a thin white veil. As we approached the Tiber, the towers and domes of Rome could be seen, like a cloud lying low on the horizon. The road and the meadows, alike under water, Jay between us and it, one sheet of silver. The horses entered; they behaved nobly. We proceeded, every moment uncertain if the water would not become deep; but the scene was beautiful, and I enjoyed it highly. I have never yet felt afraid, when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension. At last we entered the gate; the diligence stopping to be examined, I walked to the gate of Villa Ludovisi, and saw its rich shrubberies of myrtle, so pale and eloquent in the moonlight.... My dear friend, Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love; a Contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday she came in her holiday dress, a beautiful corset of red silk, richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, on the other a pair of live chickens to be eaten by me for her sake (“per amore mio”), and wanted no present, no reward: it was, as she said, “for the honor and pleasure of her acquaintance.” The old father of the family never met me but he took off his hat, and said, “Madame, it is to me a consolation to see you.” Are there not sweet flowers of affection in life, glorious moments, great thoughts? Why must they be so dearly paid for? Many Americans have shown me great and thoughtful kindness and none more so than William Story and his wife. They are now in Florence, but may return. I do not know whether I shall stay here or not: I shall be guided much by the state of my health. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI All is quieted now in Rome. Late at night the Pope had to yield, but not till the door of his palace was half burned, and his confessor killed. This man, Parma, provoked his fate by firing on the people from a window. It seems the Pope never gave order to fire; his guard acted from a sudden impulse of their own. The new ministry chosen are little inclined to accept. It is almost impossible for any one to act, unless the Pope is stripped of his temporal power, and the hour for that is not yet quite ripe; though they talk more and more of proclaiming the Republic, and even of calling to Rome my friend Mazzini. If I came home at this moment, I should feel as if forced to leave my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for. If I do come in this way, all I can promise is to plague other people as little as possible. My own plans and desires will be postponed to another world. Do not feel anxious about me. Some higher Power leads me through strange, dark, thorny paths, broken at times by glades opening down into prospects of sunny beauty, into which I am not permitted to enter. If God disposes for us, it is not for nothing. This I can say: my heart is in some respects better, it is kinder, and more humble. Also, my mental acquisitions have certainly been great, however inadequate to my desires. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

December 2, Saturday: Professor Louis Agassiz wrote off to his mother in Switzerland to advise her of what he had established about Negroes: “They are not of the same blood as we.”87 EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the events of the preceding summer in Italy: Rome, December 2, 1848. I have not written for six months, and within that time what changes have taken place on this side “the great water,” — changes of how great dramatic interest historically, — of bearing infinitely important ideally! Easy is the descent in ill. I wrote last when Pius IX. had taken the first stride on the downward road. He had proclaimed himself the foe of further reform measures, when he implied that Italian independence was 87. “I have always suspected Agassiz of superficiality & wretched reasoning powers; but I think such men do immense good in their way. See how he stirred up all Europe about Glaciers.” – Charles Darwin, commenting on Agassiz’s pseudoscientific political agenda, in a private letter to Thomas Henry Huxley on September 26, 1857. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI not important in his eyes, when he abandoned the crowd of heroic youth who had gone to the field with his benediction, to some of whom his own hand had given crosses. All the Popes, his predecessors, had meddled with, most frequently instigated, war; now came one who must carry out, literally, the doctrines of the Prince of Peace, when the war was not for wrong, or the aggrandizement of individuals, but to redeem national, to redeem human, rights from the grasp of foreign oppression. I said some cried “traitor,” some “imbecile,” some wept, but In the minds of all, I believe, at that time, grief was predominant. They could no longer depend on him they had thought their best friend. They had lost their father. Meanwhile his people would not submit to the inaction he urged. They saw it was not only ruinous to themselves, but base and treacherous to the rest of Italy. They said to the Pope, “This cannot be; you must follow up the pledges you have given, or, if you will not act to redeem them, you must have a ministry that will.” The Pope, after he had once declared to the contrary, ought to have persisted. He should have said, “I cannot thus belie myself, I cannot put my name to acts I have just declared to be against my conscience.” The ministers of the people ought to have seen that the position they assumed was utterly untenable; that they could not advance with an enemy in the background cutting off all supplies. But some patriotism and some vanity exhilarated them, and, the Pope having weakly yielded, they unwisely began their impossible task. Mamiani, their chief, I esteem a man, under all circumstances, unequal to such a position, — a man of rhetoric merely. But no man could have acted, unless the Pope had resigned his temporal power, the Cardinals been put under sufficient check, and the Jesuits and emissaries of Austria driven from their lurking-places. A sad scene began. The Pope, — shut up more and more in his palace, the crowd of selfish and insidious advisers darkening round, enslaved by a confessor, — he who might have been the liberator of suffering Europe permitted the most infamous treacheries to be practised in his name. Private letters were written to the foreign powers, denying the acts he outwardly sanctioned; the hopes of the people were evaded or dallied with; the Chamber of Deputies permitted to talk and pass measures which they never could get funds to put into execution; legions to form and manoeuvre, but never to have the arms and clothing they needed. Again and again the people went to the Pope for satisfaction. They got only — benediction. Thus plotted and thus worked the scarlet men of sin, playing the hopes of Italy off and on, while their hope was of the miserable defeat consummated by a still worse traitor at Milan on the 6th of August. But, indeed, what could be expected from the “Sword of Pius IX.,” when Pius IX. himself had thus failed in his high vocation. The king of Naples bombarded his city, and set on the Lazzaroni to rob and murder the subjects he had deluded by his pretended gift of the Constitution. Pius proclaimed that he longed to embrace all the princes of Italy. He talked of peace, when all knew for a great part of the Italians there was no longer hope of peace, except in the sepulchre, or freedom. The taunting manifestos of Welden are a sufficient comment on the conduct of the Pope. “As the government of his Holiness is too weak to control his subjects,” — “As, singularly enough, a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI great number of Romans are found, fighting against us, contrary to the expressed will of their prince,” — such were the excuses for invasions of the Pontifical dominions, and the robbery and insult by which they were accompanied. Such invasions, it was said, made his Holiness very indignant; he remonstrated against these; but we find no word of remonstrance against the tyranny of the king of Naples, — no word of sympathy for the victims of Lombardy, the sufferings of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Mantua, Venice. In the affairs of Europe there are continued signs of the plan of the retrograde party to effect similar demonstrations in different places at the same hour. The 15th of May was one of these marked days. On that day the king of Naples made use of the insurrection he had contrived to excite, to massacre his people, and find an excuse for recalling his troops from Lombardy. The same day a similar crisis was hoped in Rome from the declarations of the Pope, but that did not work at the moment exactly as the foes of enfranchisement hoped. However, the wounds were cruel enough. The Roman volunteers received the astounding news that they were not to expect protection or countenance from their prince; all the army stood aghast, that they were no longer to fight in the name of Pio. It had been so dear, so sweet, to love and really reverence the head of their Church, so inspiring to find their religion for once in accordance with the aspirations of the soul! They were to be deprived, too, of the aid of the disciplined Neapolitan troops and their artillery, on which they had counted. How cunningly all this was contrived to cause dissension and dismay may easily be seen. The Neapolitan General Pepe nobly refused to obey, and called on the troops to remain with him. They wavered; but they are a pampered army, personally much attached to the king, who pays them well and indulges them at the expense of his people, that they may be his support against that people when in a throe of nature it rises and striven for its rights. For the same reason, the sentiment of patriotism was little diffused among them in comparison with the other troops. And the alternative presented was one in which it required a very clear sense of higher duty to act against habit. Generally, after wavering awhile, they obeyed and returned. The Roman States, which had received them with so many testimonials of affection and honor, on their retreat were not slack to show a correspondent aversion and contempt. The towns would not suffer their passage; the hamlets were unwilling to serve them even with fire and water. They were filled at once with shame and rage; one officer killed himself, unable to bear it; in the unreflecting minds of the soldiers, hate sprung up for the rest of Italy, and especially Rome, which will make them admirable tools of tyranny in case of civil war. This was the first great calamity of the war. But apart from the treachery of the king of Naples and the dereliction of the Pope, it was impossible it should end thoroughly well. The people were in earnest, and have shown themselves so; brave, and able to bear privation. No one should dare, after the proofs of the summer, to reiterate the taunt, so unfriendly frequent on foreign lips at the beginning of the contest, that the Italian can boast, shout, and fling garlands, but not act. The Italian always showed himself noble and brave, even in foreign service, and is doubly so in the cause of his country. But efficient heads HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI were wanting. The princes were not in earnest; they were looking at expediency. The Grand Duke, timid and prudent, wanted to do what was safest for Tuscany; his ministry, “Moderate” and prudent, would have liked to win a great prize at small risk. They went no farther than the people pulled them. The king of Sardinia had taken the first bold step, and the idea that treachery on his part was premeditated cannot be sustained; it arises from the extraordinary aspect of his measures, and the knowledge that he is not incapable of treachery, as he proved in early youth. But now it was only his selfishness that worked to the same results. He fought and planned, not for Italy, but the house of Savoy, which his Balbis and Giobertis had so long been prophesying was to reign supreme in the new great era of Italy. These prophecies he more than half believed, because they chimed with his ambitious wishes; but he had not soul enough to realize them; he trusted only in his disciplined troops; he had not nobleness enough to believe he might rely at all on the sentiment of the people. For his troops he dared not have good generals; conscious of meanness and timidity, he shrank from the approach of able and earnest men; he was only afraid they would, in helping Italy, take her and themselves out of his guardianship. Antonini was insulted, Garibaldi rejected; other experienced leaders, who had rushed to Italy at the first trumpet-sound, could never get employment from him. As to his generalship, it was entirely inadequate, even if he had made use of the first favorable moments. But his first thought was not to strike a blow at the Austrians before they recovered from the discomfiture of Milan, but to use the panic and need of his assistance to induce Lombardy and Venice to annex themselves to his kingdom. He did not even wish seriously to get the better till this was done, and when this was done, it was too late. The Austrian army was recruited, the generals had recovered their spirits, and were burning to retrieve and avenge their past defeat. The conduct of Charles Albert had been shamefully evasive in the first months. The account given by Franzini, when challenged in the Chamber of Deputies at Turin, might be summed up thus: “Why, gentlemen, what would you have? Every one knows that the army is in excellent condition, and eager for action. They are often reviewed, hear speeches, and sometimes get medals. We take places always, if it is not difficult. I myself was present once when the troops advanced; our men behaved gallantly, and had the advantage in the first skirmish; but afterward the enemy pointed on us artillery from the heights, and, naturally, we retired. But as to supposing that his Majesty Charles Albert is indifferent to the success of Italy in the war, that is absurd. He is ‘the Sword of Italy’; he is the most magnanimous of princes; he is seriously occupied about the war; many a day I have been called into his tent to talk it over, before he was up in the morning!” Sad was it that the heroic Milan, the heroic Venice, the heroic Sicily, should lean on such a reed as this, and by hurried acts, equally unworthy as unwise, sully the glory of their shields. Some names, indeed, stand, out quite free from this blame. Mazzini, who kept up a combat against folly and cowardice, day by day and hour by hour, with almost supernatural strength, warned the people constantly of the evils which their advisers were drawing upon them. He was heard then only by a few, but in this “Italia del Popolo” may be found many prophecies exactly HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI fulfilled, as those of “the golden-haired love of Phoebus” during the struggles of Ilium. He himself, in the last sad days of Milan, compared his lot to that of Cassandra. At all events, his hands are pure from that ill. What could be done to arouse Lombardy he did, but the “Moderate” party unable to wean themselves from old habits, the pupils of the wordy Gioberti thought there could be no safety unless under the mantle of a prince. They did not foresee that he would run away, and throw that mantle on the ground. Tommaso and Manin also were clear in their aversion to these measures; and with them, as with all who were resolute in principle at that time, a great influence has followed. It is said Charles Albert feels bitterly the imputations on his courage, and says they are most ungrateful, since he has exposed the lives of himself and his sons in the combat. Indeed, there ought to be made a distinction between personal and mental courage. The former Charles Albert may possess, may have too much of what this still aristocratic world calls “the feelings of a gentleman” to shun exposing himself to a chance shot now and then. An entire want of mental courage he has shown. The battle, decisive against him, was made so by his giving up the moment fortune turned against him. It is shameful to hear so many say this result was inevitable, just because the material advantages were in favor of the Austrians. Pray, was never a battle won against material odds? It is precisely such that a good leader, a noble man, may expect to win. Were the Austrians driven out of Milan because the Milanese had that advantage? The Austrians would again, have suffered repulse from them, but for the baseness of this man, on whom they had been cajoled into relying, — a baseness that deserves the pillory; and on a pillory will the “Magnanimous,” as he was meanly called in face of the crimes of his youth and the timid selfishness of his middle age, stand in the sight of posterity. He made use of his power only to betray Milan; he took from the citizens all means of defence, and then gave them up to the spoiler; he promised to defend them “to the last drop of his blood,” and sold them the next minute; even the paltry terms he made, he has not seen maintained. Had the people slain him in their rage, he well deserved it at their hands; and all his conduct since show how righteous would have been that sudden verdict of passion. Of all this great drama I have much to write, but elsewhere, in a more full form, and where I can duly sketch the portraits of actors little known in America. The materials are over-rich. I have bought my right in them by much sympathetic suffering; yet, amid the blood and tears of Italy, ‘tis joy to see some glorious new births. The Italians are getting cured of mean adulation and hasty boasts; they are learning to prize and seek realities; the effigies of straw are getting knocked down, and living, growing men take their places. Italy is being educated for the future, her leaders are learning that the time is past for trust in princes and precedents, — that there is no hope except in truth and God; her lower people are learning to shout less and think more. Though my thoughts have been much with the public in this struggle for life, I have been away from it during the summer months, in the quiet valleys, on the lonely mountains. There, personally undisturbed, I have seen the glorious Italian summer wax and wane, — the summer of Southern Italy, which I did not HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI see last year. On the mountains it was not too hot for me, and I enjoyed the great luxuriance of vegetation. I had the advantage of having visited the scene of the war minutely last summer, so that, in mind, I could follow every step of the campaign, while around me were the glorious relics of old times, — the crumbling theatre or temple of the Roman day, the bird’s- nest village of the Middle Ages, on whose purple height shone the sun and moon of Italy in changeless lustre. It was great pleasure to me to watch the gradual growth and change of the seasons, so different from ours. Last year I had not leisure for this quiet acquaintance. Now I saw the fields first dressed in their carpets of green, enamelled richly with the red poppy and blue corn-flower, — in that sunshine how resplendent! Then swelled the fig, the grape, the olive, the almond; and my food was of these products of this rich clime. For near three months I had grapes every day; the last four weeks, enough daily for two persons for a cent! Exquisite salad for two persons’ dinner and supper cost but a cent, and all other products of the region were in the same proportion. One who keeps still in Italy, and lives as the people do, may really have much simple luxury for very little money; though both travel, and, to the inexperienced foreigner, life in the cities, are expensive. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Margaret Fuller continued her report to the New-York Tribune on the revolution in Rome: Rome, December 2, 1848. Not till I saw the snow on the mountains grow rosy in the autumn sunset did I turn my steps again toward Rome. I was very ready to return. After three or four years of constant excitement, this six months of seclusion had been welcome; but now I felt the need of meeting other eyes beside those, so bright and so shallow, of the Italian peasant. Indeed, I left what was most precious, but which I could not take with me;88 still it was a compensation that I was again to see Rome, — Rome, that almost killed me with her cold breath of last winter, yet still with that cold breath whispered a tale of import so divine. Rome so beautiful, so great! her presence stupefies, and one has to withdraw to prize the treasures she has given. City of the soul! yes, it is that; the very dust magnetizes you, and thousand spells have been chaining you in every careless, every murmuring moment. Yes! Rome, however seen, thou must be still adored; and every hour of absence or presence must deepen love with one who has known what it is to repose in thy arms. Repose! for whatever be the revolutions, tumults, panics, hopes, of the present day, still the temper of life here is repose. The great past enfolds us, and the emotions of the moment cannot here greatly disturb that impression. From the wild shout and throng of the streets the setting sun recalls us as it rests on a hundred domes and temples, — rests on the Campagna, whose grass is rooted in departed human greatness. Burial-place so full of spirit that death itself seems no longer cold! O let me rest here, too! Hest here seems possible; meseems myriad lives still 88. Her child, who was born in Rieti, September 5, 1848, and was necessarily left in that town during the difficulties and siege of Rome. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI linger here, awaiting some one great summons. The rivers had burst their bounds, and beneath the moon the fields round Rome lay one sheet of silver. Entering the gate while the baggage was under examination, I walked to the entrance of a villa. Far stretched its overarching shrubberies, its deep green bowers; two statues, with foot advanced and uplifted finger, seemed to greet me; it was near the scene of great revels, great splendors in the old time; there lay the gardens of Sallust, where were combined palace, theatre, library, bath, and villa. Strange things have happened since, the most attractive part of which — the secret heart — lies buried or has fled to animate other forms; for of that part historians have rarely given a hint more than they do now of the truest life of our day, which refuses to be embodied, by the pen, craving forms more mutable, more eloquent than the pen can give. I found Rome empty of foreigners. Most of the English have fled in affright, — the Germans and French are wanted at home, — the Czar has recalled many of his younger subjects; he does not like the schooling they get here. That large part of the population, which lives by the visits of foreigners was suffering very much, — trade, industry, for every reason, stagnant. The people were every moment becoming more exasperated by the impudent measures of the Minister Rossi, and their mortification at seeing Rome represented and betrayed by a foreigner. And what foreigner? A pupil of Guizot and Louis Philippe. The news of the bombardment and storm of Vienna had just reached Rome. Zucchi, the Minister of War, at once left the city to put down over-free manifestations in the provinces, and impede the entrance of the troops of the patriot chief, Garibaldi, into Bologna. From the provinces came soldiery, called by Rossi to keep order at the opening of the Chamber of Deputies. He reviewed them in the face of the Civic Guard; the press began to be restrained; men were arbitrarily seized and sent out of the kingdom. The public indignation rose to its height; the cup overflowed. The 15th was a beautiful day, and I had gone out for a long walk. Returning at night, the old Padrona met me with her usual smile a little clouded. “Do you know,” said she, “that the Minister Rossi has been killed?” No Roman said murdered. “Killed?” “Yes, — with a thrust in the back. A wicked man, surely; but is that the way to punish even the wicked?” “I cannot,” observed a philosopher, “sympathize under any circumstances with so immoral a deed; but surely the manner of doing it was great.” The people at large were not so refined in their comments as either the Padrona or the philosopher; but soldiers and populace alike ran up and down, singing, “Blessed the hand that rids the earth of a tyrant.” Certainly, the manner was “great.” The Chamber was awaiting the entrance of Rossi. Had he lived to enter, he would have found the Assembly, without a single exception, ranged upon the Opposition benches. His carriage approached, attended by a howling, hissing multitude. He smiled, affected unconcern, but must have felt relieved when his horses entered the courtyard gate of the Cancelleria. He did not know he was entering the place of his execution. The horses stopped; he alighted in the midst of a crowd; it jostled him, as if for the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI purpose of insult; he turned abruptly, and received as he did so the fatal blow. It was dealt by a resolute, perhaps experienced, hand; he fell and spoke no word more. The crowd, as if all previously acquainted with the plan, as no doubt most of them were, issued quietly from the gate, and passed through the outside crowd, — its members, among whom was he who dealt the blow, dispersing in all directions. For two or three minutes this outside crowd did not know that anything special had happened. When they did, the news was at the moment received in silence. The soldiers in whom Rossi had trusted, whom he had hoped to flatter and bribe, stood at their posts and said not a word. Neither they nor any one asked, “Who did this? Where is he gone?” The sense of the people certainly was that it was an act of summary justice on an offender whom the laws could not reach, but they felt it to be indecent to shout or exult on the spot where he was breathing his last. Rome, so long supposed the capital of Christendom, certainly took a very pagan view of this act, and the piece represented on the occasion at the theatres was “The Death of Nero.” The next morning I went to the Church of St. Andrea della Valle, where was to be performed a funeral service, with fine music, in honor of the victims of Vienna; for this they do here for the victims of every place, — “victims of Milan,” “victims of Paris,” “victims of Naples,” and now “victims of Vienna.” But to-day I found the church closed, the service put off, — Rome was thinking about her own victims. I passed into the Ripetta, and entered the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The Republican flag was flying at the door; the young sacristan said the fine musical service, which this church gave formerly on St. Philip’s day in honor of Louis Philippe, would now be transferred to the Republican anniversary, the 25th of February. I looked at the monument Chateaubriand erected when here, to a poor girl who died, last of her family, having seen all the others perish round her. I entered the Domenichino Chapel, and gazed anew on the magnificent representations of the Life and Death of St. Cecilia. She and St. Agnes are my favorite saints. I love to think of those angel visits which her husband knew by the fragrance of roses and lilies left behind in the apartment. I love to think of his visit to the Catacombs, and all that followed. In one of the pictures St. Cecilia, as she stretches out her arms toward the suffering multitude, seems as if an immortal fount of purest love sprung from her heart. It gives very strongly the idea of an inexhaustible love, — the only love that is much worth thinking about. Leaving the church, I passed along toward the Piazza del Popolo. “Yellow Tiber rose,” but not high enough to cause “distress,” as he does when in a swelling mood. I heard the drums beating, and, entering the Piazza, I found the troops of the line already assembled, and the Civic Guard marching in by platoons, each battalion saluted as it entered by trumpets and a fine strain from the band of the Carbineers. I climbed the Pincian to see better. There is no place so fine for anything of this kind as the Piazza del Popolo, it is so full of light, so fair and grand, the obelisk and fountain make so fine a centre to all kinds of groups. The object of the present meeting was for the Civic Guard and troops of the line to give pledges of sympathy preparatory to going to the Quirinal to demand a change of ministry and of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI measures. The flag of the Union was placed in front of the obelisk; all present saluted it; some officials made addresses; the trumpets sounded, and all moved toward the Quirinal. Nothing could be gentler than the disposition of those composing the crowd. They were resolved to be played with no longer, but no threat was uttered or thought. They believed that the court would be convinced by the fate of Rossi that the retrograde movement it had attempted was impracticable. They knew the retrograde party were panic-struck, and hoped to use the occasion to free the Pope from its meshes. All felt that Pius IX. had fallen irrevocably from his high place as the friend of progress and father of Italy; but still he was personally beloved, and still his name, so often shouted in hope and joy, had not quite lost its prestige. I returned to the house, which is very near the Quirinal. On one side I could see the palace and gardens of the Pope, on the other the Piazza Barberini and street of the Four Fountains. Presently I saw the carriage of Prince Barberini drive hurriedly into his court-yard gate, the footman signing to close it, a discharge of fire-arms was heard, and the drums of the Civic Guard beat to arms. The Padrona ran up and down, crying with every round of shot, “Jesu Maria, they are killing the Pope! O poor Holy Father! — Tito, Tito,” (out of the window to her husband,) “what is the matter?” The lord of creation disdained to reply. “O Signora! pray, pray, ask Tito what is the matter?” I did so. “I don’t know, Signora; nobody knows.” “Why don’t you go on the Mount and see?” “It would be an imprudence, Signora; nobody will go.” I was just thinking to go myself, when I saw a poor man borne by, badly wounded, and heard that the Swiss were firing on the people. Their doing so was the cause of whatever violence there was, and it was not much. The people had assembled, as usual, at the Quirinal, only with more form and solemnity than usual. They had taken with them several of the Chamber of Deputies, and they sent an embassy, headed by Galetti, who had been in the late ministry, to state their wishes. They received a peremptory negative. They then insisted on seeing the Pope, and pressed on the palace. The Swiss became alarmed, and fired from the windows and from the roof. They did this, it is said, without orders; but who could, at the time, suppose that? If it had been planned to exasperate the people to blood, what more could have been done? As it was, very little was shed; but the Pope, no doubt, felt great panic. He heard the report of fire-arms, — heard that they tried to burn a door of the palace. I would lay my life that he could have shown himself without the slightest danger; nay, that the habitual respect for his presence would have prevailed, and hushed all tumult. He did not think so, and, to still it, once more degraded himself and injured his people, by making promises he did not mean to keep. He protests now against those promises as extorted by violence, — a strange plea indeed for the representative of St. Peter! Rome is all full of the effigies of those over whom violence had no power. There was an early Pope about to be thrown into the Tiber; violence had no power to make him say what he did not HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI mean. Delicate girls, men in the prime of hope and pride of power, — they were all alike about that. They could die in boiling oil, roasted on coals, or cut to pieces; but they could not say what they did not mean. These formed the true Church; it was these who had power to disseminate the religion of him, the Prince of Peace, who died a bloody death of torture between sinners, because he never could say what he did not mean. A little church, outside the gate of St. Sebastian commemorates the following affecting tradition of the Church. Peter, alarmed at the persecution of the Christians, had gone forth to fly, when in this spot he saw a bright figure in his path, and recognized his Master travelling toward Rome. “Lord,” he said, “whither goest thou?” “I go,” replied Jesus, “to die with my people.” Peter comprehended the reproof. He felt that he must not a fourth time deny his Master, yet hope for salvation. He returned to Rome to offer his life in attestation of his faith. The Roman Catholic Church has risen a monument to the memory of such facts. And has the present head of that Church quite failed to understand their monition? Not all the Popes have so failed, though the majority have been intriguing, ambitious men of the world. But even the mob of Rome — and in Rome there is a true mob of unheeding cabbage-sellers, who never had a thought before beyond contriving how to satisfy their animal instincts for the day — said, on hearing the protest, “There was another Pius, not long since, who talked in a very different style. When the French threatened him, he said, ‘You may do with me as you see fit, but I cannot consent to act against my convictions.’” In fact, the only dignified course for the Pope to pursue was to resign his temporal power. He could no longer hold it on his own terms; but to it he clung; and the counsellors around him were men to wish him to regard that as the first of duties. When the question was of waging war for the independence of Italy, they regarded him solely as the head of the Church; but when the demand was to satisfy the wants of his people, and ecclesiastical goods were threatened with taxes, then he was the prince of the state, bound to maintain all the selfish prerogatives of bygone days for the benefit of his successors. Poor Pope! how has his mind been torn to pieces in these later days! It moves compassion. There can be no doubt that all his natural impulses are generous and kind, and in a more private station he would have died beloved and honored; but to this he was unequal; he has suffered bad men to surround him, and by their misrepresentations and insidious suggestions at last entirely to cloud his mind. I believe he really thinks now the Progress movement tends to anarchy, blood, and all that looked worst in the first French revolution. However that may be, I cannot forgive him some of the circumstances of this flight. To fly to Naples; to throw himself in the arms of the bombarding monarch, blessing him and thanking his soldiery for preserving that part of Italy from anarchy; to protest that all his promises at Rome were null and void, when he thought himself in safety to choose a commission for governing in his absence, composed of men of princely blood, but as to character so null that everybody laughed, and said he chose those who could best be spared if they were killed; (but they all ran away directly;) when Rome was thus left without any government, to refuse to see any deputation, even the Senator of Rome, whom he had so gladly HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI sanctioned, — these are the acts either of a fool or a foe. They are not his acts, to be sure, but he is responsible; he lets them stand as such in the face of the world, and weeps and prays for their success. No more of him! His day is over. He has been made, it seems unconsciously, an instrument of good his regrets cannot destroy. Nor can he be made so important an instrument of ill. These acts have not had the effect the foes of freedom hoped. Rome remained quite cool and composed; all felt that they had not demanded more than was their duty to demand, and were willing to accept what might follow. In a few days all began to say: “Well, who would have thought it? The Pope, the Cardinals, the Princes are gone, and Rome is perfectly tranquil, and one does not miss anything, except that there are not so many rich carriages and liveries.” The Pope may regret too late that he ever gave the people a chance to make this reflection. Yet the best fruits of the movement may not ripen for a long time. It is a movement which requires radical measures, clear-sighted, resolute men: these last, as yet, do not show themselves in Rome. The new Tuscan ministry has three men of superior force in various ways, — Montanelli, Guerazzi, D’Aguila; such are not as yet to be found in Rome. But should she fall this time, — and she must either advance with decision and force, or fall, since to stand still is impossible, — the people have learned much; ignorance and servility of thought are lessened, — the way is paving for final triumph. And my country, what does she? You have chosen a new President from a Slave State, representative of the Mexican war. But he seems to be honest, a man that can be esteemed, and is one really known to the people, which is a step upward, after having sunk last time to choosing a mere tool of party. Pray send here a good Ambassador, — one that has experience of foreign life, that he may act with good judgment, and, if possible, a man that has knowledge and views which extend beyond the cause of party politics in the United States, — a man of unity in principles, but capable of understanding variety in forms. And send a man capable of prizing the luxury of living in, or knowing Rome; the office of Ambassador is one that should not be thrown away on a person who cannot prize or use it. Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself, (‘tis true, like other Ambassadors, I would employ clerks to do the most of the duty,) but woman’s day has not come yet. They hold their clubs in Paris, but even George Sand will not act with women as they are. They say she pleads they are too mean, too treacherous. She should not abandon them for that, which is not nature, but misfortune. How much I shall have to say on that subject if I live, which I desire not, for I am very tired of the battle with giant wrongs, and would like to have some one younger and stronger arise to say what ought to be said, still more to do what ought to be done. Enough! if I felt these things in privileged America, the cries of mothers and wives beaten at night by sons and husbands for their diversion after drinking, as I have repeatedly heard them these past months, — the excuse for falsehood, “I dare not tell my husband, he would be ready to kill me,” — have sharpened my perception as to the ills of woman’s condition and the remedies that must be applied. Had I HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI but genius, had I but energy, to tell what I know as it ought to be told! God grant them me, or some other more worthy woman, I pray. Don Tirlone, the Punch of Rome, has just come in. This number represents the fortress of Gaëta. Outside hangs a cage containing a parrot (pappagallo), the plump body of the bird surmounted by a noble large head with benign face and Papal head- dress. He sits on the perch now with folded wings, but the cage door, in likeness of a portico, shows there is convenience to come forth for the purposes of benediction, when wanted. Outside, the king of Naples, dressed as Harlequin, plays the organ for instruction of the bird (unhappy penitent, doomed to penance), and, grinning with sharp teeth, observes: “He speaks in my way now.” In the background a young Republican holds ready the match for a barrel of gunpowder, but looks at his watch, waiting the moment to ignite it. A happy New Year to my country! may she be worthy of the privileges she possesses, while others are lavishing their blood to win them, — that is all that need be wished for her at present. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1849

January: The Pope, safe in Gaeta, excommunicated the populace of the city of Rome. His fiat of excommunication with the papal seal was paraded through the streets dangling above a chamber pot. Margaret Fuller wrote that this piece of silliness was “probably the last document of the kind the world will see.” However, the Pope would summon a French army, the republic would fall, and Giuseppe Mazzini would again need to flee from the peninsula to London.

February 20, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Bronson Alcott in Boston.

{No MS — printed copy MEMOIR OF BRONSON ALCOTT, page 461}12 WEST STREET, BOSTON, Feb. 20, 1849. DEAR SIR, — I send you herewith the names of a select company of gentlemen, esteemed as deserving of better acquaintance, and disposed for closer fellowship of Thought and Endeavor, who are hereby invited to assemble at No. 12 West Street, on Tuesday, the 20th of March next, to discuss the advantages of organizing a Club or College for the study and diffusion of the Ideas and Tendencies proper to the nineteenth century; and to concert measures, if deemed desirable, for promoting the ends of good fellowship. The company will meet at 10 A.M. Your presence is respectfully claimed by Yours truly, A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

That evening Margaret Fuller was reporting in the New-York Tribune on republican Rome: Rome, Evening of Feb. 20, 1849. It is said you cannot thoroughly know any place till you have both summered and wintered in it; but more than one summer and winter of experience seems to be needed for Rome. How I fretted last winter, during the three months’ rain, and sepulchral chill, and far worse than sepulchral odors, which accompanied it! I thought it was the invariable Roman winter, and that I should never be able to stay here during another; so took my room only by the month, thinking to fly so soon as the rain set in. And lo! it has never rained at all; but there has been glorious sun and moon, unstained by cloud, always; and these last days have been as warm as May, — the days of the Carnival, for I have just come in from seeing the Moccoletti. The Republican Carnival has not been as splendid as the Papal, the absence of dukes and princes being felt in the way of coaches and rich dresses; there are also fewer foreigners than usual, many having feared to assist at this most peaceful of revolutions. But if less splendid, it was not less gay; the costumes were many and fanciful, — flowers, smiles, and fun abundant. This is the first time of my seeing the true Moccoletti; last year, in one of the first triumphs of democracy, they did not blow oat the lights, thus turning it into an illumination. The effect of the swarms of lights, little and large, thus in motion all over the fronts of the houses, and up and down the Corso, was HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI exceedingly pretty and fairy-like; but that did not make up for the loss of that wild, innocent gayety of which this people alone is capable after childhood, and which never shines out so much as on this occasion. It is astonishing the variety of tones, the lively satire and taunt of which the words Senza moccolo, senza mo, are susceptible from their tongues. The scene is the best burlesque on the life of the “respectable” world that can be imagined. A ragamuffin with a little piece of candle, not even lighted, thrusts it in your face with an air of far greater superiority than he can wear who, dressed in gold and velvet, erect in his carriage, holds aloft his light on a tall pole. In vain his security; while he looks down on the crowd to taunt the wretches senza mo, a weak female hand from a chamber window blots out his pretensions by one flirt of an old handkerchief. Many handsome women, otherwise dressed in white, wore the red liberty cap, and the noble though somewhat coarse Roman outline beneath this brilliant red, by the changeful glow of million lights, made a fine effect. Men looked too vulgar in the liberty cap. How I mourn that my little companion E. never saw these things, that would have given him such store of enchanting reminiscences for all his after years! I miss him always on such occasions; formerly it was through him that I enjoyed them. He had the child’s heart, had the susceptible fancy, and, naturally, a fine discerning sense for whatever is individual or peculiar. I missed him much at the Fair of St. Eustachio. This, like the Carnival, was last year entirely spoiled by constant rain. I never saw it at all before. It comes in the first days, or rather nights, of January. All the quarter of St. Eustachio is turned into one toy-shop; the stalls are set out in the street and brightly lighted, up. These are full of cheap toys, — prices varying from half a cent up to twenty cents. The dolls, which are dressed as husband and wife, or sometimes grouped in families, are the most grotesque rag-babies that can be imagined. Among the toys are great quantities of whistles, tin trumpets, and little tambourines; of these every man, woman, and child has bought one, and is using it to make a noise. This extempore concert begins about ten o’clock, and lasts till midnight; the delight of the numerous children that form part of the orchestra, the good-humored familiarity without the least touch of rudeness in the crowd, the lively effect of the light upon the toys, and the jumping, shouting figures that, exhibit them, make this the pleasantest Saturnalia. Had you only been there, E., to guide me by the hand, blowing the trumpet for both, and spying out a hundred queer things in nooks that entirely escape me! The Roman still plays amid his serious affairs, and very serious have they been this past winter. The Roman legions went out singing and dancing to fight in Lombardy, and they fought no less bravely for that. When I wrote last, the Pope had fled, guided, he says, “by the hand of Providence,” — Italy deems by the hand of Austria, — to Gaëta. He had already soiled his white robes, and defamed himself for ever, by heaping benedictions on the king of Naples and the bands of mercenaries whom he employs to murder his subjects on the least sign of restlessness in their most painful position. Most cowardly had been the conduct of his making promises he never meant to keep, stealing away by night in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI coach of a foreign diplomatist, protesting that what he had done was null because he had acted under fear, — as if such a protest could avail to one who boasts himself representative of Christ and his Apostles, guardian of the legacy of the martyrs! He selected a band of most incapable men to face the danger he had feared for himself; most of these followed his example and fled. Rome sought an interview with him, to see if reconciliation were possible; he refused to receive her messengers. His wicked advisers calculated upon great confusion and distress as inevitable on the occasion; but, for once, the hope of the bad heart was doomed to immediate disappointment. Rome coolly said, “If you desert me, — if you will not hear me, — I must act for myself.” She threw herself into the arms of a few men who had courage and calmness for this crisis; they bade her think upon what was to be done, meanwhile avoiding every excess that could give a color to calumny and revenge. The people, with admirable good sense, comprehended and followed up this advice. Never was Rome so truly tranquil, so nearly free from gross ill, as this winter. A few words of brotherly admonition have been more powerful than all the spies, dungeons, and scaffolds of Gregory. “The hand of the Omnipotent works for us,” observed an old man whom I saw in the street selling cigars the evening before the opening of the Constitutional Assembly. He was struck by the radiant beauty of the night. The old people observe that there never has been such a winter as this which follows the establishment by the French of a republic. May the omens speed well! A host of enemies without are ready to levy war against this long-suffering people, to rivet anew their chains. Still there is now an obvious tide throughout Europe toward a better order of things, and a wave of it may bear Italy onward to the shore. The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them. The waters, which had flowed so secretly beneath the crust of habit that many never heard their murmur, unless in dreams, have suddenly burst to light in full and beautiful jets; all rush to drink the pure and living draught. As in the time of Jesus, the multitude had been long enslaved beneath a cumbrous ritual, their minds designedly darkened by those who should have enlightened them, brutified, corrupted, amid monstrous contradictions and abuses; yet the moment they hear a word correspondent to the original nature, “Yes, it is true,” they cry. “It is spoken with, authority. Yes, it ought to be so. Priests ought to be better and wiser than other men; if they were, they would not need pomp and temporal power to command respect. Yes, it is true; we ought not to lie; we should not try to impose upon one another. We ought rather to prefer that our children should work honestly for their bread, than get it by cheating, begging, or the prostitution of their mothers. It would be better to act worthily and kindly, probably would please God more than the kissing of relics. We have long darkly felt that these things were so; now we know it.” The unreality of relation between the people and the hierarchy was obvious instantly upon the flight of Pius. He made an immense mistake then, and he made it because neither he nor his Cardinals were aware of the unreality. They did not know that, great as is the force of habit, truth only is imperishable. The people had abhorred Gregory, had adored Pius, upon whom they looked as a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI saviour, as a liberator; finding themselves deceived, a mourning-veil had overshadowed their love. Still, had Pius remained here, and had courage to show himself on agitating occasions, his position as the Pope, before whom they had been bred to bow, his aspect, which had once seemed to them full of blessing and promise, like that of an angel, would have still retained power. Probably the temporal dominion of the Papacy would not have been broken up. He fled; the people felt contempt for his want of force and truth. He wrote to reproach them with ingratitude; they were indignant. What had they to be grateful for? A constitution to which he had not kept true an instant; the institution of the National Guard, which he had begun to neutralize; benedictions, followed by such actions as the desertion of the poor volunteers in the war for Italian independence? Still, the people were not quite alienated from Pius. They felt sure that his heart was, in substance, good and kindly, though the habits of the priest and the arts of his counsellors had led him so egregiously to falsify its dictates and forget the vocation with which he had been called. Many hoped he would see his mistake, and return to be at one with the people. Among the more ignorant, there was a superstitious notion that he would return in the night of the 5th of January. There were many bets that he would be found in the palace of the Quirinal the morning of the 6th. All these lingering feelings were finally extinguished by the advice of excommunication. As this may not have readied America, I subjoin a translation. Here I was obliged to make use of a manuscript copy; all the printed ones were at once destroyed. It is probably the last document of the kind the world will see. MANIFESTO OF PIUS IX. “To OUR MOST BELOVED SUBJECTS: — “From this pacific abode to which it has pleased Divine Providence to conduct us, and whence we can freely manifest our sentiments and our will, we have waited for testimonies of remorse from our misguided children for the sacrileges and misdeeds committed against persons attached to our service, — among whom some have been slain, others outraged in the most barbarous manner, — as well as for those against our residence and our person. But we have seen nothing except a sterile invitation to return to our capital, unaccompanied by a word of condemnation for those crimes or the least guaranty for our security against the frauds and violences of that same company of furious men which still tyrannizes with a barbarous despotism over Rome and the States of the Church. We also waited, expecting that the protests and orders we have uttered would recall to the duties of fidelity and subjection those who have despised and trampled upon them in the very capital of our States. But, instead of this, a new and more monstrous act of undisguised felony and of actual rebellion by them audaciously committed, has filled the measure of our affliction, and excited at the same time our just indignation, as it will afflict the Church Universal. We speak of that act, in every respect detestable, by which, it has been pretended to initiate the convocation of a so-called General National Assembly of the Roman States, by a decree of the 29th of last December, in order to establish new political forms for the Pontifical dominion. Adding thus HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI iniquity to iniquity, the authors and favorers of the demagogical anarchy strive to destroy the temporal authority of the Roman Pontiff over the dominions of Holy Church, — however irrefragably established through the most ancient and solid rights, and venerated, recognized, and sustained by all the nations, — pretending and making others believe that his sovereign power can be subject to controversy or depend on the caprices of the factious. We shall spare our dignity the humiliation of dwelling on all that is monstrous contained in that act, abominable through the absurdity of its origin no less than the illegality of its form and the impiety of its scope; but it appertains to the apostolic authority, with which, however unworthy, we are invested, and to the responsibility which binds us by the most sacred oaths in the sight of the Omnipotent, not only to protest in the most energetic and efficacious manner against that same act, but to condemn it in the face of the universe as an enormous and sacrilegious crime against our independence and sovereignty, meriting the chastisements threatened by divine and human laws. We are persuaded that, on receiving the impudent invitation, you were full of holy indignation, and will have rejected far from you this guilty and shameful provocation. Notwithstanding, that none of you may say he has been deluded by fallacious seductions, and by the preachers of subversive doctrines, or ignorant of what is contriving by the foes of all order, all law, all right, true liberty, and your happiness, we to-day again raise and utter abroad our voice, so that you may be more certain of the absoluteness with which we prohibit men, of whatever class and condition, from taking any part in the meetings which those persons may dare to call, for the nomination of individuals to be sent to the condemned Assembly. At the same time we recall to you how this absolute prohibition is sanctioned by the decrees of our predecessors and of the Councils, especially of the Sacred Council-General of Trent, Sect. XXII. Chap. 11, in which the Church has fulminated many times her censures, and especially the greater excommunication, as incurred without fail by any declaration of whomsoever daring to become guilty of whatsoever attempt against the temporal sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff, this we declare to have been already unhappily incurred by all those who have given aid to the above-named act, and others preceding, intended to prejudice the same sovereignty, and in other modes and under false pretexts have, perturbed, violated, and usurped our authority. Yet, though we feel ourselves obliged by conscience to guard the sacred deposit of the patrimony of the Spouse of Jesus Christ, confided to our care, by using the sword of severity given to us for that purpose, we cannot therefore forget that we are on earth the representative of Him who in exercise of his justice does not forget mercy. Raising, therefore, our hands to Heaven, while we to it recommend a cause which is indeed more Heaven’s than ours, and while anew we declare ourselves ready, with the aid of its powerful grace, to drink even to the dregs, for the defence and glory of the Catholic Church, the cup of persecution which He first wished to drink for the salvation of the same, we shall not desist from supplicating Him benignly to hear the fervent prayers which day and night we unceasingly offer for the salvation of the misguided. No day certainly could be more joyful for us, than that in which it shall be granted to see HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI return into the fold of the Lord our sons from whom now we derive so much bitterness and so great tribulations. The hope of enjoying soon the happiness of such a day is strengthened in us by the reflection, that universal are the prayers which, united to ours, ascend to the throne of Divine Mercy from the lips and the heart of the faithful throughout the Catholic world, urging it continually to change the hearts of sinners, and reconduct them into the paths of truth and of justice.

“Gaëta, January 6, 1849.” The silliness, bigotry, and ungenerous tone of this manifesto excited a simultaneous movement in the population. The procession which carried it, mumbling chants, for deposit in places provided for lowest uses, and then, taking from, the doors of the hatters’ shops the cardinals’ hats, threw them into the Tiber, was a real and general expression of popular disgust. From that hour the power of the scarlet hierarchy fell to rise no more. No authority can survive a universal movement of derision. From that hour tongues and pens were loosed, the leaven of Machiavellism, which still polluted the productions of the more liberal, disappeared, and people talked as they felt, just as those of us who do not choose to be slaves are accustomed to do in America. “Jesus,” cried an orator, “bade them feed his lambs. If they have done so, it has been to rob their fleece and drink their blood.” “Why,” said another, “have we been so long deaf to the saying, that the temporal dominion of the Church was like a thorn in the wound of Italy, which shall never be healed till that thorn is extracted?” And then, without passion, all felt that the temporal dominion was in fact finished of itself, and that it only remained to organize another form of government. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

That evening Margaret Fuller was also reporting to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the uncertain future: Rome, Evening of Feb. 20, 1849. The League between the Italian States, and the Diet which was to establish it, had been the thought of Gioberti, but had found the instrument at Rome in Mamiani. The deputies were to be named by princes or parliaments, their mandate to be limited by the existing institutions of the several states; measures of mutual security and some modifications in the way of reform would be the utmost that could be hoped from this Diet. The scope of this party did not go beyond more vigorous prosecution of the war for independence, and the establishment of good, institutions for the several principalities on a basis of assimilation. Mazzini, the great radical thinker of Italy, was, on the contrary, persuaded that unity, not union, was necessary to this country. He had taken for his motto, GOD AND THE PEOPLE, and believed in no other powers. He wished an Italian Constitutional Assembly, selected directly by the people, and furnished with an unlimited mandate to decide what form was now required by the needs of the Peninsula. His own wishes, certainly, aimed at a republic; but the decision remained with the representatives of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the people. The thought of Gioberti had been at first the popular one, as he, in fact, was the seer of the so-called Moderate party. For myself, I always looked upon him as entirely a charlatan, who covered his want of all real force by the thickest embroidered mantle of words. Still, for a time, he corresponded with the wants of the Italian mind. He assailed the Jesuits, and was of real use by embodying the distrust and aversion that brooded in the minds of men against these most insidious and inveterate foes of liberty and progress. This triumph, at least, he may boast: that sect has been obliged to yield; its extinction seems impossible, of such life-giving power was the fiery will of Loyola. In the Primate he had embodied the lingering hope of the Catholic Church; Pius IX. had answered to the appeal, had answered only to show its futility. He had run through Italy as courier for Charles Albert, when the so falsely styled Magnanimous entered, pretending to save her from the stranger, really hoping to take her for himself. His own cowardice and treachery neutralized the hope, and Charles Albert, abject in his disgrace, took a retrograde ministry. This the country would not suffer, and obliged him after a while to reassume at least the position of the previous year, by taking Gioberti for his premier. But it soon became evident that the ministry of Charles Albert was in the same position as had been that of Pius IX. The hand was powerless when the head was indisposed. Meantime the name of Mazzini had echoed through Tuscany from the revered lips of Montanelli; it reached the Roman States, and though at first propagated by foreign impulse, yet, as soon as understood, was welcomed as congenial. Montanelli had nobly said, addressing Florence: “We could not regret that the realization of this project should take place in a sister city, still more illustrious than ours.” The Romans took him at his word; the Constitutional Assembly for the Roman States was elected with a double mandate, that the deputies might sit in the Constitutional Assembly for all Italy whenever the other provinces could send theirs. They were elected by universal suffrage. Those who listened to Jesuits and Moderates predicted that the project would fail of itself. The people were too ignorant to make use of the liberty of suffrage. But ravens now-a-days are not the true prophetic birds. The Roman eagle recommences her flight, and it is from its direction only that the high-priest may draw his augury. The people are certainly as ignorant as centuries of the worst government, the neglect of popular education, the enslavement of speech and the press, could make them; yet they have an instinct to recognize measures that are good for them. A few weeks’ schooling at some popular meetings, the clubs, the conversations of the National Guards in their quarters or on patrol, were sufficient to concert measures so well, that the people voted in larger proportion than at contested elections in our country, and made a very good choice. The opening of the Constitutional Assembly gave occasion for a fine procession. All the troops in Rome defiled from the Campidoglio; among them many bear the marks of suffering from the Lombard war. The banners of Sicily, Venice, and Bologna waved proudly; that of Naples was veiled with crape. I was in a balcony in the Piazza di Venezia; the Palazzo di Venezia, that sternest feudal pile, so long the head-quarters of Austrian HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI machinations, seemed to frown, as the bands each in passing struck up the Marseillaise. The nephew of Napoleon and Garibaldi, the hero of Montevideo, walked together, as deputies. The deputies, a grave band, mostly advocates or other professional men, walked without other badge of distinction than the tricolored scarf. I remembered the entrance of the deputies to the Council only fourteen months ago, in the magnificent carriages lent by the princes for the occasion; they too were mostly nobles, and their liveried attendants followed, carrying their scutcheons. Princes and councillors have both fled or sunk into nothingness; in those councillors was no counsel. Will it be found in the present? Let us hope so! What we see to-day has much more the air of reality than all that parade of scutcheons, or the pomp of dress and retinue with which the Ecclesiastical Court was wont to amuse the people. A few days after followed the proclamation of a Republic. An immense crowd of people surrounded the Palazzo della Cancelleria, within whose court-yard Rossi fell, while the debate was going on within. At one o’clock in the morning of the 9th of February, a Republic was resolved upon, and the crowd rushed away to ring all the bells. Early next morning I rose and went forth to observe the Republic. Over the Quirinal I went, through the Forum, to the Capitol. There was nothing to be seen except the magnificent calm emperor, the tamers of horses, the fountain, the trophies, the lions, as usual; among the marbles, for living figures, a few dirty, bold women, and Murillo boys in the sun just as usual. I passed into the Corso; there were men in the liberty cap, — of course the lowest and vilest had been the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars persecuting as impudently as usual. I met some English; all their comfort was, “It would not last a month.” “They hoped to see all these fellows shot yet.” The English clergyman, more mild and legal, only hopes to see them (i.e. the ministry, deputies, &c.) hung. Mr. Carlyle would be delighted with his countrymen. They are entirely ready and anxious to see a Cromwell for Italy. They, too, think, when the people starve, “It is no matter what happens in the back parlor.” What signifies that, if there is “order” in the front? How dare the people make a noise to disturb us yawning at billiards! I met an American. He “had no confidence in the Republic.” Why? Because he “had no confidence in the people.” Why? Because “they were not like our people.” Ah! Jonathan and John, — excuse me, but I must say the Italian has a decided advantage over you in the power of quickly feeling generous sympathy, as well as some other things which I have not time now to particularize. I have memoranda from you both in my note-book. At last the procession mounts the Campidoglio. It is all dressed with banners. The tricolor surmounts the palace of the senator; the senator himself has fled. The deputies mount the steps, and one of them reads, in a clear, friendly voice, the following words: — “FUNDAMENTAL DECREE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY OF ROME. “ART. I. — The Papacy has fallen in fact and in right from the temporal government of the Roman State. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI “ART. II. — The Roman Pontiff shall have all the necessary guaranties for independence in the exercise of his spiritual power. “ART. III. — The form of government of the Roman State shall be a pure democracy, and will take the glorious name of Roman Republic. “ART. IV. — The Roman Republic shall have with the rest of Italy the relations exacted by a common nationality.” Between each of these expressive sentences the speaker paused; the great bell of the Capitol gave forth its solemn melodies; the cannon answered; while the crowd shouted, Viva la Republica! Viva Italia! The imposing grandeur of the spectacle to me gave new force to the emotion that already swelled my heart; my nerves thrilled, and I longed to see in some answering glance a spark of Rienzi, a little of that soul which made my country what she is. The American at my side remained impassive. Receiving all his birthright from a triumph of democracy, he was quite indifferent to this manifestation on this consecrated spot. Passing the winter in Rome to study art, he was insensible to the artistic beauty of the scene, — insensible to this new life of that spirit from which all the forms he gazes at in galleries emanated. He “did not see the use of these popular demonstrations.” Again I must mention a remark of his, as a specimen of the ignorance in which Americans usually remain during their flighty visits to these scenes, where they associate only with one another. And I do it the rather as this seemed a really thoughtful, intelligent man; no vain, vulgar trifler. He said, “The people seem only to be looking on; they take no part.” What people? said I. “Why, these around us; there is no other people.” There are a few beggars, errand-boys, and nurse-maids. “The others are only soldiers.” Soldiers! The Civic Guard! all the decent men in Rome. Thus it is that the American, on many points, becomes more ignorant for coming abroad, because he attaches some value to his crude impressions and frequent blunders. It is not thus that any seed-corn can be gathered from foreign gardens. Without modest scrutiny, patient study, and observation, he spends his money and goes home, with a new coat perhaps, but a mind befooled rather than instructed. It is necessary to speak the languages of these countries, and know personally some of their inhabitants, in order to form any accurate impressions. The flight of the Grand Duke of Tuscany followed. In imitation of his great exemplar, he promised and smiled to the last, deceiving Montanelli, the pure and sincere, at the very moment he was about to enter his carriage, into the belief that he persevered in his assent to the liberal movement. His position was certainly very difficult, but he might have left it like a gentleman, like a man of honor. ‘T was pity to destroy so lightly the good opinion the Tuscans had of him. Now Tuscany meditates union with Rome. Meanwhile, Charles Albert is filled with alarm. He is indeed betwixt two fires. Gioberti has published one of his prolix, weak addresses, in which, he says, that in the beginning of every revolution one must fix a limit beyond which he will not go; that, for himself, he has done it, — others are passing beyond his mark, and he will not go any farther. Of the want of thought, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of insight into historic and all other truths, which distinguishes the “illustrious Gioberti,” this assumption is a specimen. But it makes no difference; he and his prince must go, sooner or later, if the movement continues, nor is there any prospect of its being stayed unless by foreign intervention. This the Pope has not yet, it is believed, solicited, but there is little reason to hope he will be spared that crowning disgrace. He has already consented to the incitement of civil war. Should an intervention be solicited, all depends on France. Will she basely forfeit every pledge and every duty, to say nothing of her true interest? It seems that her President stands doubtful, intending to do what is for his particular interest; but if his interest proves opposed to the republican principle, will France suffer herself again to be hoodwinked and enslaved? It is impossible to know, she has already shown such devotion to the mere prestige of a name. On England no dependence can be placed. She is guided by no great idea; her Parliamentary leaders sneer at sentimental policy, and the “jargon” of ideas. She will act, as always, for her own interest; and the interest of her present government is becoming more and more the crushing of the democratic tendency. They are obliged to do it at home, both in the back and the front parlor; it would not be decent as yet to have a Spielberg just at home for obstreperous patriots, but England has so many ships, it is just as easy to transport them to a safe distance. Then the Church of England, so long an enemy to the Church of Rome, feels a decided interest with it on the subject of temporal possessions. The rich English traveller, fearing to see the Prince Borghese stripped of one of his palaces for a hospital or some such low use, thinks of his own twenty-mile park and the crowded village of beggars at its gate, and muses: “I hope to see them all shot yet, these rascally republicans.” How I wish my country would show some noble sympathy when an experience so like her own is going on. Politically she cannot interfere; but formerly, when Greece and Poland were struggling, they were at least aided by private contributions. Italy, naturally so rich, but long racked and impoverished by her oppressors, greatly needs money to arm and clothe her troops. Some token of sympathy, too, from America would be so welcome to her now. If there were a circle of persons inclined to trust such to me, I might venture to promise the trust should be used to the advantage of Italy. It would make me proud to have my country show a religious faith in the progress of ideas, and make some small sacrifice of its own great resources in aid of a sister cause, now. But I must close this letter, which it would be easy to swell to a volume from the materials in my mind. One or two traits of the hour I must note. Mazzarelli, chief of the present ministry, was a prelate, and named spontaneously by the Pope before his flight. He has shown entire and frank intrepidity. He has laid aside the title of Monsignor, and appears before the world as a layman. Nothing can be more tranquil than has been the state of Rome all winter. Every wile has been used by the Oscurantists to excite the people, but their confidence in their leaders could not be broken. A little mutiny in the troops, stimulated by letters from their old leaders, was quelled in a moment. The day after the proclamation of the Republic, some zealous ignoramuses HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI insulted the carriages that appeared with servants in livery. The ministry published a grave admonition, that democracy meant liberty, not license, and that he who infringed upon an innocent freedom of action in others must be declared traitor to his country. Every act of the kind ceased instantly. An intimation that it was better not to throw large comfits or oranges during the Carnival, as injuries have thus been sometimes caused, was obeyed with equal docility. On Sunday last, placards affixed in the high places summoned the city to invest Giuseppe Mazzini with the rights of a Roman citizen. I have not yet heard the result. The Pope made Rossi a Roman citizen; he was suffered to retain that title only one day. It was given him on the 14th of November, he died the 15th. Mazzini enters Rome at any rate, for the first time in his life, as deputy to the Constitutional Assembly; it would be a noble poetic justice, if he could enter also as a Roman citizen. February 24. The Austrians have invaded Ferrara, taken $200,000 and six hostages, and retired. This step is, no doubt, intended to determine whether France will resent the insult, or whether she will betray Italy. It shows also the assurance of the Austrian that the Pope will approve of an armed intervention. Probably before I write again these matters will reach some decided crisis. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Nathaniel Hawthorne had heard Thoreau lecture twice on Chapter 1 of WALDEN and Thoreau informed him in a letter on this date that, while writing WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, he had been thinking of Hawthorne as a reader. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Hawthorne would communicate later, however, to a noble acquaintance, that Thoreau was “not an agreeable person, and in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or of having written a book that the public will read – his own mode of life being so unsparing a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves.”89

89. In reading through Hawthorne’s materials, I have been gobstruck with the extent to which he was deploying the categories “agreeable,” “not agreeable,” and “disagreeable.” Circumstances are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! The persons whom he encountered are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! This seems to have been for him the utterly fundamental categorization of all reality! As a flaming sexist, everything female was of course “disagreeable.” As a flaming racist, everything black and everything connected in any way with blackness (such as Republicanism or abolitionism) was also “disagreeable.” However, I have been forced to the conclusion upon close reading that the distinction being made between the first two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “not agreeable”) was more of a class thing, and that that distinction had been different in kind from the disjunction he had been attempting between the outside two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “disagreeable”). It is almost as if he had been attempting a triage, a triage between the grand souls of Heaven with the more dicey souls floating somehow in Purgatory, versus demonic evils forever consigned to an Outer Darkness. It seems significant, therefore, that in the case of this communication with a member of the British nobility, Thoreau is merely allowed to float in limbo as “not an agreeable person” (one of the souls held in a Purgatory), rather than being utterly condemned to the flames as “disagreeable.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or having written a book that the public will read — his own mode of life being so unsparing a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves. — Hawthorne’s letter of November 18, 1854 to Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885), page 334 in Edward Mather’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: A MODEST MAN (NY: Crowell, 1940)

April: With Rome besieged by a French army and her infant reaching eight months of age, Margaret Fuller took a meeting with Florence Nightingale (presumably while she was not in one of her bipolar periods) and then assumed responsibility for a hospital for the wounded. The eternal city would not surrender under bombardment until the end of June. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI April 30, Monday: Henry Thoreau returned corrected proof sheets of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK 90 RIVERS to the printer (1000 changes). TIMELINE OF A WEEK

Confident of Prussian support, King Friedrich August of Saxony dissolved both houses of the Landtag.

At a state ball in Buckingham Palace, the Alice-Polka op.238 by Johann Strauss, Jr. was performed for the initial time. It had been written in honor of Queen Victoria’s six-year-old daughter.

From this point until July 4th, the siege of Roma by a French army. According to page 80 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sick ambivalences and manly defenses are readily to be discerned: In the summer of 1844, while the Hawthornes were still at the Old Manse, Margaret Fuller, who was friends with them both, came to visit, and it was then that Nathaniel became most intimate with her. Throughout the month of July, they went boating at dusk on the Concord, took moonlit walks through the woods, and conversed at length on a variety of subjects. (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was occupied with the new baby, Una Hawthorne.) And, surprisingly, given his reserve and shyness, it was Hawthorne who initiated many of their hours alone together. After Fuller moved to New York City that fall and thence to Europe and Rome, she and Hawthorne never saw one another again; however, ten years after her death, Hawthorne in a long and famous passage in his Italian notebook ridiculed her husband and called her “a great humbug” with a “defective and evil nature.” This outburst seems inexplicable, given Hawthorne’s previous friendliness, but it does make sense if one sees it as motivated by guilt and anger about his attraction to her. As Paula Blanshard has pointed out, “There is no possible way that anyone can accuse Margaret of being evil — if he is thinking of Margaret herself. But Hawthorne was not; he was thinking of what she represented to him.” During the summer of 1849, when Fuller and her fellow republicans fought their losing battle against the invading French, capturing the attention and admiration of the American public, Hawthorne certainly noticed, and when he wrote THE SCARLET LETTER several months later, he then too had in mind what Fuller represented: a female revolutionary trying to overthrow the world’s most prominent politico-religious leader, a freethinking temptress who had almost subverted his right-minded thoughts and feelings.

90.There were 1,000 changes, most of which were ignored by the printer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 27, Sunday, 1849: Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended. Alas! alas! never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always, like God; to love always — this is duty.”

Thomas Mayo Brewer got married with Sally R. Coffin, daughter of Mr. Stephen Coffin of Damariscotta, Maine. The couple would produce two children.

After two Boston churches attended by persons of color had declined to allow the funeral services for the hanged black seaman to be conducted on their premises, on this afternoon the body of Washington Goode was interred in a city tomb at the South Burying Ground. The Reverend Mr. Grimes, pastor of the 12th Baptist Society, presided. On the handsome coffin of black walnut, a silver plate bore the simple inscription “Washington Goode, Died, May 25, 1849, Aged 29 years.”

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome “between the heaves of storm”: Rome, May 27, 1849. I have suspended writing in the expectation of some decisive event; but none such comes yet. The French, entangled in a web of falsehood, abashed by a defeat that Oudinot has vainly tried to gloss over, the expedition disowned by all honorable men at home, disappointed at Gaëta, not daring to go the length Papal infatuation demands, know not what to do. The Neapolitans have been decidedly driven back into their own borders, the last time in a most shameful rout, their king flying in front. We have heard for several days that the Austrians were advancing, but they come not. They also, it is probable, meet with unexpected embarrassments. They find that the sincere movement of the Italian people is very unlike that of troops commanded by princes and generals who never wished to conquer and were always waiting to betray. Then their troubles at home are constantly increasing, and, should the Russian intervention quell these to- day, it is only to raise a storm far more terrible to-morrow. The struggle is now fairly, thoroughly commenced between the principle of democracy and the old powers, no longer legitimate. That struggle may last fifty years, and the earth be watered with the blood and tears of more than one generation, but the result is sure. All Europe, including Great Britain, where the most bitter resistance of all will be made, is to be under republican government in the next century. “God moves in a mysterious way.” Every struggle made by the old tyrannies, all their Jesuitical deceptions, their rapacity, their imprisonments and executions of the most generous men, only sow more dragon’s teeth; the crop shoots up daily more and more plenteous. When I first arrived in Italy, the vast majority of this people had no wish beyond limited monarchies, constitutional governments. They still respected the famous names of the nobility; they despised the priests, but were still fondly attached to the dogmas and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. It required King Bomba, the triple treachery of Charles Albert, Pius IX., and the “illustrious Gioberti,” the naturally kind- hearted, but, from the necessity of his position, cowardly and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI false Leopold of Tuscany, the vagabond “serene” meannesses of Parma and Modena, the “fatherly” Radetzsky, and, finally, the imbecile Louis Bonaparte, “would-be Emperor of France,” to convince this people that no transition is possible between the old and the new. The work is done; the revolution in Italy is now radical, nor can it stop till Italy becomes independent and united as a republic. Protestant she already is, and though the memory of saints and martyrs may continue to be revered, the ideal of woman to be adored under the name of Mary, yet Christ will now begin to be a little thought of; his idea has always been kept carefully out of sight under the old régime; all the worship being for the Madonna and saints, who were to be well paid for interceding for sinners; — an example which might make men cease to be such, was no way coveted. Now the New Testament has been translated into Italian; copies are already dispersed far and wide; men calling themselves Christians will no longer be left entirely ignorant of the precepts and life of Jesus. The people of Rome have burnt the Cardinals’ carriages. They took the confessionals out of the churches, and made mock confessions in the piazzas, the scope of which was, “I have sinned, father, so and so.” “Well, my son, how much will you pay to the Church for absolution?” Afterward the people thought of burning the confessionals, or using them for barricades; but at the request of the Triumvirate they desisted, and even put them back into the churches. But it was from no reaction of feeling that they stopped short, only from respect for the government. The “Tartuffe” of Molière has been translated into Italian, and was last night performed with great applause at the Valle. Can all this be forgotten? Never! Should guns and bayonets replace the Pope on the throne, he will find its foundations, once deep as modern civilization, now so undermined that it falls with the least awkward movement. But I cannot believe he will be replaced there. France alone could consummate that crime, — that, for her, most cruel, most infamous treason. The elections in France will decide. In three or four days we shall know whether the French nation at large be guilty or no, — whether it be the will of the nation to aid or strive to ruin a government founded on precisely the same basis as their own. I do not dare to trust that people. The peasant is yet very ignorant. The suffering workman is frightened as he thinks of the punishments that ensued on the insurrections of May and June. The man of property is full of horror at the brotherly scope of Socialism. The aristocrat dreams of the guillotine always when he hears men speak of the people. The influence of the Jesuits is still immense in France. Both in France and England the grossest falsehoods have been circulated with unwearied diligence about the state of things in Italy. An amusing specimen of what is still done in this line I find just now in a foreign journal, where it says there are red flags on all the houses of Rome; meaning to imply that the Romans are athirst for blood. Now, the fact is, that these flags are put up at the entrance of those streets where there is no barricade, as a signal to coachmen and horsemen that they can pass freely. There is one on the house where I am, in which is no person but myself, who thirst for peace, and the Padrone, who thirsts for money. Meanwhile the French troops are encamped at a little distance HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI from Rome. Some attempts at fair and equal treaty when their desire to occupy Rome was firmly resisted, Oudinot describes in his despatches as a readiness for submission. Having tried in vain to gain this point, he has sent to France for fresh orders. These will be decided by the turn the election takes. Meanwhile the French troops are much exposed to the Roman force where they are. Should the Austrians come up, what will they do? Will they shamelessly fraternize with the French, after pretending and proclaiming that they came here as a check upon their aggressions? Will they oppose them in defence of Rome, with which they are at war? Ah! the way of falsehood, the way of treachery, — how dark, how full of pitfalls and traps! Heaven defend from it all who are not yet engaged therein! War near at hand seems to me even more dreadful than I had fancied it. True, it tries men’s souls, lays bare selfishness in undeniable deformity. Here it has produced much fruit of noble sentiment, noble act; but still it breeds vice too, drunkenness, mental dissipation, tears asunder the tenderest ties, lavishes the productions of Earth, for which her starving poor stretch out their hands in vain, in the most unprofitable manner. And the ruin that ensues, how terrible! Let those who have ever passed happy days in Rome grieve to hear that the beautiful plantations of Villa Borghese — that chief delight and refreshment of citizens, foreigners, and little children — are laid low, as far as the obelisk. The fountain, singing alone amid the fallen groves, cannot be seen and heard without tears; it seems like some innocent infant calling and crowing amid dead bodies on a field which battle has strewn with the bodies of those who once cherished it. The plantations of Villa Salvage on the Tiber, also, the beautiful trees on the way from St. John Lateran to La Maria Maggiore, the trees of the Forum, are fallen. Rome is shorn of the locks which lent grace to her venerable brow. She looks desolate, profaned. I feel what I never expected to, — as if I might by and by be willing to leave Rome. Then I have, for the first time, seen what wounded men suffer. The night of the 30th of April I passed in the hospital, and saw the terrible agonies of those dying or who needed amputation, felt their mental pains and longing for the loved ones who were away; for many of these were Lombards, who had come from the field of Novarra to fight with a fairer chance, — many were students of the University, who had enlisted and thrown themselves into the front of the engagement. The impudent falsehoods of the French general’s despatches are incredible. The French were never decoyed on in any way. They were received with every possible mark of hostility. They were defeated in open field, the Garibaldi legion rushing out to meet them; and though they suffered much from the walls, they sustained themselves nowhere. They never put up a white flag till they wished to surrender. The vanity that strives to cover over these facts is unworthy of men. The only excuse for the imprudent conduct of the expedition is that they were deceived, not by the Romans here, but by the priests of Gaëta, leading them to expect action in their favor within the walls. These priests themselves were deluded by their hopes and old habits of mind. The troops did not fight well, and General Oudinot abandoned his wounded without proper care. All this says nothing against French valor, proved by ages of glory, beyond the doubt of their worst foes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI They were demoralized because they fought in so bad a cause, and there was no sincere ardor or clear hope in any breast. But to return to the hospitals: these were put in order, and have been kept so, by the Princess Belgioioso. The princess was born of one of the noblest families of the Milanese, a descendant of the great Trivalzio, and inherited a large fortune. Very early she compromised it in liberal movements, and, on their failure, was obliged to fly to Paris, where for a time she maintained herself by writing, and I think by painting also. A princess so placed naturally excited great interest, and she drew around her a little court of celebrated men. After recovering her fortune, she still lived in Paris, distinguished for her talents and munificence, both toward literary men and her exiled countrymen. Later, on her estate, called Locate, between Pavia and Milan, she had made experiments in the Socialist direction with fine judgment and success. Association for education, for labor, for transaction of household affairs, had been carried on for several years; she had spared no devotion of time and money to this object, loved, and was much beloved by, those objects of her care, and said she hoped to die there. All is now despoiled and broken up, though it may be hoped that some seeds of peaceful reform have been sown which will spring to light when least expected. The princess returned to Italy in 1847-8, full of hope in Pius IX and Charles Albert. She showed her usual energy and truly princely heart, sustaining, at her own expense, a company of soldiers and a journal up to the last sad betrayal of Milan, August 6th. These days undeceived all the people, but few of the noblesse; she was one of the few with mind strong enough to understand the lesson, and is now warmly interested in the republican movement. From Milan she went to France, but, finding it impossible to effect anything serious there in behalf of Italy, returned, and has been in Rome about two months. Since leaving Milan she receives no income, her possessions being in the grasp of Radetzky, and cannot know when, if ever, she will again. But as she worked so largely and well with money, so can she without. She published an invitation to the Roman women to make lint and bandages, and offer their services to the wounded; she put the hospitals in order; in the central one, Trinita de Pellegrini, once the abode where the pilgrims were received during holy week, and where foreigners were entertained by seeing their feet washed by the noble dames and dignitaries of Rome, she has remained day and night since the 30th of April, when the wounded were first there. Some money she procured at first by going through Rome, accompanied by two other ladies veiled, to beg it. Afterward the voluntary contributions were generous; among the rest, I am proud to say, the Americans in Rome gave $250, of which a handsome portion came from Mr. Brown, the Consul. I value this mark of sympathy more because of the irritation and surprise occasioned here by the position of Mr. Cass, the Envoy. It is most unfortunate that we should have an envoy here for the first time, just to offend and disappoint the Romans. When all the other ambassadors are at Gaëta, ours is in Rome, as if by his presence to discountenance the republican government, which he does not recognize. Mr. Cass, it seems, is required by his instructions not to recognize the government till sure it can be sustained. Now it seems to me that the only dignified ground for our government, the only legitimate ground for any HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI republican government, is to recognize for any nation the government chosen by itself. The suffrage had been correct here, and the proportion of votes to the whole population was much larger, it was said by Americans here, than it is in our own country at the time of contested elections. It had elected an Assembly; that Assembly had appointed, to meet the exigencies of this time, the Triumvirate. If any misrepresentations have induced America to believe, as France affects to have believed, that so large a vote could have been obtained by moral intimidation, the present unanimity of the population in resisting such immense odds, and the enthusiasm of their every expression in favor of the present government, puts the matter beyond a doubt. The Roman people claims once more to have a national existence. It declines further serfdom to an ecclesiastical court. It claims liberty of conscience, of action, and of thought. Should it fall from its present position, it will not be from, internal dissent, but from foreign oppression. Since this is the case, surely our country, if no other, is bound to recognize the present government so long as it can sustain itself. This position is that to which we have a right: being such, it is no matter how it is viewed by others. But I dare assert it is the only respectable one for our country, in the eyes of the Emperor of Russia himself. The first, best occasion is past, when Mr. Cass might, had he been empowered to act as Mr. Rush did in France, have morally strengthened the staggering republic, which would have found sympathy where alone it is of permanent value, on the basis of principle. Had it been in vain, what then? America would have acted honorably; as to our being compromised thereby with the Papal government, that fear is idle. Pope and Cardinals have great hopes from America; the giant influence there is kept up with the greatest care; the number of Catholic writers in the United States, too, carefully counted. Had our republican government acknowledged this republican government, the Papal Camarilla would have respected us more, but not loved us less; for have we not the loaves and fishes to give, as well as the precious souls to be saved? Ah! here, indeed, America might go straightforward with all needful impunity. Bishop Hughes himself need not be anxious. That first, best occasion has passed, and the unrecognized, unrecognizing Envoy has given offence, and not comfort, by a presence that seemed constantly to say, I do not think you can sustain yourselves. It has wounded both the heart and the pride of Rome. Some of the lowest people have asked me, “Is it not true that your country had a war to become free?” “Yes.” “Then why do they not feel for us?” Yet even now it is not too late. If America would only hail triumphant, though she could not sustain injured Rome, that would be something. “Can you suppose Rome will triumph,” you say, “without money, and against so potent a league of foes?” I am not sure, but I hope, for I believe something in the heart of a people when fairly awakened. I have also a lurking confidence in what our fathers spoke of so constantly, a providential order of things, by which brute force and selfish enterprise are sometimes set at naught by aid which seems to descend from a higher sphere. Even old pagans believed in that, you know; and I was born in America, Christianized by the Puritans, — America, freed by eight years’ patient suffering, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI poverty, and struggle, — America, so cheered in dark days by one spark of sympathy from a foreign shore, — America, first “recognized” by Lafayette. I saw him when traversing our country, then great, rich, and free. Millions of men who owed in part their happiness to what, no doubt, was once sneered at as romantic sympathy, threw garlands in his path. It is natural that I should have some faith. Send, dear America! to thy ambassadors a talisman precious beyond all that boasted gold of California. Let it loose his tongue to cry, “Long live the Republic, and may God bless the cause of the people, the brotherhood of nations and of men, — equality of rights for all.” Viva America! Hail to my country! May she live a free, a glorious, a loving life, and not perish, like the old dominions, from, the leprosy of selfishness. Evening. I am alone in the ghostly silence of a great house, not long since full of gay faces and echoing with gay voices, now deserted by every one but me, — for almost all foreigners are gone now, driven by force either of the summer heats or the foe. I hear all the Spaniards are going now, — that twenty-one have taken passports to-day; why that is, I do not know. I shall not go till the last moment; my only fear is of France. I cannot think in any case there would be found men willing to damn themselves to latest posterity by bombarding Rome. Other cities they may treat thus, careless of destroying the innocent and helpless, the babe and old grandsire who cannot war against them. But Rome, precious inheritance of mankind, — will they run the risk of marring her shrined treasures? Would they dare do it? Two of the balls that struck St. Peter’s have been sent to Pius IX. by his children, who find themselves so much less “beloved” than were the Austrians. These two days, days of solemn festivity in the calends of the Church, have been duly kept, and the population looks cheerful as it swarms through the streets. The order of Rome, thronged as it is with troops, is amazing. I go from one end to the other, and amid the poorest and most barbarous of the population, (barbarously ignorant, I mean,) alone and on foot. My friends send out their little children alone with their nurses. The amount of crime is almost nothing to what it was. The Roman, no longer pent in ignorance and crouching beneath espionage, no longer stabs in the dark. His energies have true vent; his better feelings are roused; he has thrown aside the stiletto. The power here is indeed miraculous, since no doubt still lurk within the walls many who are eager to incite brawls, if only to give an excuse for slander. To-day I suppose twelve thousand Austrians marched into Florence. The Florentines have humbled and disgraced themselves in vain. They recalled the Grand Duke to ward off the entrance of the Austrians, but in vain went the deputation to Gaëta — in an American steamer! Leopold was afraid to come till his dear cousins of Austria had put everything in perfect order; then the Austrians entered to take Leghorn, but the Florentines still kept on imploring them not to come there; Florence was as subdued, as good as possible, already: — they have had the answer they deserved. Now they crown their work by giving over Guerazzi and Petracci to be tried by an Austrian court-martial. Truly the cup of shame brims over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI I have been out on the balcony to look over the city. All sleeps with that peculiar air of serene majesty known to this city only; — this city that has grown, not out of the necessities of commerce nor the luxuries of wealth, but first out of heroism, then out of faith. Swelling domes, roofs softly tinted with yellow moss! what deep meaning, what deep repose, in your faintly seen outline! The young moon climbs among clouds, — the clouds of a departing thunderstorm. Tender, smiling moon! can it be that thy full orb may look down on a smoking, smouldering Rome, and see her best blood run along the stones, without one nation in the world to defend, one to aid, — scarce one to cry out a tardy “Shame”? We will wait, whisper the nations, and see if they can bear it. Rack them well to see if they are brave. If they can do without us, we will help them. Is it thus ye would be served in your turn? Beware! ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

June 10, Sunday: Frédéric Kalkbrenner died at Enghien-les-Bains in the midst of a cholera epidemic, at 63 years of age.

The song “Susannah” was already wearing at people’s nerves. Here is a 49er diary entry, by Andy Gordon: I have heard “Susannah” sung at least forty times today, and now it’s bedtime and Tommy Plunkett is picking out the tune on his banjo and singing it loud enough to keep most of us awake. Don’t he ever get tired of it? I used to like that song, but enough is enough, and I believe it will drive me crazy before we get to California.

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI animates them. They make a stand here for honor and their rights, with little ground for hope that they can resist, now they are betrayed by France. Since the 30th of April, I go almost daily to the hospitals, and though I have suffered, for I had no idea before how terrible gun-shot wounds and wound-fevers are, yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men. There is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of the Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books and flowers; they read, and we talk. The palace of the Pope, on the Quirinal, is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens I walk with them, one with his sling, another with his crutch. The gardener plays off all his water-works for the defenders of the country, and gathers flowers for me, their friend. A day or two since, we sat in the Pope’s little pavilion, where he used to give private audience. The sun was going gloriously down over Monte Mario, where gleamed the white tents of the French light-horse among the trees. The cannonade was heard at intervals. Two bright-eyed boys sat at our feet, and gathered up eagerly every word said by the heroes of the day. It was a beautiful hour, stolen from the midst of ruin and sorrow, and tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit, — with noble hope for man, and reverence for woman. The young ladies of the family, very young girls, were filled with enthusiasm for the suffering, wounded patriots, and they wished to go to the hospital, to give their services. Excepting the three superintendents, none but married ladies were permitted to serve there, but their services were accepted. Their governess then wished to go too, and, as she could speak several languages, she was admitted to the rooms of the wounded soldiers, to interpret for them, as the nurses knew nothing but Italian, and many of these poor men were suffering because they could not make their wishes known. Some are French, some Germans, many Poles. Indeed, I am afraid it is too true that there were comparatively few Romans among them. This young lady passed several nights there. Should I never return, and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, — so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here, — if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself, — the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, — at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can. Let me feel that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp. I feel profoundly for Mazzini. At moments I am tempted to say, “Cursed with every granted prayer,” — so cunning is the demon. Mazzini has become the inspiring soul of his people. He saw Rome, to which all his hopes through life tended, for the first time as a Roman citizen, and to become in a few days its ruler. He has animated, he sustains her to a glorious effort, which, if it fails this time, will not in the age. His country will be free. Yet to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, — to dig the graves of such martyrs! Then, Rome is being destroyed; her glorious oaks, — her villas, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world for ever, — the villa of Raphael, the villa of Albani, home of Winckelmann and the best expression of the ideal of modern Rome, and so many other sanctuaries of beauty, — all must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter. I could not, could not! I know not, dear friend, whether I shall ever get home across that great ocean, but here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O Rome, my country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head! Speaking of the republic, you say, “Do you not wish Italy had a great man?” Mazzini is a great man. In mind, a great, poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Cæsar. Dearly I love Mazzini. He came in, just as I had finished the first letter to you. His soft, radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life, that, like the Magdalen, I may, at the important hour, shed all the consecrated ointment on his head. There is one, Mazzini, who understands thee well, — who knew thee no less when an object of popular fear than now of idolatry, — and who, if the pen be not held too feebly, will help posterity to know thee too! ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the latest negotiations and the latest betrayals: Rome, June 10, 1849. What shall I write of Rome in these sad but glorious days? Plain facts are the best; for my feelings I could not find fit words. When I last wrote, the French were playing the second act of their farce. In the first, the French government affected to consult the Assembly. The Assembly, or a majority of the Assembly, affected to believe the pretext it gave, and voted funds for twelve thousand men to go to Civita Vecchia. Arriving there, Oudinot proclaimed that he had come as a friend and brother. He was received as such. Immediately he took possession of the town, disarmed the Roman troops, and published a manifesto in direct opposition to his first declaration. He sends to Rome that he is coming there as a friend; receives the answer that he is not wanted and cannot be trusted. This answer he chooses to consider as coming from a minority, and advances on Rome. The pretended majority on which he counts never shows itself by a single movement within the walls. He makes an assault, and is defeated. On this subject his despatches to his government are full of falsehoods that would disgrace the lowest pickpocket, — falsehoods which it is impossible he should not know to be such. The Assembly passed a vote of blame. M. Louis Bonaparte writes a letter of compliment and assurance that this course of violence shall be sustained. In conformity with this promise twelve thousand more troops are sent. This time it is not thought necessary to consult the Assembly. Let us view the SECOND ACT. Now appears in Rome M. Ferdinand Lesseps, Envoy, &c. of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI French government. He declares himself clothed with full powers to treat with Rome. He cannot conceal his surprise at all he sees there, at the ability with which preparations have been made for defence, at the patriotic enthusiasm which pervades the population. Nevertheless, in beginning his game of treaty- making, he is not ashamed to insist on the French occupying the city. Again and again repulsed, he again and again returns to the charge on this point. And here I shall translate the letter addressed to him by the Triumvirate, both because of its perfect candor of statement, and to give an idea of the sweet and noble temper in which these treacherous aggressions have been met. LETTER OF THE TRIUMVIRS TO MONSIEUR LESSEPS. “May 25, 1849. “We have had the honor, Monsieur, to furnish you, in our note of the 16th, with some information as to the unanimous consent which was given to the formation of the government of the Roman Republic. We to-day would speak to you of the actual question, such as it is debated in fact, if not by right, between the French government and ours. You will allow us to do it with the frankness demanded by the urgency of the situation, as well as the sympathy which ought to govern all relations between France and Italy. Our diplomacy is the truth, and the character given to your mission is a guaranty that the best possible interpretation will be given to what we shall say to you. “With your permission, we return for an instant to the cause of the present situation of affairs. “In consequence of conferences and arrangements which took place without the government of the Roman Republic ever being called on to take part, it was some time since decided by the Catholic Powers, — 1st. That a modification should take place in the government and institutions of the Roman States; 2d. That this modification should have for basis the return of Pius IX., not as Pope, for to that no obstacle is interposed by us, but as temporal sovereign; 3d. That if, to attain that aim, a continuous intervention was judged necessary, that intervention should take place. “We are willing to admit, that while for some of the contracting governments the only motive was the hope of a general restoration and absolute return to the treaties of 1815, the French government was drawn into this agreement only in consequence of erroneous information, tending systematically to depict the Roman States as given up to anarchy and governed by terror exercised in the name of an audacious minority. We know also, that, in the modification proposed, the French government intended to represent an influence more or less liberal, opposed to the absolutist programme of Austria and of Naples. It does none the less remain true, that under the Apostolic or constitutional form, with or without liberal guaranties to the Roman people, the dominant thought in all the negotiations to which we allude has been some sort of return toward the past, a compromise between the Roman people and Pius IX. considered as temporal prince. “We cannot dissemble to ourselves, Monsieur, that the French expedition has been planned and executed under the inspiration of this thought. Its object was, on one side, to throw the sword of France into the balance of negotiations which were to be opened at Rome; on the other, to guarantee the Roman people from the excess of retrograde, but always on condition that it should HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI submit to constitutional monarchy in favor of the Holy Father. This is assured to us partly from information which we believe we possess as to the concert with Austria; from the proclamations of General Oudinot; from the formal declarations made by successive envoys to the Triumvirate; from the silence obstinately maintained whenever we have sought to approach the political question and obtain a formal declaration of the fact proved in our note of the 16th, that the institutions by which the Roman people are governed at this time are the free and spontaneous expression of the wish of the people inviolable when legally ascertained. For the rest, the vote of the French Assembly sustains implicitly the fact that we affirm. “In such a situation, under the menace of an inadmissible compromise, and of negotiations which the state of our people no way provoked, our part, Monsieur, could not be doubtful. To resist, — we owed this to our country, to France, to all Europe. We ought, in fulfilment of a mandate loyally given, loyally accepted, maintain to our country the inviolability, so far as that was possible to us, of its territory, and of the institutions decreed by all the powers, by all the elements, of the state. We ought to conquer the time needed for appeal from France ill informed to France better informed, to save the sister republic the disgrace and the remorse which must be hers if, rashly led on by bad suggestions from without, she became, before she was aware, accomplice in an act of violence to which we can find no parallel without going back to the partition of Poland in 1772. We owed it to Europe to maintain, as far as we could, the fundamental principles of all international life, the independence of each people in all that concerns its internal administration. We say it without pride, — for if it is with enthusiasm that we resist the attempts of the Neapolitan monarchy and of Austria, our eternal enemy, it is with profound grief that we are ourselves constrained to contend with the arms of France, — we believe in following this line of conduct we have deserved well, not only of our country, but of all the people of Europe, even of France herself. “We come to the actual question. You know, Monsieur, the events which have followed the French intervention. Our territory has been invaded by the king of Naples. “Four thousand Spaniards were to embark on the 17th for invasion of this country. The Austrians, having surmounted the heroic resistance of Bologna, have advanced into Romagna, and are now marching on Ancona. “We have beaten and driven out of our territory the forces of the king of Naples. We believe we should do the same by the Austrian forces, if the attitude of the French here did not fetter our action. “We are sorry to say it, but France must be informed that the expedition of Civita Vecchia, said to be planned for our protection, costs us very dear. Of all the interventions with which it is hoped to overwhelm us, that of the French has been the most perilous. Against the soldiers of Austria and the king of Naples we can fight, for God protects a good cause. But we do not wish to fight against the French. We are toward them in a state, not of war, but of simple defence. But this position, the only one we wish to take wherever we meet France, has for us all the inconveniences without any of the favorable chances of war. “The French expedition has, from the first, forced us to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI concentrate our troops, thus leaving our frontier open to Austrian invasion, and Bologna and the cities of Romagna unsustained. The Austrians have profited by this. After eight days of heroic resistance by the population, Bologna was forced to yield. We had bought in France arms for our defence. Of these ten thousand muskets have been detained between Marseilles and Civita Vecchia. These are in your hands. Thus with a single blow you deprive us of ten thousand soldiers. In every armed man is a soldier against the Austrians. “Your forces are disposed around our walls as if for a siege. They remain there without avowed aim or programme. They have forced us to keep the city in a state of defence which weighs upon our finances. They force us to keep here a body of troops who might be saving our cities from the occupation and ravages of the Austrians. They hinder our going from place to place, our provisioning the city, our sending couriers. They keep minds in a state of excitement and distrust which might, if our population were less good and devoted, lead to sinister results. They do not engender anarchy nor reaction, for both are impossible at Rome; but they sow the seed of irritation against France, and it is a misfortune for us who were accustomed to love and hope in her. “We are besieged, Monsieur, besieged by France, in the name of a protective mission, while some leagues off the king of Naples, flying, carries off our hostages, and the Austrian slays our brothers. “You have presented propositions. Those propositions have been declared inadmissible by the Assembly. To-day you add a fourth to the three already rejected. This says that France will protect from foreign invasion all that part of our territory that may be occupied by her troops. You must yourself feel that this changes nothing in our position. “The parts of the territory occupied by your troops are in fact protected; but if only for the present, to what are they reduced? and if it is for the future, have we no other way to protect our territory than by giving it up entirely to you? “The real intent of your demands is not stated. It is the occupation of Rome. This demand has constantly stood first in your list of propositions. Now we have had the honor to say to you, Monsieur, that is impossible. The people will never consent to it. If the occupation of Rome has for its aim only to protect it, the people thank you, but tell you at the same time, that, able to defend Rome by their own forces, they would be dishonored even in your eyes by declaring themselves insufficient, and needing the aid of some regiments of French soldiers. If the occupation has otherwise a political object, which God forbid, the people, who have given themselves freely these institutions, cannot suffer it. Rome is their capital, their palladium, their sacred city. They know very well, that, apart from their principles, apart from their honor, there is civil war at the end of such an occupation. They are filled with distrust by your persistence. They foresee, the troops being once admitted, changes in men and in actions which would be fatal to their liberty. They know that, in presence of foreign bayonets, the independence of their Assembly, of their government, would be a vain word. They have always Civita Vecchia before their eyes. “On this point be sure their will is irrevocable. They will be massacred from barricade to barricade, before they will HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI surrender. Can the soldiers of France wish to massacre a brother people whom they came to protect, because they do not wish to surrender to them their capital? “There are for France only three parts to take in the Roman States. She ought to declare herself for us, against us, or neutral. To declare herself for us would be to recognize our republic, and fight side by side with us against the Austrians. To declare against us is to crush without motive the liberty, the national life, of a friendly people, and fight side by side with the Austrians. France cannot do that. She will not risk a European war to depress us, her ally. Let her, then, rest neutral in this conflict between us and our enemies. Only yesterday we hoped more from her, but to-day we demand but this. “The occupation of Civita Vecchia is a fact accomplished; let it go. France thinks that, in the present state of things, she ought not to remain distant from the field of battle. She thinks that, vanquishers or vanquished, we may have need of her moderative action and of her protection. We do not think so; but we will not react against her. Let her keep Civita Vecchia. Let her even extend her encampments, if the numbers of her troops require it, in the healthy regions of Civita Vecchia and Viterbo. Let her then wait the issue of the combats about to take place. All facilities will be offered her, every proof of frank and cordial sympathy given; her officers can visit Rome, her soldiers have all the solace possible. But let her neutrality be sincere and without concealed plans. Let her declare herself in explicit terms. Let her leave us free to use all our forces. Let her restore our arms. Let her not by her cruisers drive back from our ports the men who come to our aid from other parts of Italy. Let her, above all, withdraw from before our walls, and cause even the appearance of hostility to cease between two nations who, later, undoubtedly are destined to unite in the same international faith, as now they have adopted the same form of government.” In his answer, Lesseps appears moved by this statement, and particularly expresses himself thus: — “One point appears above all to occupy you; it is the thought that we wish forcibly to impose upon you the obligation of receiving us as friends. Friendship and violence are incompatible. Thus it would be inconsistent on our part to begin by firing our cannon upon you, since we are your natural protectors. Such a contradiction enters neither into my intentions, nor those of the government of the French republic, nor of our army and its honorable chief.” These words were written at the head-quarters of Oudinot, and of course seen and approved by him. At the same time, in private conversation, “the honorable chief” could swear he would occupy Rome by “one means or another.” A few days after, Lesseps consented to conditions such as the Romans would tolerate. He no longer insisted on occupying Rome, but would content himself with good positions in the country. Oudinot protested that the Plenipotentiary had “exceeded his powers,” — that he should not obey, — that the armistice was at an end, and he should attack Rome on Monday. It was then Friday. He proposed to leave these two days for the few foreigners that remained to get out of town. M. Lesseps went off to Paris, in great seeming indignation, to get his treaty ratified. Of course we could not hear from him for eight or ten days. Meanwhile, the honorable chief, alike in all his conduct, attacked on Sunday instead of Monday. The attack HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI began before sunrise, and lasted all day. I saw it from my window, which, though distant, commands the gate of St. Pancrazio. Why the whole force was bent on that part, I do not know. If they could take it, the town would be cannonaded, and the barricades useless; but it is the same with the Pincian Gate. Small-parties made feints in two other directions, but they were at once repelled. The French fought with great bravery, and this time it is said with beautiful skill and order, sheltering themselves in their advance by movable barricades. The Italians fought like lions, and no inch of ground was gained by the assailants. The loss of the French is said to be very great: it could not be otherwise. Six or seven hundred Italians are dead or wounded. Among them are many officers, those of Garibaldi especially, who are much exposed by their daring bravery, and whose red tunic makes them the natural mark of the enemy. It seems to me great folly to wear such a dress amid the dark uniforms; but Garibaldi has always done it. He has now been wounded twice here and seventeen times in Ancona. All this week I have been much at the hospitals where are these noble sufferers. They are full of enthusiasm; this time was no treason, no Vicenza, no Novara, no Milan. They had not been given up by wicked chiefs at the moment they were shedding their blood, and they had conquered. All were only anxious to get out again and be at their posts. They seemed to feel that those who died so gloriously were fortunate; perhaps they were, for if Rome is obliged to yield, — and how can she stand always unaided against the four powers? — where shall these noble youths fly? They are the flower of the Italian youth; especially among the Lombards are some of the finest young men I have ever seen. If Rome falls, if Venice falls, there is no spot of Italian earth where they can abide more, and certainly no Italian will wish to take refuge in France. Truly you said, M. Lesseps, “Violence and friendship are incompatible.” A military funeral of the officer Ramerino was sadly picturesque and affecting. The white-robed priests went before the body singing, while his brothers in arms bore the lighted tapers. His horse followed, saddled and bridled. The horse hung his head and stepped dejectedly; he felt there was something strange and gloomy going on, — felt that his master was laid low. Ramerino left a wife and children. A great proportion of those who run those risks are, happily, alone. Parents weep, but will not suffer long; their grief is not like that of widows and children. Since the 3d we have only cannonade and skirmishes. The French are at their trenches, but cannot advance much; they are too much molested from the walls. The Romans have made one very successful sortie. The French availed themselves of a violent thunderstorm, when the walls were left more thinly guarded, to try to scale them, but were immediately driven back. It was thought by many that they never would be willing to throw bombs and shells into Rome, but they do whenever they can. That generous hope and faith in them as republicans and brothers, which put the best construction on their actions, and believed in their truth as far as possible, is now destroyed. The government is false, and the people do not resist; the general is false, and the soldiers obey. Meanwhile, frightful sacrifices are being made by Rome. All her glorious oaks, all her gardens of delight, her casinos, full of the monuments of genius and taste, are perishing in the defence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The houses, the trees which had been spared at the gate of St. Pancrazio, all afforded shelter to the foe, and caused so much loss of life, that the Romans have now fully acquiesced in destruction agonizing to witness. Villa Borghese is finally laid waste, the villa of Raphael has perished, the trees are all cut down at Villa Albani, and the house, that most beautiful ornament of Rome, must, I suppose, go too. The stately marble forms are already driven from their place in that portico where Winckelmann sat and talked with such delight. Villa Salvage is burnt, with all its fine frescos, and that bank of the Tiber shorn of its lovely plantations. Rome will never recover the cruel ravage of these days, perhaps only just begun. I had often thought of living a few months near St. Peter’s, that I might go as much as I liked to the church and the museum, have Villa Pamfili and Monte Mario within the compass of a walk. It is not easy to find lodgings there, as it is a quarter foreigners never inhabit; but, walking about to see what pleasant places there were, I had fixed my eye on a clean, simple house near Ponte St. Angelo. It bore on a tablet that it was the property of Angela — — ; its little balconies with their old wooden rails, full of flowers in humble earthen vases, the many bird-cages, the air of domestic quiet and comfort, marked it as the home of some vestal or widow, some lone woman whose heart was centred in the ordinary and simplest pleasures of a home. I saw also she was one having the most limited income, and I thought, “She will not refuse to let me a room for a few months, as I shall be as quiet as herself, and sympathize about the flowers and birds.” Now the Villa Pamfili is all laid waste. The French encamp on Monte Mario; what they have done there is not known yet. The cannonade reverberates all day under the dome of St. Peter’s, and the house of poor Angela is levelled with the ground. I hope her birds and the white peacocks of the Vatican gardens are in safety; — but who cares for gentle, harmless creatures now? I have been often interrupted while writing this letter, and suppose it is confused as well as incomplete. I hope my next may tell of something decisive one way or the other. News is not yet come from Lesseps, but the conduct of Oudinot and the formation of the new French ministry give reason to hope no good. Many seem resolved to force back Pius IX. among his bleeding flock, into the city ruined by him, where he cannot remain, and if he come, all this struggle and sorrow is to be borne over again. Mazzini stands firm as a rock. I know not whether he hopes for a successful issue, but he believes in a God bound to protect men who do what they deem their duty. Yet how long, O Lord, shall the few trample on the many? I am surprised to see the air of perfect good faith with which articles from the London Times, upon the revolutionary movements, are copied into our papers. There exists not in Europe a paper more violently opposed to the cause of freedom than the Times, and neither its leaders nor its foreign correspondence are to be depended upon. It is said to receive money from Austria. I know not whether this be true, or whether it be merely subservient to the aristocratical feeling of England, which is far more opposed to republican movements than is that of Russia; for in England fear embitters hate. It is droll to remember our reading in the class-book. “Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are”; — HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to think how bitter the English were on the Italians who succumbed, and see how they hate those who resist. And their cowardice here in Italy is ludicrous. It is they who run away at the least intimation of danger, — it is they who invent all the “fe, fo, fum” stories about Italy, — it is they who write to the Times and elsewhere that they dare not for their lives stay in Rome, where I, a woman, walk everywhere alone, and all the little children do the same, with their nurses. More of this anon. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Fall: According to a letter in the Italian language written by Angelo’s sister Angela, a letter first published in English translation in 1969, the lovers were married in Firenze and Margaret Fuller became officially the marchésa Ossoli. But Ossoli would have no way to earn a living: “Being a nobleman is a poor trade in a ruined despotism.” And in Firenze they would not get along all that well with the Brownings. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had misgivings about Fuller’s politics, “she being one of the out and out Reds and scorners of grades of society.”

January 19, Friday: Margaret Fuller wrote to her brother Richard Frederick Fuller: Rome, January 19, 1849. MY DEAR RICHARD, — With my window open, looking out upon St. Peter’s, and the glorious Italian sun pouring in, I was just thinking of you; I was just thinking how I wished you were here, that we might walk forth and talk together under the influence of these magnificent objects. I was thinking of the proclamation HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of the Constitutional Assembly here, a measure carried by courageous youth in the face of age, sustained by the prejudices of many years, the ignorance of the people, and all the wealth of the country; yet courageous youth faces not only these, but the most threatening aspect of foreign powers, and dares a future of blood and exile to achieve privileges which are our American common birthright. I thought of the great interests which may in our country be sustained without obstacle by every able man, — interests of humanity, interests of God. I thought of the new prospects of wealth opened to our countrymen by the acquisition of New Mexico and California, — the vast prospects of our country every way, so that it is itself a vast blessing to be born an American; and I thought how impossible it is that one like you, of so strong and generous a nature, should, if he can but patiently persevere, be defrauded of a rich, manifold, powerful life. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

January 25, Thursday: Margaret Fuller wrote to her brother Richard Frederick Fuller: Thursday eve, January 25. This has been a most beautiful day, and I have taken a long walk out of town. How much I should like sometimes to walk with you again! I went to the church of St. Lorenzo, one of the most ancient in Rome, rich in early mosaics, also with spoils from the temples, marbles, ancient sarcophagi with fine bassirilievi, and magnificent columns. There is a little of everything, but the medley is harmonized by the action of time, and the sensation induced is that of repose. It has the public cemetery, and there lie the bones of many poor; the rich and noble lie in lead coffins in the church vaults of Rome, but St. Lorenzo loved the poor. When his tormentors insisted on knowing where he had hid his riches, — ”There,” he said, pointing to the crowd of wretches who hovered near his bed, compelled to see the tyrants of the earth hew down the tree that had nourished and sheltered them. Amid the crowd of inexpressive epitaphs, one touched me, erected by a son to his father. “He was,” says the son, “an angel of prosperity, seeking our good in distant countries with unremitting toll and pain. We owe him all. For his death it is my only consolation that in life I never left his side.” Returning, I passed the Pretorian Camp, the Campus Salisetus, where vestals that had broken their vows were buried alive in the city whose founder was born from a similar event. Such are the usual, the frightful inconsistencies of mankind. From my windows I see the Barberini palace; in its chambers are the pictures of the Cenci, and the Galatea, so beautifully described by Goethe; in the gardens are the remains of the tomb of Servius Tullius. Yesterday as I went forth I saw the house where Keats lived in Rome, and where he died; I saw the Casino of Raphael. Returning, I passed the villa where Goethe lived when in Rome: afterwards, the houses of Claude and Poussin. Ah what human companionship here! how everything speaks! I live myself in the apartment described in Andersen’s “Improvvisatore,” which get you, and read a scene of the childhood of Antonio. I have the room, I suppose, indicated as HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI being occupied by the Danish sculptor. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

February 20, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Bronson Alcott in Boston.

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI imagined. A ragamuffin with a little piece of candle, not even lighted, thrusts it in your face with an air of far greater superiority than he can wear who, dressed in gold and velvet, erect in his carriage, holds aloft his light on a tall pole. In vain his security; while he looks down on the crowd to taunt the wretches senza mo, a weak female hand from a chamber window blots out his pretensions by one flirt of an old handkerchief. Many handsome women, otherwise dressed in white, wore the red liberty cap, and the noble though somewhat coarse Roman outline beneath this brilliant red, by the changeful glow of million lights, made a fine effect. Men looked too vulgar in the liberty cap. How I mourn that my little companion E. never saw these things, that would have given him such store of enchanting reminiscences for all his after years! I miss him always on such occasions; formerly it was through him that I enjoyed them. He had the child’s heart, had the susceptible fancy, and, naturally, a fine discerning sense for whatever is individual or peculiar. I missed him much at the Fair of St. Eustachio. This, like the Carnival, was last year entirely spoiled by constant rain. I never saw it at all before. It comes in the first days, or rather nights, of January. All the quarter of St. Eustachio is turned into one toy-shop; the stalls are set out in the street and brightly lighted, up. These are full of cheap toys, — prices varying from half a cent up to twenty cents. The dolls, which are dressed as husband and wife, or sometimes grouped in families, are the most grotesque rag-babies that can be imagined. Among the toys are great quantities of whistles, tin trumpets, and little tambourines; of these every man, woman, and child has bought one, and is using it to make a noise. This extempore concert begins about ten o’clock, and lasts till midnight; the delight of the numerous children that form part of the orchestra, the good-humored familiarity without the least touch of rudeness in the crowd, the lively effect of the light upon the toys, and the jumping, shouting figures that, exhibit them, make this the pleasantest Saturnalia. Had you only been there, E., to guide me by the hand, blowing the trumpet for both, and spying out a hundred queer things in nooks that entirely escape me! The Roman still plays amid his serious affairs, and very serious have they been this past winter. The Roman legions went out singing and dancing to fight in Lombardy, and they fought no less bravely for that. When I wrote last, the Pope had fled, guided, he says, “by the hand of Providence,” — Italy deems by the hand of Austria, — to Gaëta. He had already soiled his white robes, and defamed himself for ever, by heaping benedictions on the king of Naples and the bands of mercenaries whom he employs to murder his subjects on the least sign of restlessness in their most painful position. Most cowardly had been the conduct of his making promises he never meant to keep, stealing away by night in the coach of a foreign diplomatist, protesting that what he had done was null because he had acted under fear, — as if such a protest could avail to one who boasts himself representative of Christ and his Apostles, guardian of the legacy of the martyrs! He selected a band of most incapable men to face the danger he had feared for himself; most of these followed his example and fled. Rome sought an interview with him, to see if reconciliation were HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI possible; he refused to receive her messengers. His wicked advisers calculated upon great confusion and distress as inevitable on the occasion; but, for once, the hope of the bad heart was doomed to immediate disappointment. Rome coolly said, “If you desert me, — if you will not hear me, — I must act for myself.” She threw herself into the arms of a few men who had courage and calmness for this crisis; they bade her think upon what was to be done, meanwhile avoiding every excess that could give a color to calumny and revenge. The people, with admirable good sense, comprehended and followed up this advice. Never was Rome so truly tranquil, so nearly free from gross ill, as this winter. A few words of brotherly admonition have been more powerful than all the spies, dungeons, and scaffolds of Gregory. “The hand of the Omnipotent works for us,” observed an old man whom I saw in the street selling cigars the evening before the opening of the Constitutional Assembly. He was struck by the radiant beauty of the night. The old people observe that there never has been such a winter as this which follows the establishment by the French of a republic. May the omens speed well! A host of enemies without are ready to levy war against this long-suffering people, to rivet anew their chains. Still there is now an obvious tide throughout Europe toward a better order of things, and a wave of it may bear Italy onward to the shore. The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them. The waters, which had flowed so secretly beneath the crust of habit that many never heard their murmur, unless in dreams, have suddenly burst to light in full and beautiful jets; all rush to drink the pure and living draught. As in the time of Jesus, the multitude had been long enslaved beneath a cumbrous ritual, their minds designedly darkened by those who should have enlightened them, brutified, corrupted, amid monstrous contradictions and abuses; yet the moment they hear a word correspondent to the original nature, “Yes, it is true,” they cry. “It is spoken with, authority. Yes, it ought to be so. Priests ought to be better and wiser than other men; if they were, they would not need pomp and temporal power to command respect. Yes, it is true; we ought not to lie; we should not try to impose upon one another. We ought rather to prefer that our children should work honestly for their bread, than get it by cheating, begging, or the prostitution of their mothers. It would be better to act worthily and kindly, probably would please God more than the kissing of relics. We have long darkly felt that these things were so; now we know it.” The unreality of relation between the people and the hierarchy was obvious instantly upon the flight of Pius. He made an immense mistake then, and he made it because neither he nor his Cardinals were aware of the unreality. They did not know that, great as is the force of habit, truth only is imperishable. The people had abhorred Gregory, had adored Pius, upon whom they looked as a saviour, as a liberator; finding themselves deceived, a mourning-veil had overshadowed their love. Still, had Pius remained here, and had courage to show himself on agitating occasions, his position as the Pope, before whom they had been bred to bow, his aspect, which had once seemed to them full of blessing and promise, like that of an angel, would have still retained power. Probably the temporal dominion of the Papacy HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI would not have been broken up. He fled; the people felt contempt for his want of force and truth. He wrote to reproach them with ingratitude; they were indignant. What had they to be grateful for? A constitution to which he had not kept true an instant; the institution of the National Guard, which he had begun to neutralize; benedictions, followed by such actions as the desertion of the poor volunteers in the war for Italian independence? Still, the people were not quite alienated from Pius. They felt sure that his heart was, in substance, good and kindly, though the habits of the priest and the arts of his counsellors had led him so egregiously to falsify its dictates and forget the vocation with which he had been called. Many hoped he would see his mistake, and return to be at one with the people. Among the more ignorant, there was a superstitious notion that he would return in the night of the 5th of January. There were many bets that he would be found in the palace of the Quirinal the morning of the 6th. All these lingering feelings were finally extinguished by the advice of excommunication. As this may not have readied America, I subjoin a translation. Here I was obliged to make use of a manuscript copy; all the printed ones were at once destroyed. It is probably the last document of the kind the world will see. MANIFESTO OF PIUS IX. “To OUR MOST BELOVED SUBJECTS: — “From this pacific abode to which it has pleased Divine Providence to conduct us, and whence we can freely manifest our sentiments and our will, we have waited for testimonies of remorse from our misguided children for the sacrileges and misdeeds committed against persons attached to our service, — among whom some have been slain, others outraged in the most barbarous manner, — as well as for those against our residence and our person. But we have seen nothing except a sterile invitation to return to our capital, unaccompanied by a word of condemnation for those crimes or the least guaranty for our security against the frauds and violences of that same company of furious men which still tyrannizes with a barbarous despotism over Rome and the States of the Church. We also waited, expecting that the protests and orders we have uttered would recall to the duties of fidelity and subjection those who have despised and trampled upon them in the very capital of our States. But, instead of this, a new and more monstrous act of undisguised felony and of actual rebellion by them audaciously committed, has filled the measure of our affliction, and excited at the same time our just indignation, as it will afflict the Church Universal. We speak of that act, in every respect detestable, by which, it has been pretended to initiate the convocation of a so-called General National Assembly of the Roman States, by a decree of the 29th of last December, in order to establish new political forms for the Pontifical dominion. Adding thus iniquity to iniquity, the authors and favorers of the demagogical anarchy strive to destroy the temporal authority of the Roman Pontiff over the dominions of Holy Church, — however irrefragably established through the most ancient and solid rights, and venerated, recognized, and sustained by all the nations, — pretending and making others believe that his sovereign power can be subject to controversy or depend on the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI caprices of the factious. We shall spare our dignity the humiliation of dwelling on all that is monstrous contained in that act, abominable through the absurdity of its origin no less than the illegality of its form and the impiety of its scope; but it appertains to the apostolic authority, with which, however unworthy, we are invested, and to the responsibility which binds us by the most sacred oaths in the sight of the Omnipotent, not only to protest in the most energetic and efficacious manner against that same act, but to condemn it in the face of the universe as an enormous and sacrilegious crime against our independence and sovereignty, meriting the chastisements threatened by divine and human laws. We are persuaded that, on receiving the impudent invitation, you were full of holy indignation, and will have rejected far from you this guilty and shameful provocation. Notwithstanding, that none of you may say he has been deluded by fallacious seductions, and by the preachers of subversive doctrines, or ignorant of what is contriving by the foes of all order, all law, all right, true liberty, and your happiness, we to-day again raise and utter abroad our voice, so that you may be more certain of the absoluteness with which we prohibit men, of whatever class and condition, from taking any part in the meetings which those persons may dare to call, for the nomination of individuals to be sent to the condemned Assembly. At the same time we recall to you how this absolute prohibition is sanctioned by the decrees of our predecessors and of the Councils, especially of the Sacred Council-General of Trent, Sect. XXII. Chap. 11, in which the Church has fulminated many times her censures, and especially the greater excommunication, as incurred without fail by any declaration of whomsoever daring to become guilty of whatsoever attempt against the temporal sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff, this we declare to have been already unhappily incurred by all those who have given aid to the above-named act, and others preceding, intended to prejudice the same sovereignty, and in other modes and under false pretexts have, perturbed, violated, and usurped our authority. Yet, though we feel ourselves obliged by conscience to guard the sacred deposit of the patrimony of the Spouse of Jesus Christ, confided to our care, by using the sword of severity given to us for that purpose, we cannot therefore forget that we are on earth the representative of Him who in exercise of his justice does not forget mercy. Raising, therefore, our hands to Heaven, while we to it recommend a cause which is indeed more Heaven’s than ours, and while anew we declare ourselves ready, with the aid of its powerful grace, to drink even to the dregs, for the defence and glory of the Catholic Church, the cup of persecution which He first wished to drink for the salvation of the same, we shall not desist from supplicating Him benignly to hear the fervent prayers which day and night we unceasingly offer for the salvation of the misguided. No day certainly could be more joyful for us, than that in which it shall be granted to see return into the fold of the Lord our sons from whom now we derive so much bitterness and so great tribulations. The hope of enjoying soon the happiness of such a day is strengthened in us by the reflection, that universal are the prayers which, united to ours, ascend to the throne of Divine Mercy from the lips and the heart of the faithful throughout the Catholic world, urging it continually to change the hearts of sinners, and reconduct HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI them into the paths of truth and of justice.

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI real use by embodying the distrust and aversion that brooded in the minds of men against these most insidious and inveterate foes of liberty and progress. This triumph, at least, he may boast: that sect has been obliged to yield; its extinction seems impossible, of such life-giving power was the fiery will of Loyola. In the Primate he had embodied the lingering hope of the Catholic Church; Pius IX. had answered to the appeal, had answered only to show its futility. He had run through Italy as courier for Charles Albert, when the so falsely styled Magnanimous entered, pretending to save her from the stranger, really hoping to take her for himself. His own cowardice and treachery neutralized the hope, and Charles Albert, abject in his disgrace, took a retrograde ministry. This the country would not suffer, and obliged him after a while to reassume at least the position of the previous year, by taking Gioberti for his premier. But it soon became evident that the ministry of Charles Albert was in the same position as had been that of Pius IX. The hand was powerless when the head was indisposed. Meantime the name of Mazzini had echoed through Tuscany from the revered lips of Montanelli; it reached the Roman States, and though at first propagated by foreign impulse, yet, as soon as understood, was welcomed as congenial. Montanelli had nobly said, addressing Florence: “We could not regret that the realization of this project should take place in a sister city, still more illustrious than ours.” The Romans took him at his word; the Constitutional Assembly for the Roman States was elected with a double mandate, that the deputies might sit in the Constitutional Assembly for all Italy whenever the other provinces could send theirs. They were elected by universal suffrage. Those who listened to Jesuits and Moderates predicted that the project would fail of itself. The people were too ignorant to make use of the liberty of suffrage. But ravens now-a-days are not the true prophetic birds. The Roman eagle recommences her flight, and it is from its direction only that the high-priest may draw his augury. The people are certainly as ignorant as centuries of the worst government, the neglect of popular education, the enslavement of speech and the press, could make them; yet they have an instinct to recognize measures that are good for them. A few weeks’ schooling at some popular meetings, the clubs, the conversations of the National Guards in their quarters or on patrol, were sufficient to concert measures so well, that the people voted in larger proportion than at contested elections in our country, and made a very good choice. The opening of the Constitutional Assembly gave occasion for a fine procession. All the troops in Rome defiled from the Campidoglio; among them many bear the marks of suffering from the Lombard war. The banners of Sicily, Venice, and Bologna waved proudly; that of Naples was veiled with crape. I was in a balcony in the Piazza di Venezia; the Palazzo di Venezia, that sternest feudal pile, so long the head-quarters of Austrian machinations, seemed to frown, as the bands each in passing struck up the Marseillaise. The nephew of Napoleon and Garibaldi, the hero of Montevideo, walked together, as deputies. The deputies, a grave band, mostly advocates or other professional men, walked without other badge of distinction than the tricolored scarf. I remembered the entrance of the deputies to the Council only fourteen months ago, in the magnificent HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI carriages lent by the princes for the occasion; they too were mostly nobles, and their liveried attendants followed, carrying their scutcheons. Princes and councillors have both fled or sunk into nothingness; in those councillors was no counsel. Will it be found in the present? Let us hope so! What we see to-day has much more the air of reality than all that parade of scutcheons, or the pomp of dress and retinue with which the Ecclesiastical Court was wont to amuse the people. A few days after followed the proclamation of a Republic. An immense crowd of people surrounded the Palazzo della Cancelleria, within whose court-yard Rossi fell, while the debate was going on within. At one o’clock in the morning of the 9th of February, a Republic was resolved upon, and the crowd rushed away to ring all the bells. Early next morning I rose and went forth to observe the Republic. Over the Quirinal I went, through the Forum, to the Capitol. There was nothing to be seen except the magnificent calm emperor, the tamers of horses, the fountain, the trophies, the lions, as usual; among the marbles, for living figures, a few dirty, bold women, and Murillo boys in the sun just as usual. I passed into the Corso; there were men in the liberty cap, — of course the lowest and vilest had been the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars persecuting as impudently as usual. I met some English; all their comfort was, “It would not last a month.” “They hoped to see all these fellows shot yet.” The English clergyman, more mild and legal, only hopes to see them (i.e. the ministry, deputies, &c.) hung. Mr. Carlyle would be delighted with his countrymen. They are entirely ready and anxious to see a Cromwell for Italy. They, too, think, when the people starve, “It is no matter what happens in the back parlor.” What signifies that, if there is “order” in the front? How dare the people make a noise to disturb us yawning at billiards! I met an American. He “had no confidence in the Republic.” Why? Because he “had no confidence in the people.” Why? Because “they were not like our people.” Ah! Jonathan and John, — excuse me, but I must say the Italian has a decided advantage over you in the power of quickly feeling generous sympathy, as well as some other things which I have not time now to particularize. I have memoranda from you both in my note-book. At last the procession mounts the Campidoglio. It is all dressed with banners. The tricolor surmounts the palace of the senator; the senator himself has fled. The deputies mount the steps, and one of them reads, in a clear, friendly voice, the following words: — “FUNDAMENTAL DECREE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY OF ROME. “ART. I. — The Papacy has fallen in fact and in right from the temporal government of the Roman State. “ART. II. — The Roman Pontiff shall have all the necessary guaranties for independence in the exercise of his spiritual power. “ART. III. — The form of government of the Roman State shall be a pure democracy, and will take the glorious name of Roman Republic. “ART. IV. — The Roman Republic shall have with the rest HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of Italy the relations exacted by a common nationality.” Between each of these expressive sentences the speaker paused; the great bell of the Capitol gave forth its solemn melodies; the cannon answered; while the crowd shouted, Viva la Republica! Viva Italia! The imposing grandeur of the spectacle to me gave new force to the emotion that already swelled my heart; my nerves thrilled, and I longed to see in some answering glance a spark of Rienzi, a little of that soul which made my country what she is. The American at my side remained impassive. Receiving all his birthright from a triumph of democracy, he was quite indifferent to this manifestation on this consecrated spot. Passing the winter in Rome to study art, he was insensible to the artistic beauty of the scene, — insensible to this new life of that spirit from which all the forms he gazes at in galleries emanated. He “did not see the use of these popular demonstrations.” Again I must mention a remark of his, as a specimen of the ignorance in which Americans usually remain during their flighty visits to these scenes, where they associate only with one another. And I do it the rather as this seemed a really thoughtful, intelligent man; no vain, vulgar trifler. He said, “The people seem only to be looking on; they take no part.” What people? said I. “Why, these around us; there is no other people.” There are a few beggars, errand-boys, and nurse-maids. “The others are only soldiers.” Soldiers! The Civic Guard! all the decent men in Rome. Thus it is that the American, on many points, becomes more ignorant for coming abroad, because he attaches some value to his crude impressions and frequent blunders. It is not thus that any seed-corn can be gathered from foreign gardens. Without modest scrutiny, patient study, and observation, he spends his money and goes home, with a new coat perhaps, but a mind befooled rather than instructed. It is necessary to speak the languages of these countries, and know personally some of their inhabitants, in order to form any accurate impressions. The flight of the Grand Duke of Tuscany followed. In imitation of his great exemplar, he promised and smiled to the last, deceiving Montanelli, the pure and sincere, at the very moment he was about to enter his carriage, into the belief that he persevered in his assent to the liberal movement. His position was certainly very difficult, but he might have left it like a gentleman, like a man of honor. ‘T was pity to destroy so lightly the good opinion the Tuscans had of him. Now Tuscany meditates union with Rome. Meanwhile, Charles Albert is filled with alarm. He is indeed betwixt two fires. Gioberti has published one of his prolix, weak addresses, in which, he says, that in the beginning of every revolution one must fix a limit beyond which he will not go; that, for himself, he has done it, — others are passing beyond his mark, and he will not go any farther. Of the want of thought, of insight into historic and all other truths, which distinguishes the “illustrious Gioberti,” this assumption is a specimen. But it makes no difference; he and his prince must go, sooner or later, if the movement continues, nor is there any prospect of its being stayed unless by foreign intervention. This the Pope has not yet, it is believed, solicited, but there is little reason to hope he will be spared that crowning HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI disgrace. He has already consented to the incitement of civil war. Should an intervention be solicited, all depends on France. Will she basely forfeit every pledge and every duty, to say nothing of her true interest? It seems that her President stands doubtful, intending to do what is for his particular interest; but if his interest proves opposed to the republican principle, will France suffer herself again to be hoodwinked and enslaved? It is impossible to know, she has already shown such devotion to the mere prestige of a name. On England no dependence can be placed. She is guided by no great idea; her Parliamentary leaders sneer at sentimental policy, and the “jargon” of ideas. She will act, as always, for her own interest; and the interest of her present government is becoming more and more the crushing of the democratic tendency. They are obliged to do it at home, both in the back and the front parlor; it would not be decent as yet to have a Spielberg just at home for obstreperous patriots, but England has so many ships, it is just as easy to transport them to a safe distance. Then the Church of England, so long an enemy to the Church of Rome, feels a decided interest with it on the subject of temporal possessions. The rich English traveller, fearing to see the Prince Borghese stripped of one of his palaces for a hospital or some such low use, thinks of his own twenty-mile park and the crowded village of beggars at its gate, and muses: “I hope to see them all shot yet, these rascally republicans.” How I wish my country would show some noble sympathy when an experience so like her own is going on. Politically she cannot interfere; but formerly, when Greece and Poland were struggling, they were at least aided by private contributions. Italy, naturally so rich, but long racked and impoverished by her oppressors, greatly needs money to arm and clothe her troops. Some token of sympathy, too, from America would be so welcome to her now. If there were a circle of persons inclined to trust such to me, I might venture to promise the trust should be used to the advantage of Italy. It would make me proud to have my country show a religious faith in the progress of ideas, and make some small sacrifice of its own great resources in aid of a sister cause, now. But I must close this letter, which it would be easy to swell to a volume from the materials in my mind. One or two traits of the hour I must note. Mazzarelli, chief of the present ministry, was a prelate, and named spontaneously by the Pope before his flight. He has shown entire and frank intrepidity. He has laid aside the title of Monsignor, and appears before the world as a layman. Nothing can be more tranquil than has been the state of Rome all winter. Every wile has been used by the Oscurantists to excite the people, but their confidence in their leaders could not be broken. A little mutiny in the troops, stimulated by letters from their old leaders, was quelled in a moment. The day after the proclamation of the Republic, some zealous ignoramuses insulted the carriages that appeared with servants in livery. The ministry published a grave admonition, that democracy meant liberty, not license, and that he who infringed upon an innocent freedom of action in others must be declared traitor to his country. Every act of the kind ceased instantly. An intimation that it was better not to throw large comfits or oranges during the Carnival, as injuries have thus been sometimes caused, was HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI obeyed with equal docility. On Sunday last, placards affixed in the high places summoned the city to invest Giuseppe Mazzini with the rights of a Roman citizen. I have not yet heard the result. The Pope made Rossi a Roman citizen; he was suffered to retain that title only one day. It was given him on the 14th of November, he died the 15th. Mazzini enters Rome at any rate, for the first time in his life, as deputy to the Constitutional Assembly; it would be a noble poetic justice, if he could enter also as a Roman citizen. February 24. The Austrians have invaded Ferrara, taken $200,000 and six hostages, and retired. This step is, no doubt, intended to determine whether France will resent the insult, or whether she will betray Italy. It shows also the assurance of the Austrian that the Pope will approve of an armed intervention. Probably before I write again these matters will reach some decided crisis. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Hawthorne’s judgment would be that Thoreau “despises the world, and all that it has to offer, and, like other humorists, is an intolerable bore”: He despises the world, and all that it has to offer, and, like other humorists, is an intolerable bore. I shall cause it to be known to him that you sat up till two o’clock reading his book; and he will pretend that it is of no consequence, but will never forget it.... He is not an agreeable person, and in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or having written a book that the public will read — his own mode of life being so unsparing a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves. — Hawthorne’s letter of November 18, 1854 to Richard Monckton Milnes,

91. In reading through Hawthorne’s materials, I have been gobstruck with the extent to which he was deploying the categories “agreeable,” “not agreeable,” and “disagreeable.” Circumstances are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! The persons whom he encountered are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! This seems to have been for him the utterly fundamental categorization of all reality! As a flaming sexist, everything female was of course “disagreeable.” As a flaming racist, everything black and everything connected in any way with blackness (such as Republicanism or abolitionism) was also “disagreeable.” However, I have been forced to the conclusion upon close reading that the distinction being made between the first two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “not agreeable”) was more of a class thing, and that that distinction had been different in kind from the disjunction he had been attempting between the outside two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “disagreeable”). It is almost as if he had been attempting a triage, a triage between the grand souls of Heaven with the more dicey souls floating somehow in Purgatory, versus demonic evils forever consigned to an Outer Darkness. It seems significant, therefore, that in the case of this communication with a member of the British nobility, Thoreau is merely allowed to float in limbo as “not an agreeable person” (one of the souls held in a Purgatory), rather than being utterly condemned to the flames as “disagreeable.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885), page 334 in Edward Mather’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: A MODEST MAN (NY: Crowell, 1940)

March 17, Saturday: Margaret Fuller wrote to her brother Richard Frederick Fuller: Rome, March 17, 1849. I take occasion to enclose this seal, as a little birthday present, for I think you will be twenty-five in May. I have used it a great deal; the design is graceful and expressive, — the stone of some little value. I live with the severest economy consistent with my health. I could not live for less anywhere. I have renounced much, have suffered more. I trust I shall not find it impossible to accomplish, at least one of my designs. This is, to see the end of the political struggle in Italy, and write its history. I think it will come to its crisis within, this year. But to complete my work as I have begun, I must watch it to the end. This work, if I can accomplish it, will be a worthy chapter in the history of the world; and if written with the spirit which breathes through me, and with sufficient energy and calmness to execute well the details, would be what the motto on my ring indicates, — ”a possession for ever, for man.” It ought to be profitable to me pecuniarily; but in these respects Fate runs so uniformly counter to me, that I dare not expect ever to be free from perplexity and uncongenial labor. Still, these will never more be so hard to me, if I shall have done something good, which may survive my troubled existence. Yet it would be like the rest, if by ill health, want of means, or being driven prematurely from the field of observation, this hope also should be blighted. I am prepared to have it so. Only my efforts tend to the accomplishment of my object; and should they not be baffled, you will not see me before the summer of 1850. Meantime, let the future be what it may, I live as well as I can in the present. Farewell, my dear Richard; that you may lead a peaceful, aspiring, and generous life was ever, and must ever be, the prayer from the soul of your sister MARGARET. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

March 20, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott organized a new literary and social club, named “Town and Country Club.”

Henry Thoreau would not explicitly refuse to join this club, and would sometimes attend an Alcott conversation hosted by them.

The formation of this club is now of interest, in that it displays a group of 19th-Century white guys attempting to negotiate both a gender bar and a race bar. This would be transacted as of a letter that Emerson wrote on May 2, 1849, at the very formation of the club. Bronson Alcott had included on the potential membership list a number of women’s names, and if my memory serves then Margaret Fuller was on that list. This was considered just outrageous by Waldo, and a violation of everything that they had discussed. However, in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI discussing this gender bar, he indicated that he would soften his stance somewhat on the race bar. He agreed to leave the door open just a crack, in case “there be a black who is superior for his aquirements [sic] in letters or science, or for his clubbable qualities.” Now, please, put on your thinking cap and contemplate about this one. Emerson’s position, when Frederick Douglass’s membership was considered, would be emphatically NO. However, a few months earlier, in the discussion of the gender bar, he had indicated that he would soften his stance somewhat on the race bar. He had agreed to leave the door open just a crack, in case “there be a black who is superior for his aquirements [sic] in letters or science, or for his clubbable qualities.” It would seem to follow, logically, therefrom, that either Emerson had been merely blowing smoke up their asses a few months before, when he indicated this race possibility, this leaving of the door ajar a bit, or, he did not consider that Frederick Douglass, the putative author of the just-published bestseller NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, amounted to “a black who is superior for his aquirements in letters or science.” Some overlapping possibilities exist. I will enumerate them below: • Do you suppose that maybe Emerson had merely not been sincere when he indicated a few months earlier that he would leave the race door ajar? • Or, do you suppose that Emerson had been sincere, but simply did not regard Douglass’s bestselling NARRATIVE –which today we consider to be an innovative literary masterpiece– to be a worthy piece of writing? Do you suppose that his literary judgment could possibly have been that far out of whack? • Or do you suppose that maybe Emerson knew something then that today we do not know, that Douglass was not the actual author of NARRATIVE, that the manuscript of this best-selling literary masterpiece which initiated an entire genre had instead been ghost-written for him by some other person, a white person, a formally educated person having definite literary as opposed to oratorical HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI talents? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Gentle reader, do you have any preferences among the above three options?

Note that when Douglass returned from England with some money under his control that had been contributed directly to him by English supporters, money that the white abolitionists had not gotten their hands upon, and was announcing that now he was going to start a newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison attempted to reason with him. Garrison said to Douglass, in effect, — now look, boy, you don’t understand, a newspaper editor has to know how to write. Garrison the publisher said this to his very best-selling author, who had to his credit what we now regard as an innovative masterpiece, which was launching an entire confessional genre! Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E

Do you suppose that Garrison knew something then that today we do not know, that Frederick Douglass was not the actual author of NARRATIVE, that the manuscript of this best-selling literary masterpiece which initiated an entire genre had instead been ghost-written for him by some other person, a white person, a formally educated person having definite literary as opposed to oratorical talents?

I myself suppose the answer to be clear: in fact neither Garrison nor Emerson regarded Douglass as the actual author of the best-selling literary masterpiece entitled NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE. They regarded him instead as what the title exactly indicates — as the mere narrator of the story, rather than its inscriber. What, specifically, does the book claim that Douglass himself inscribed? On the title page, set off from the title by a period, appears the notation “written by himself,” and on the facing page, opposite that notation, appears Douglass’s signature as inscribed by himself: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

It is apparently a 20th-Century conceit, that Douglass wrote rather than narrated his life, for this 1845 publication!

Notice, please, that at no point during his lifetime did Douglass himself ever assert such a claim. (Notice also, please, that at no point, nowadays, has such a senior scholar as Professor Henry Louis Gates ever made such a claim.) So my question would be, who specifically in the Boston environs in 1844 and 1845 happens to have been the ghost of this manuscript?

Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on kings, republicans, and American artists: Rome, March 20, 1849. The Roman Republic moves on better than could have been expected. There are great difficulties about money, necessarily, as the government, so beset with trials and dangers, cannot command confidence in that respect. The solid coin has crept out of the country or lies hid, and in the use of paper there are the corresponding inconveniences. But the poor, always the chief sufferers from such a state of things, are wonderfully patient, and I doubt not that the new form, if Italy could be left to itself, would be settled for the advantage of all. Tuscany would soon be united with Rome, and to the Republic of Central Italy, no longer broken asunder by petty restrictions and sacrificed to the interests of a few persons, would come that prosperity natural to a region so favored by nature. Could Italy be left alone! But treacherous, selfish men at home strive to betray, and foes threaten her from without on every side. Even France, her natural ally, promises to prove foolishly and basely faithless. The dereliction from principle of her government seems certain, and thus far the nation, despite the remonstrance of a few worthy men, gives no sign of effective protest. There would be little hope for Italy, were not the thrones of her foes in a tottering state, their action liable at every moment to be distracted by domestic difficulties. The Austrian government seems as destitute of support from the nation as is possible for a government to be, and the army is no longer what it was, being made up so largely of new recruits. The Croats are uncertain in their adhesion, the war in Hungary likely to give them much to do; and if the Russian is called in, the rest of Europe becomes hostile. All these circumstances give Italy a chance she otherwise could not have; she is in great measure unfurnished with arms and money; her king in the South is a bloody, angry, well-armed foe; her king in the North, a proved traitor. Charles Albert has now declared, war because he could not do otherwise; but his sympathies are in fact all against liberty; the splendid lure that he might become king of Italy glitters no more; the Republicans are in the ascendant, and he may well doubt, should the stranger be driven out, whether Piedmont could escape the contagion. Now, his people insisting on war, he has the air of making it with a good grace; but should he be worsted, probably he will know some loophole by which to steal out. The rat will get out and leave the lion in the trap. The “illustrious Gioberti” has fallen, — fallen for ever from his high scaffold of words. His demerits were too unmistakable for rhetoric to hide. That he sympathized with the Pope rather than the Roman people, and could not endure to see him stripped of his temporal power, no one could blame in the author of the Primato. That he refused the Italian General Assembly, if it was to be based on the so-called Montanelli system instead of his own, might be conviction, or it might be littleness and vanity. But that he privily planned, without even adherence of the council of ministers, an armed intervention of the Piedmontese troops in Tuscany, thus willing to cause civil war, and, at this great moment, to see Italian blood shed by Italian hands, was treachery. I think, indeed, he has been probably made the scape- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI goat in that affair; that Charles Albert planned the measure, and, finding himself unable to carry it out, in consequence of the vigilance and indignant opposition of the Chamber of Deputies, was somewhat consoled by making it an occasion to victimize the “Illustrious,” whom four weeks before the people had forced him to accept as his minister. Now the name of Gioberti is erased from the corners of the streets to which it was affixed a year ago; he is stripped of all his honorary degrees, and proclaimed an unworthy son of the country. Mazzini is the idol of the people. “Soon to be hunted out,” sneered the sceptical American. Possibly yes; for no man is secure of his palm till the fight is over. The civic wreath may be knocked from his head a hundred times in the ardor of the contest. No matter, if he can always keep the forehead pure and lofty, as will Mazzini. In thinking of Mazzini, I always remember Petrarch’s invocation to Rienzi. Mazzini comes at a riper period in the world’s history, with the same energy of soul, but of purer temper and more enlarged views to answer them. I do not know whether I mentioned a kind of poetical correspondence about Mazzini and Rossi. Rossi was also an exile for liberal principles, but he did not value his birthright; he alienated it, and as a French citizen became peer of France and representative of Louis Philippe in Italy. When, with the fatuity of those whom the gods have doomed to perish, Pius IX. took the representative of the fallen Guizot policy for his minister, he made him a Roman citizen. He was proclaimed such on the 14th of November. On the 15th he perished, before he could enter the parliament he had called. He fell at the door of the Cancelleria when it was sitting. Mazzini, in his exile, remained absolutely devoted to his native country. Because, though feeling as few can that the interests of humanity in all nations are identical, he felt also that, born of a race so suffering, so much needing devotion and energy, his first duty was to that. The only powers he acknowledged were God and the People, the special scope of his acts the unity and independence of Italy. Rome was the theme of his thoughts, but, very early exiled, he had never seen that home to which all the orphans of the soul so naturally turn. Now he entered it as a Roman citizen, elected representative of the people by universal suffrage. His motto, Dio e Popolo, is put upon the coin with the Roman eagle; unhappily this first-issued coin is of brass, or else of silver, with much alloy. Dii, avertite omen, and may peaceful days turn it all to pure gold! On his first entrance to the house, Mazzini, received with fervent applause and summoned, to take his place beside the President, spoke as follows: — “It is from me, colleagues, that should come these tokens of applause, these tokens of affection, because the little good I have not done, but tried to do, has come to me from Rome. Rome was always a sort of talisman for me; a youth, I studied the history of Italy, and found, while all the other nations were born, grew up, played their part in the world, then fell to reappear no more in the same power, a single city was privileged by God to die only to rise again greater than before, to fulfil a mission greater than the first. I saw the Rome of the Empire extend her conquests from the confines of Africa to the confines of Asia. I saw Rome perish, crushed by the barbarians, by those HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI whom even yet the world, calls barbarians. I saw her rise again, after having chased away these same barbarians, reviving in its sepulchre the germ of Civilization. I saw her rise more great for conquest, not with arms, but with words, — rise in the name of the Popes to repeat her grand mission. I said in my heart, the city which alone in the world has had two grand lives, one greater than the other, will have a third. After the Rome which wrought by conquest of arms, the Rome which wrought by conquest of words, must come a third which shall work by virtue of example. After the Rome of the Emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, will come the Rome of the People. The Rome of the People is arisen; do not salute with applauses, but let us rejoice together! I cannot promise anything for myself, except concurrence in all you shall do for the good of Rome, of Italy, of mankind. Perhaps we shall have to pass through great crises; perhaps we shall have to fight a sacred battle against the only enemy that threatens us, — Austria. We will fight it, and we will conquer. I hope, please God, that foreigners may not be able to say any more that which so many of them repeat to-day, speaking of our affairs, — that the light which, comes from Rome is only an ignis fatuus wandering among the tombs. The world shall see that it is a starry light, eternal, pure, and resplendent as those we look up to in the heavens!” On a later day he spoke more fully of the difficulties that threaten at home the young republic, and said: — “Let us not hear of Right, of Left, of Centre; these terms express the three powers in a constitutional monarchy; for us they have no meaning; the only divisions for us are of Republicans or non-Republicans, — or of sincere men and temporizing men. Let us not hear so much of the Republicans of to-day and of yesterday; I am a Republican of twenty years’ standing. Entertaining such hopes for Italy, when many excellent, many sincere men held them as Utopian, shall I denounce these men because they are now convinced of their practicability?” This last I quote from memory. In hearing the gentle tone of remonstrance with those of more petty mind, or influenced by the passions of the partisan, I was forcibly reminded of the parable by Jesus, of the vineyard and the discontent of the laborers that those who came at the eleventh hour “received also a penny.” Mazzini also is content that all should fare alike as brethren, if only they will come into the vineyard. He is not an orator, but the simple conversational tone of his address is in refreshing contrast with the boyish rhetoric and academic swell common to Italian speakers in the present unfledged state. As they have freer use of the power of debate, they will become more simple and manly. The speech of Mazzini is laden with thought, — it goes straight to the mark by the shortest path, and moves without effort, from the irresistible impression of deep conviction and fidelity in the speaker. Mazzini is a man of genius, an elevated thinker; but the most powerful and first impression from his presence must always be of the religion of his soul, of his virtue, both in the modern and antique sense of that word. If clearness of right, if energy, if indefatigable perseverance, can steer the ship through this dangerous pass, it will be done. He said, “We will conquer”; whether Rome will, this time, is not to me certain, but such men as Mazzini conquer always, — conquer HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI in defeat. Yet Heaven grant that no more blood, no more corruption of priestly government, be for Italy. It could only be for once more, for the strength, of her present impulse would not fail to triumph at last; but even one more trial seems too intolerably much, when I think of the holocaust of the broken hearts, baffled lives, that must attend it. But enough of politics for the present; this letter goes by private hand, and, as news, will be superseded before it can arrive. Let me rather take the opportunity to say some things that I have let lie by, while writing of political events. Especially of our artists I wish to say something. I know many of thorn, if not all, and see with pleasure our young country so fairly represented. Among the painters I saw of Brown only two or three pictures at the exhibition in Florence; they were coarse, flashy things. I was told he could do better; but a man who indulges himself with such, coarse sale-work cannot surely do well at any time. The merits of Terry and Freeman are not my merits; they are beside both favorites in our country, and have a sufficient number of pictures there for every one to judge. I am no connoisseur as regards the technical merits of paintings; it is only poetic invention, or a tender feeling of nature, which captivates me. Terry loves grace, and consciously works from the model. The result is a pleasing transposition of the hues of this clime. But the design of the picture is never original, nor is it laden with any message from, the heart. Of Freeman I know less; as the two or three pictures of his that I have seen never interested me. I have not visited his studio. Of Hicks I think very highly. He is a man of ideas, an original observer, and with a poetic heart. His system of coloring is derived from a thoughtful study, not a mere imitation of nature, and shows the fineness of his organization. Struggling unaided to pursue the expensive studies of his art, he has had only a small studio, and received only orders for little cabinet pictures. Could, he carry out adequately his ideas, in him would be found the treasure of genius. He has made the drawings for a large picture of many figures; the design is original and noble, the grouping highly effective. Could he paint this picture, I believe it would be a real boon to the lovers of art, the lovers of truth. I hope very much that, when he returns to the United States, some competent patron of art — one of the few who have mind as well as purse — will see the drawings and order the picture. Otherwise he cannot paint it, as the expenses attendant on models for so many figures, &c. are great, and the time demanded could not otherwise be taken from the claims of the day. Among landscape painters Cropsey and Cranch have the true artist spirit. In faculties, each has what the other wants. Cropsey is a reverent and careful student of nature in detail; it is no pedantry, but a true love he has, and his pictures are full of little, gentle signs of intimacy. They please and touch; but yet in poetic feeling of the heart of nature he is not equal to Cranch, who produces fine effects by means more superficial, and, on examination, less satisfactory. Each might take somewhat from the other to advantage, could he do it without diminishing his own original dower. Both are artists of high promise, and deserve to be loved and cherished by a country which may, without HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI presumption, hope to carry landscape painting to a pitch of excellence unreached before. For the historical painter, the position with us is, for many reasons, not favorable; but there is no bar in the way of the landscape painter, and fate, bestowing such a prodigality of subject, seems to give us a hint not to be mistaken. I think the love of landscape painting is genuine in our nation, and as it is a branch of art where achievement has been comparatively low, we may not unreasonably suppose it has been left for us. I trust it will be undertaken in the highest spirit. Nature, it seems to me, reveals herself more freely in our land; she is true, virgin, and confiding, — she smiles upon the vision of a true Endymion. I hope to see, not only copies upon canvas of our magnificent scenes, but a transfusion of the spirit which is their divinity. Then why should the American landscape painter come to Italy? cry many. I think, myself, he ought not to stay here very long. Yet a few years’ study is precious, for here Nature herself has worked with man, as if she wanted to help him in the composition of pictures. The ruins of Italy, in their varied relations with vegetation and the heavens, make speeches from every stone for instruction of the artist; the greatest variety here is found with the greatest harmony. To know how this union may be accomplished is a main secret of art, and though the coloring is not the same, yet he who has the key to its mysteries of beauty is the more initiated to the same in other climates, and will easily attune afresh his more instructed eye and mind to the contemplation of that which moulded his childhood. I may observe of the two artists I have named, that Cranch has entered more into the spirit of Italian landscape, while Cropsey is still more distinguished on subjects such as he first loved. He seemed to find the Scotch lake and mountain scenery very congenial; his sketches and pictures taken from a short residence there are impressive. Perhaps a melancholy or tender subject suits him best; something rich, bold, and mellow is more adapted to call out the genius of Cranch. Among the sculptors new names rise up, to show that this is decidedly a province for hope in America. I look upon this as the natural talent of an American, and have no doubt that glories will be displayed by our sculptors unknown to classic art. The facts of our history, ideal and social, will be grand and of new import; it is perfectly natural to the American to mould in clay and carve in stone. The permanence of material and solid, relief in the forms correspond to the positiveness of his nature better than the mere ephemeral and even tricky methods of the painter, — to his need of motion and action, better than the chambered scribbling of the poet. He will thus record his best experiences, and these records will adorn the noble structures that must naturally arise for the public uses of our society. It is particularly gratifying to see men that might amass far more money and attain more temporary power in other things, despise those lower lures, too powerful in our country, and aim only at excellence in the expression of thought. Among these I may mention Story and Mozier. Story has made in Florence the model for a statue of his father. This I have not seen, but two statuettes that he modelled here from the “Fisher” of Goethe pleased me extremely. The languid, meditative reverie of the boy, the morbid tenderness of his nature, is most happily expressed in the first, as is the fascinated surrender to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI siren murmur of the flood in the second. He has taken the moment “Half drew she him; half sank he in,” &c. I hope some one will give him an order to make them in marble. Mozier seemed to have an immediate success. The fidelity and spirit of his portrait-busts could be appreciated by every one; for an ideal head of Pocahontas, too, he had at once orders for many copies. It was not an Indian head, but, in the union of sweetness and strength with a princelike, childlike dignity, very happily expressive of his idea of her character. I think he has modelled a Rebecca at the Well, but this I did not see. These have already a firm hold on the affections of our people; every American who comes to Italy visits their studios, and speaks of them with pride, as indeed they well may, in comparing them with artists of other nations. It will not be long before you see Greenough’s group; it is in spirit a pendant to Cooper’s novels. I confess I wish he had availed himself of the opportunity to immortalize the real noble Indian in marble. This is only the man of the woods, — no Metamora, no Uncas. But the group should be very instructive to our people. You seem as crazy about Powers’s Greek Slave as the Florentines were about Cimabue’s Madonnas, in which we still see the spark of genius, but not fanned to its full flame. If your enthusiasm be as genuine as that of the lively Florentines, we will not quarrel with it; but I am afraid a great part is drawing-room rapture and newspaper echo. Genuine enthusiasm, however crude the state of mind from which it springs, always elevates, always educates; but in the same proportion talking and writing for effect stultifies and debases. I shall not judge the adorers of the Greek Slave, but only observe, that they have not kept in reserve any higher admiration for works even now extant, which are, in comparison with that statue, what that statue is compared with any weeping marble on a common monument. I consider the Slave as a form of simple and sweet beauty, but that neither as an ideal expression nor a specimen of plastic power is it transcendent. Powers stands far higher in his busts than in any ideal statue. His conception of what is individual in character is clear and just, his power of execution almost unrivalled; but he has had a lifetime of discipline for the bust, while his studies on the human body are comparatively limited; nor is his treatment of it free and masterly. To me, his conception of subject is not striking: I do not consider him rich in artistic thought. He, no less than Greenough and Crawford, would feel it a rich reward for many labors, and a happy climax to their honors, to make an equestrian statue of Washington for our country. I wish they might all do it, as each would show a different kind of excellence. To present the man on horseback, the wise centaur, the tamer of horses, may well be deemed a high achievement of modern, as it was of ancient art. The study of the anatomy and action of the horse, so rich in suggestions, is naturally most desirable to the artist; happy he who, obliged by the brevity of life and the limitations of fortune, to make his studies conform to his “orders,” finds himself justified by a national behest in entering on this department. At home one gets callous about the character of Washington, from a long experience of Fourth of July bombast in his praise. But seeing the struggles of other nations, and the deficiencies of the leaders who try to sustain them, the heart is again HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI stimulated, and puts forth buds of praise. One appreciates the wonderful combination of events and influences that gave our independence so healthy a birth, and the almost miraculous merits of the men who tended its first motions. In the combination of excellences needed at such a period with the purity and modesty which dignify the private man in the humblest station, Washington as yet stands alone. No country has ever had such a good future; no other is so happy as to have a pattern of spotless worth which will remain in her latest day venerable as now. Surely, then, that form should be immortalized in material solid as its fame; and, happily for the artist, that form was of natural beauty and dignity, and he who places him on horseback simply represents his habitual existence. Everything concurs to make an equestrian statue of Washington desirable. The dignified way to manage that affair would be to have a committee chosen of impartial judges, men who would look only to the merits of the work and the interests of the country, unbiassed by any personal interest in favor of some one artist. It is said it is impossible to find such a committee, but I cannot believe it. Let there be put aside the mean squabbles and jealousies, the vulgar pushing of unworthy friends, with which, unhappily, the artist’s career seems more rife than any other, and a fair concurrence established; let each artist offer his design for an equestrian statue of Washington, and let the best have the preference. Mr. Crawford has made a design which he takes with him to America, and which, I hope, will be generally seen. He has represented Washington in his actual dress; a figure of Fame, winged, presents the laurel and civic wreath; his gesture declines them; he seems to say, “For me the deed is enough, — I need no badge, no outward, token in reward.” This group has no insipid, allegorical air, as might be supposed; and its composition is very graceful, simple, and harmonious. The costume is very happily managed. The angel figure is draped, and with, the liberty-cap, which, as a badge both of ancient and modern times, seems to connect the two figures, and in an artistic point of view balances well the cocked hat; there is a similar harmony between the angel’s wings and the extremities of the horse. The action of the winged figure induces a natural and spirited action of the horse and rider. I thought of Goethe’s remark, that a fine work of art will always have, at a distance, where its details cannot be discerned, a beautiful effect, as of architectural ornament, and that this excellence the groups of Raphael share with the antique. He would have been pleased with the beautiful balance of forms in this group, with the freedom with which light and air play in and out, the management of the whole being clear and satisfactory at the first glance. But one should go into a great number of studies, as you can in Rome or Florence, and see the abundance of heavy and inharmonious designs to appreciate the merits of this; anything really good seems so simple and so a matter of course to the unpractised observer. Some say the Americans will not want a group, but just the fact; the portrait of Washington riding straight onward, like Marcus Aurelius, or making an address, or lifting his sword. I do not know about that, — it is a matter of feeling. This winged figure not only gives a poetic sense to the group, but a natural support HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI and occasion for action to the horse and rider. Uncle Sam must send Major Downing to look at it, and then, if he wants other designs, let him establish a concurrence, as I have said, and choose what is best. I am not particularly attached to Mr. Greenough, Mr. Powers, or Mr. Crawford. I admire various excellences in the works of each, and should be glad if each received an order for an equestrian statue. Nor is there any reason why they should not. There is money enough in the country, and the more good things there are for the people to see freely in open daylight, the better. That makes artists germinate. I love the artists, though I cannot speak of their works in a way to content their friends, or even themselves, often. Who can, that has a standard of excellence in the mind, and a delicate conscience in the use of words? My highest tribute is meagre of superlatives in comparison with the hackneyed puffs with which artists submit to be besmeared. Submit? alas! often they court them, rather. I do not expect any kindness from my contemporaries. I know that what is to me justice and honor is to them only a hateful coldness. Still I love them, I wish for their good, I feel deeply for their sufferings, annoyances, privations, and would lessen them if I could. I have thought it might perhaps be of use to publish some account of the expenses of the artist. There is a general impression, that the artist lives very cheaply in Italy. This is a mistake. Italy, compared with America, is not so very cheap, except for those who have iron constitutions to endure bad food, eaten in bad air, damp and dirty lodgings. The expenses, even in Florence, of a simple but clean and wholesome life, are little less than in New York. The great difference is for people that are rich. An Englishman of rank and fortune does not need the same amount of luxury as at home, to be on a footing with the nobles of Italy. The Broadway merchant would find his display of mahogany and carpets thrown away in a country where a higher kind of ornament is the only one available. But poor people, who can, at any rate, buy only the necessaries of life, will find them in the Italian cities, where all sellers live by cheating foreigners, very little cheaper than in America. The patrons of Art in America, ignorant of these facts, and not knowing the great expenses which attend the study of Art and the production of its wonders, are often guilty of most undesigned cruelty, and do things which it would grieve their hearts to have done, if they only knew the facts. They have read essays on the uses of adversity in developing genius, and they are not sufficiently afraid to administer a dose of adversity beyond what the forces of the patient can bear. Laudanum in drops is useful as a medicine, but a cupful kills downright. Beside this romantic idea about letting artists suffer to develop their genius, the American Mæcenas is not sufficiently aware of the expenses attendant on producing the work he wants. He does not consider that the painter, the sculptor, must be paid for the time he spends in designing and moulding, no less than in painting and carving; that he must have his bread and sleeping-house, his workhouse or studio, his marbles and colors, — the sculptor his workmen; so that if the price be paid he asks, a modest and delicate man very commonly receives no guerdon for his thought, — the real essence of the work, — except the luxury of seeing it embodied, which he could not otherwise have afforded, The American Mæcenas often pushes the price down, not HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI from want of generosity, but from a habit of making what are called good bargains, — i.e. bargains for one’s own advantage at the expense of a poorer brother. Those who call these good do not believe that “Mankind is one, And beats with one great heart.” They have not read the life of Jesus Christ. Then the American Mæcenas sometimes, after ordering a work, has been known to change his mind when the statue is already modelled. It is the American who does these things, because an American, who either from taste or vanity buys a picture, is often quite uneducated as to the arts, and cannot understand why a little picture or figure costs so much money. The Englishman or Frenchman, of a suitable position to seek these adornments for his house, usually understands better than the visitor of Powers who, on hearing the price of the Proserpine, wonderingly asked, “Isn’t statuary riz lately?” Queen Victoria of England, and her Albert, it is said, use their royal privilege to get works of art at a price below their value; but their subjects would be ashamed to do so. To supply means of judging to the American merchant (full of kindness and honorable sympathy as beneath the crust he so often is) who wants pictures and statues, not merely from ostentation, but as means of delight and improvement to himself and his friends, who has a soul to respect the genius and desire the happiness of the artist, and who, if he errs, does so from ignorance of the circumstances, I give the following memorandum, made at my desire by an artist, my neighbor: — “The rent of a suitable studio for modelling in clay and executing statues in marble may be estimated at $200 a year. “The best journeyman carver in marble at Rome receives $60 a month. Models are paid $1 a day. “The cost of marble varies according to the size of the block, being generally sold by the cubic palm, a square of nine inches English. As a general guide regarding the prices established among the higher sculptors of Rome, I may mention that for a statue of life-size the demand is from $1,000 to $5,000, varying according to the composition of the figure and the number of accessories. “It is a common belief in the United States, that a student of Art can live in Italy and pursue his studies on an income of $300 or $400 a year. This is a lamentable error; the Russian government allows its pensioners $700, which is scarcely sufficient. $1,000 per annum should be placed at the disposal of every young artist leaving our country for Europe.” Let it be remembered, in addition to considerations inevitable from this memorandum, that an artist may after years and months of uncheered and difficult toil, after he has gone through the earlier stages of an education, find it too largely based, and of aim too high, to finish in this world. The Prussian artist here on my left hand learned not only his art, but reading and writing, after he was thirty. A farmer’s son, he was allowed no freedom to learn anything till the death of the head of the house left him a beggar, but set him free; he walked to Berlin, distant several hundred miles, attracted by his first works some attention, and received some assistance in money, earned more by invention of a ploughshare, walked to Rome, struggled through every privation, and has now a reputation which has secured him the means of putting his HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI thoughts into marble. True, at forty-nine years of age he is still severely poor; he cannot marry, because he cannot maintain a family; but he is cheerful, because he can work in his own way, trusts with childlike reliance in God, and is still sustained by the vigorous health he won laboring in his father’s fields. Not every man could continue to work, circumstanced as he is, at the end of the half-century. For him the only sad thing in my mind is that his works are not worth working, though of merit in composition and execution, yet ideally a product of the galvanized piety of the German school, more mutton-like than lamb-like to my unchurched eyes. You are likely to have a work to look at in the United States by the great master of that school, Overbeck; Mr. Perkins of Boston, who knows how to spend his money with equal generosity and discretion, having bought his “Wise and Foolish Virgins.” It will be precious to the country from great artistic merits. As to the spirit, “blessed are the poor in spirit.” That kind of severity is, perhaps has become, the nature of Overbeck. He seems like a monk, but a really pious and pure one. This spirit is not what I seek; I deem it too narrow for our day, but being deeply sincere in him, its expression is at times also deeply touching. Barabbas borne in triumph, and the child Jesus, who, playing with his father’s tools, has made himself a cross, are subjects best adapted for expression of this spirit. I have written too carelessly, — much writing hath made me mad of late. Forgive if the “style be not neat, terse, and sparkling,” if there be naught of the “thrilling,” if the sentences seem not “written with a diamond pen,” like all else that is published in America. Some time I must try to do better. For this time “Forgive my faults; forgive my virtues too.” ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

March 21, Wednesday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: March 21. Day before yesterday was the Feast of St. Joseph. He is supposed to have acquired a fondness for fried rice-cakes during his residence in Egypt. Many are eaten in the open street, in arbors made for the occasion. One was made beneath my window, on Piazza Barberini. All the day and evening men, cleanly dressed in white aprons and liberty caps, quite new, of fine, red cloth, were frying cakes for crowds of laughing, gesticulating customers. It rained a little, and they held an umbrella over the frying- pan, but not over themselves. The arbor is still there, and little children are playing in and out of it; one still lesser runs in its leading-strings, followed by the bold, gay nurse, to the brink of the fountain, after its orange which has rolled before it. Tenerani’s workmen are coming out of his studio, the priests are coming home from Ponte Pio, the Contadini beginning to play at moro, for the setting sun has just lit up the magnificent range of windows in the Palazzo Barberini, and then faded tenderly, sadly away, and the mellow bells have chimed the Ave Maria. Rome looks as Roman, that is to say as tranquil, as ever, despite the trouble that tugs at her heart-strings. There is a report that Mazzini is to be made Dictator, as Manin is in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Venice, for a short time, so as to provide hastily and energetically for the war. Ave Maria Sanissima! when thou didst gaze on thy babe with such infinite hope, thou didst not dream that, so many ages after, blood would be shed and curses uttered in his name. Madonna Addolorata! hadst thou not hoped peace and good-will would spring from his bloody woes, couldst thou have borne those hours at the foot of the cross. O Stella! woman’s heart of love, send yet a ray of pure light on this troubled deep?

May 6, Sunday: Prussian and Saxon troops began their assault on Dresden. Richard Wagner saw his opera house in flames, apparently set by revolutionaries, commenting “It was an ugly building anyway.”

Margaret Fuller reported the arrival of the French army at Rome: Rome, May 6, 1819. I write you from barricaded Rome. The “Mother of Nations” is now at bay against them all. Rome was suffering before. The misfortunes of other regions of Italy, the defeat at Novara, preconcerted in hope to strike the last blow at Italian independence, the surrender and painful condition of Genoa, the money-difficulties, — insuperable unless the government could secure confidence abroad as well as at home, — prevented her people from finding that foothold for which they were ready. The vacillations of France agitated them; still they could not seriously believe she would ever act the part she has. We must say France, because, though many honorable men have washed their hands of all share in the perfidy, the Assembly voted funds to sustain the expedition to Civita Vecchia; and the nation, the army, have remained quiescent. No one was, no one could be, deceived as to the scope of this expedition. It was intended to restore the Pope to the temporal sovereignty, from which the people, by the use of suffrage, had deposed him. No doubt the French, in case of success, proposed to temper the triumph of Austria and Naples, and stipulate for conditions that might soothe the Romans and make their act less odious. They were probably deceived, also, by the representations of Gaëta, and believed that a large party, which had been intimidated by the republicans, would declare in favor of the Pope when they found themselves likely to be sustained. But this last pretext can in noway avail them. They landed at Civita Vecchia, and no one declared for the Pope. They marched on Rome. Placards were affixed within the walls by hands unknown, calling upon the Papal party to rise within the town. Not a soul stirred. The French had no excuse left for pretending to believe that the present government was not entirely acceptable to the people. Notwithstanding, they assail the gates; they fire upon St. Peter’s, and their balls pierce the Vatican. They were repulsed, as they deserved, retired in quick and shameful defeat, as surely the brave French soldiery could not, if they had not been demoralized by the sense of what an infamous course they were pursuing. France, eager to destroy the last hope of Italian emancipation, — France, the alguazil of Austria, the soldiers of republican France, firing upon republican Rome! If there be angel as well as demon powers that interfere in the affairs of men, those bullets could scarcely fail to be turned back against their own HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI breasts. Yet Roman blood has flowed also; I saw how it stained the walls of the Vatican Gardens on the 30th of April — the first anniversary of the appearance of Pius IX.’s too famous encyclic letter. Shall he, shall any Pope, ever again walk peacefully in these gardens? It seems impossible! The temporal sovereignty of the Popes is virtually destroyed by their shameless, merciless measures taken to restore it. The spiritual dominion ultimately falls, too, into irrevocable ruin. What may be the issue at this moment, we cannot guess. The French have retired to Civita Vecchia, but whether to reëmbark or to await reinforcements, we know not. The Neapolitan force has halted within a few miles of the walls; it is not large, and they are undoubtedly surprised at the discomfiture of the French. Perhaps they wait for the Austrians, but we do not yet hear that these have entered the Romagna. Meanwhile, Rome is strongly barricaded, and, though she cannot stand always against a world in arms, she means at least to do so as long as possible. Mazzini is at her head; she has now a guide “who understands his faith,” and all there is of a noble spirit will show itself. We all feel very sad, because the idea of bombs, barbarously thrown in, and street-fights in Rome, is peculiarly dreadful. Apart from all the blood and anguish inevitable at such times, the glories of Art may perish, and mankind be forever despoiled of the most beautiful inheritance. Yet I would defend Rome to the last moment. She must not be false to the higher hope that has dawned upon her. She must not fall back again into servility and corruption. And no one is willing. The interference of the French has roused the weakest to resistance. “From the Austrians, from the Neapolitans,” they cried, “we expected this; but from the French — it is too infamous; it cannot be borne;” and they all ran to arms and fought nobly. The Americans here are not in a pleasant situation. Mr. Cass, the Chargé of the United States, stays here without recognizing the government. Of course, he holds no position at the present moment that can enable him to act for us. Beside, it gives us pain that our country, whose policy it justly is to avoid armed interference with the affairs of Europe, should not use a moral influence. Rome has, as we did, thrown off a government no longer tolerable; she has made use of the suffrage to form another; she stands on the same basis as ourselves. Mr. Rush did us great honor by his ready recognition of a principle as represented by the French Provisional Government; had Mr. Cass been empowered to do the same, our country would have acted nobly, and all that is most truly American in America would have spoken to sustain the sickened hopes of European democracy. But of this more when I write next. Who knows what I may have to tell another week? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 22, Tuesday: Abraham Lincoln was granted US Patent No. 6,469 (he remains the only President ever to be granted a patent).

Maria Edgeworth died.

Christine Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer Wagner joined Richard Wagner at Magdala where he was hiding.

Margaret Fuller wrote to her brother Richard Frederick Fuller: Rome, May 22, 1849. I do not write to Eugene yet, because around me is such excitement I cannot settle my mind enough to write a letter good for anything. The Neapolitans have been driven back; but the French, seem to be amusing us with a pretence of treaties, while waiting for the Austrians to come up. The Austrians cannot, I suppose, be more than three days’ march from us. I feel but little about myself. Such thoughts are merged in indignation, and in the fears I have that Rome may be bombarded. It seems incredible that any nation should be willing to incur the infamy of such an act, — an act that may rob posterity of a most precious part of its inheritance; — only so many incredible things have happened of late. I am with William Story, his wife and uncle. Very kind friends they have been in this strait. They are going away, so soon as they can find horses, — going into Germany. I remain alone in the house, under our flag, almost the only American except the Consul and Ambassador. But Mr. Cass, the Envoy, has offered to do anything for me, and I feel at liberty to call on him if I please. But enough of this. Let us implore of fate another good meeting, full and free, whether long or short. Love to dearest mother, Arthur, Ellen, Lloyd. Say to all, that, should any accident possible to these troubled times transfer me to another scene of existence, they need not regret it. There must be better worlds than this, where innocent blood is not ruthlessly shed, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI where treason does not so easily triumph, where the greatest and best are not crucified. I do not say this in apprehension, but in case of accident, you might be glad to keep this last word from your sister MARGARET. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

June 10, Sunday: Frédéric Kalkbrenner died at Enghien-les-Bains in the midst of a cholera epidemic, at 63 years of age.

Margaret Fuller wrote to Waldo Emerson: Rome, June 10, 1849. I received your letter amid the round of cannonade and musketry. It was a terrible battle fought here from the first to the last light of day. I could see all its progress from my balcony. The Italians fought like lions. It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honor and their rights, with little ground for hope that they can resist, now they are betrayed by France. Since the 30th of April, I go almost daily to the hospitals, and though I have suffered, for I had no idea before how terrible gun-shot wounds and wound-fevers are, yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men. There is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of the Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books and flowers; they read, and we talk. The palace of the Pope, on the Quirinal, is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens I walk with them, one with his sling, another with his crutch. The gardener plays off all his water-works for the defenders of the country, and gathers flowers for me, their friend. A day or two since, we sat in the Pope’s little pavilion, where he used to give private audience. The sun was going gloriously down over Monte Mario, where gleamed the white tents of the French light-horse among the trees. The cannonade was heard at intervals. Two bright-eyed boys sat at our feet, and gathered up eagerly every word said by the heroes of the day. It was a beautiful hour, stolen from the midst of ruin and sorrow, and tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit, — with noble hope for man, and reverence for woman. The young ladies of the family, very young girls, were filled with enthusiasm for the suffering, wounded patriots, and they wished to go to the hospital, to give their services. Excepting the three superintendents, none but married ladies were HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI permitted to serve there, but their services were accepted. Their governess then wished to go too, and, as she could speak several languages, she was admitted to the rooms of the wounded soldiers, to interpret for them, as the nurses knew nothing but Italian, and many of these poor men were suffering because they could not make their wishes known. Some are French, some Germans, many Poles. Indeed, I am afraid it is too true that there were comparatively few Romans among them. This young lady passed several nights there. Should I never return, and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, — so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here, — if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself, — the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, — at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can. Let me feel that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp. I feel profoundly for Mazzini. At moments I am tempted to say, “Cursed with every granted prayer,” — so cunning is the demon. Mazzini has become the inspiring soul of his people. He saw Rome, to which all his hopes through life tended, for the first time as a Roman citizen, and to become in a few days its ruler. He has animated, he sustains her to a glorious effort, which, if it fails this time, will not in the age. His country will be free. Yet to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, — to dig the graves of such martyrs! Then, Rome is being destroyed; her glorious oaks, — her villas, haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world for ever, — the villa of Raphael, the villa of Albani, home of Winckelmann and the best expression of the ideal of modern Rome, and so many other sanctuaries of beauty, — all must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter. I could not, could not! I know not, dear friend, whether I shall ever get home across that great ocean, but here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O Rome, my country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head! Speaking of the republic, you say, “Do you not wish Italy had a great man?” Mazzini is a great man. In mind, a great, poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Cæsar. Dearly I love Mazzini. He came in, just as I had finished the first letter to you. His soft, radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life, that, like the Magdalen, I may, at the important hour, shed all the consecrated ointment on his head. There is one, Mazzini, who understands thee well, — who knew thee no less when an object of popular fear than now of idolatry, — and who, if the pen be not held too feebly, will help posterity to know thee too! ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the latest negotiations and the latest betrayals: Rome, June 10, 1849. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI What shall I write of Rome in these sad but glorious days? Plain facts are the best; for my feelings I could not find fit words. When I last wrote, the French were playing the second act of their farce. In the first, the French government affected to consult the Assembly. The Assembly, or a majority of the Assembly, affected to believe the pretext it gave, and voted funds for twelve thousand men to go to Civita Vecchia. Arriving there, Oudinot proclaimed that he had come as a friend and brother. He was received as such. Immediately he took possession of the town, disarmed the Roman troops, and published a manifesto in direct opposition to his first declaration. He sends to Rome that he is coming there as a friend; receives the answer that he is not wanted and cannot be trusted. This answer he chooses to consider as coming from a minority, and advances on Rome. The pretended majority on which he counts never shows itself by a single movement within the walls. He makes an assault, and is defeated. On this subject his despatches to his government are full of falsehoods that would disgrace the lowest pickpocket, — falsehoods which it is impossible he should not know to be such. The Assembly passed a vote of blame. M. Louis Bonaparte writes a letter of compliment and assurance that this course of violence shall be sustained. In conformity with this promise twelve thousand more troops are sent. This time it is not thought necessary to consult the Assembly. Let us view the SECOND ACT. Now appears in Rome M. Ferdinand Lesseps, Envoy, &c. of the French government. He declares himself clothed with full powers to treat with Rome. He cannot conceal his surprise at all he sees there, at the ability with which preparations have been made for defence, at the patriotic enthusiasm which pervades the population. Nevertheless, in beginning his game of treaty- making, he is not ashamed to insist on the French occupying the city. Again and again repulsed, he again and again returns to the charge on this point. And here I shall translate the letter addressed to him by the Triumvirate, both because of its perfect candor of statement, and to give an idea of the sweet and noble temper in which these treacherous aggressions have been met. LETTER OF THE TRIUMVIRS TO MONSIEUR LESSEPS. “May 25, 1849. “We have had the honor, Monsieur, to furnish you, in our note of the 16th, with some information as to the unanimous consent which was given to the formation of the government of the Roman Republic. We to-day would speak to you of the actual question, such as it is debated in fact, if not by right, between the French government and ours. You will allow us to do it with the frankness demanded by the urgency of the situation, as well as the sympathy which ought to govern all relations between France and Italy. Our diplomacy is the truth, and the character given to your mission is a guaranty that the best possible interpretation will be given to what we shall say to you. “With your permission, we return for an instant to the cause of the present situation of affairs. “In consequence of conferences and arrangements which took place without the government of the Roman Republic ever being called on to take part, it was some time since decided by the Catholic Powers, — 1st. That a modification should take place in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI government and institutions of the Roman States; 2d. That this modification should have for basis the return of Pius IX., not as Pope, for to that no obstacle is interposed by us, but as temporal sovereign; 3d. That if, to attain that aim, a continuous intervention was judged necessary, that intervention should take place. “We are willing to admit, that while for some of the contracting governments the only motive was the hope of a general restoration and absolute return to the treaties of 1815, the French government was drawn into this agreement only in consequence of erroneous information, tending systematically to depict the Roman States as given up to anarchy and governed by terror exercised in the name of an audacious minority. We know also, that, in the modification proposed, the French government intended to represent an influence more or less liberal, opposed to the absolutist programme of Austria and of Naples. It does none the less remain true, that under the Apostolic or constitutional form, with or without liberal guaranties to the Roman people, the dominant thought in all the negotiations to which we allude has been some sort of return toward the past, a compromise between the Roman people and Pius IX. considered as temporal prince. “We cannot dissemble to ourselves, Monsieur, that the French expedition has been planned and executed under the inspiration of this thought. Its object was, on one side, to throw the sword of France into the balance of negotiations which were to be opened at Rome; on the other, to guarantee the Roman people from the excess of retrograde, but always on condition that it should submit to constitutional monarchy in favor of the Holy Father. This is assured to us partly from information which we believe we possess as to the concert with Austria; from the proclamations of General Oudinot; from the formal declarations made by successive envoys to the Triumvirate; from the silence obstinately maintained whenever we have sought to approach the political question and obtain a formal declaration of the fact proved in our note of the 16th, that the institutions by which the Roman people are governed at this time are the free and spontaneous expression of the wish of the people inviolable when legally ascertained. For the rest, the vote of the French Assembly sustains implicitly the fact that we affirm. “In such a situation, under the menace of an inadmissible compromise, and of negotiations which the state of our people no way provoked, our part, Monsieur, could not be doubtful. To resist, — we owed this to our country, to France, to all Europe. We ought, in fulfilment of a mandate loyally given, loyally accepted, maintain to our country the inviolability, so far as that was possible to us, of its territory, and of the institutions decreed by all the powers, by all the elements, of the state. We ought to conquer the time needed for appeal from France ill informed to France better informed, to save the sister republic the disgrace and the remorse which must be hers if, rashly led on by bad suggestions from without, she became, before she was aware, accomplice in an act of violence to which we can find no parallel without going back to the partition of Poland in 1772. We owed it to Europe to maintain, as far as we could, the fundamental principles of all international life, the independence of each people in all that concerns its internal administration. We say it without pride, — for if it is with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI enthusiasm that we resist the attempts of the Neapolitan monarchy and of Austria, our eternal enemy, it is with profound grief that we are ourselves constrained to contend with the arms of France, — we believe in following this line of conduct we have deserved well, not only of our country, but of all the people of Europe, even of France herself. “We come to the actual question. You know, Monsieur, the events which have followed the French intervention. Our territory has been invaded by the king of Naples. “Four thousand Spaniards were to embark on the 17th for invasion of this country. The Austrians, having surmounted the heroic resistance of Bologna, have advanced into Romagna, and are now marching on Ancona. “We have beaten and driven out of our territory the forces of the king of Naples. We believe we should do the same by the Austrian forces, if the attitude of the French here did not fetter our action. “We are sorry to say it, but France must be informed that the expedition of Civita Vecchia, said to be planned for our protection, costs us very dear. Of all the interventions with which it is hoped to overwhelm us, that of the French has been the most perilous. Against the soldiers of Austria and the king of Naples we can fight, for God protects a good cause. But we do not wish to fight against the French. We are toward them in a state, not of war, but of simple defence. But this position, the only one we wish to take wherever we meet France, has for us all the inconveniences without any of the favorable chances of war. “The French expedition has, from the first, forced us to concentrate our troops, thus leaving our frontier open to Austrian invasion, and Bologna and the cities of Romagna unsustained. The Austrians have profited by this. After eight days of heroic resistance by the population, Bologna was forced to yield. We had bought in France arms for our defence. Of these ten thousand muskets have been detained between Marseilles and Civita Vecchia. These are in your hands. Thus with a single blow you deprive us of ten thousand soldiers. In every armed man is a soldier against the Austrians. “Your forces are disposed around our walls as if for a siege. They remain there without avowed aim or programme. They have forced us to keep the city in a state of defence which weighs upon our finances. They force us to keep here a body of troops who might be saving our cities from the occupation and ravages of the Austrians. They hinder our going from place to place, our provisioning the city, our sending couriers. They keep minds in a state of excitement and distrust which might, if our population were less good and devoted, lead to sinister results. They do not engender anarchy nor reaction, for both are impossible at Rome; but they sow the seed of irritation against France, and it is a misfortune for us who were accustomed to love and hope in her. “We are besieged, Monsieur, besieged by France, in the name of a protective mission, while some leagues off the king of Naples, flying, carries off our hostages, and the Austrian slays our brothers. “You have presented propositions. Those propositions have been declared inadmissible by the Assembly. To-day you add a fourth to the three already rejected. This says that France will protect from foreign invasion all that part of our territory HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI that may be occupied by her troops. You must yourself feel that this changes nothing in our position. “The parts of the territory occupied by your troops are in fact protected; but if only for the present, to what are they reduced? and if it is for the future, have we no other way to protect our territory than by giving it up entirely to you? “The real intent of your demands is not stated. It is the occupation of Rome. This demand has constantly stood first in your list of propositions. Now we have had the honor to say to you, Monsieur, that is impossible. The people will never consent to it. If the occupation of Rome has for its aim only to protect it, the people thank you, but tell you at the same time, that, able to defend Rome by their own forces, they would be dishonored even in your eyes by declaring themselves insufficient, and needing the aid of some regiments of French soldiers. If the occupation has otherwise a political object, which God forbid, the people, who have given themselves freely these institutions, cannot suffer it. Rome is their capital, their palladium, their sacred city. They know very well, that, apart from their principles, apart from their honor, there is civil war at the end of such an occupation. They are filled with distrust by your persistence. They foresee, the troops being once admitted, changes in men and in actions which would be fatal to their liberty. They know that, in presence of foreign bayonets, the independence of their Assembly, of their government, would be a vain word. They have always Civita Vecchia before their eyes. “On this point be sure their will is irrevocable. They will be massacred from barricade to barricade, before they will surrender. Can the soldiers of France wish to massacre a brother people whom they came to protect, because they do not wish to surrender to them their capital? “There are for France only three parts to take in the Roman States. She ought to declare herself for us, against us, or neutral. To declare herself for us would be to recognize our republic, and fight side by side with us against the Austrians. To declare against us is to crush without motive the liberty, the national life, of a friendly people, and fight side by side with the Austrians. France cannot do that. She will not risk a European war to depress us, her ally. Let her, then, rest neutral in this conflict between us and our enemies. Only yesterday we hoped more from her, but to-day we demand but this. “The occupation of Civita Vecchia is a fact accomplished; let it go. France thinks that, in the present state of things, she ought not to remain distant from the field of battle. She thinks that, vanquishers or vanquished, we may have need of her moderative action and of her protection. We do not think so; but we will not react against her. Let her keep Civita Vecchia. Let her even extend her encampments, if the numbers of her troops require it, in the healthy regions of Civita Vecchia and Viterbo. Let her then wait the issue of the combats about to take place. All facilities will be offered her, every proof of frank and cordial sympathy given; her officers can visit Rome, her soldiers have all the solace possible. But let her neutrality be sincere and without concealed plans. Let her declare herself in explicit terms. Let her leave us free to use all our forces. Let her restore our arms. Let her not by her cruisers drive back from our ports the men who come to our aid from other parts of Italy. Let her, above all, withdraw from HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI before our walls, and cause even the appearance of hostility to cease between two nations who, later, undoubtedly are destined to unite in the same international faith, as now they have adopted the same form of government.” In his answer, Lesseps appears moved by this statement, and particularly expresses himself thus: — “One point appears above all to occupy you; it is the thought that we wish forcibly to impose upon you the obligation of receiving us as friends. Friendship and violence are incompatible. Thus it would be inconsistent on our part to begin by firing our cannon upon you, since we are your natural protectors. Such a contradiction enters neither into my intentions, nor those of the government of the French republic, nor of our army and its honorable chief.” These words were written at the head-quarters of Oudinot, and of course seen and approved by him. At the same time, in private conversation, “the honorable chief” could swear he would occupy Rome by “one means or another.” A few days after, Lesseps consented to conditions such as the Romans would tolerate. He no longer insisted on occupying Rome, but would content himself with good positions in the country. Oudinot protested that the Plenipotentiary had “exceeded his powers,” — that he should not obey, — that the armistice was at an end, and he should attack Rome on Monday. It was then Friday. He proposed to leave these two days for the few foreigners that remained to get out of town. M. Lesseps went off to Paris, in great seeming indignation, to get his treaty ratified. Of course we could not hear from him for eight or ten days. Meanwhile, the honorable chief, alike in all his conduct, attacked on Sunday instead of Monday. The attack began before sunrise, and lasted all day. I saw it from my window, which, though distant, commands the gate of St. Pancrazio. Why the whole force was bent on that part, I do not know. If they could take it, the town would be cannonaded, and the barricades useless; but it is the same with the Pincian Gate. Small-parties made feints in two other directions, but they were at once repelled. The French fought with great bravery, and this time it is said with beautiful skill and order, sheltering themselves in their advance by movable barricades. The Italians fought like lions, and no inch of ground was gained by the assailants. The loss of the French is said to be very great: it could not be otherwise. Six or seven hundred Italians are dead or wounded. Among them are many officers, those of Garibaldi especially, who are much exposed by their daring bravery, and whose red tunic makes them the natural mark of the enemy. It seems to me great folly to wear such a dress amid the dark uniforms; but Garibaldi has always done it. He has now been wounded twice here and seventeen times in Ancona. All this week I have been much at the hospitals where are these noble sufferers. They are full of enthusiasm; this time was no treason, no Vicenza, no Novara, no Milan. They had not been given up by wicked chiefs at the moment they were shedding their blood, and they had conquered. All were only anxious to get out again and be at their posts. They seemed to feel that those who died so gloriously were fortunate; perhaps they were, for if Rome is obliged to yield, — and how can she stand always unaided against the four powers? — where shall these noble youths fly? They are the flower of the Italian youth; especially among the Lombards are some of the finest young men I have ever seen. If Rome falls, if Venice falls, there is no spot of Italian earth where they HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI can abide more, and certainly no Italian will wish to take refuge in France. Truly you said, M. Lesseps, “Violence and friendship are incompatible.” A military funeral of the officer Ramerino was sadly picturesque and affecting. The white-robed priests went before the body singing, while his brothers in arms bore the lighted tapers. His horse followed, saddled and bridled. The horse hung his head and stepped dejectedly; he felt there was something strange and gloomy going on, — felt that his master was laid low. Ramerino left a wife and children. A great proportion of those who run those risks are, happily, alone. Parents weep, but will not suffer long; their grief is not like that of widows and children. Since the 3d we have only cannonade and skirmishes. The French are at their trenches, but cannot advance much; they are too much molested from the walls. The Romans have made one very successful sortie. The French availed themselves of a violent thunderstorm, when the walls were left more thinly guarded, to try to scale them, but were immediately driven back. It was thought by many that they never would be willing to throw bombs and shells into Rome, but they do whenever they can. That generous hope and faith in them as republicans and brothers, which put the best construction on their actions, and believed in their truth as far as possible, is now destroyed. The government is false, and the people do not resist; the general is false, and the soldiers obey. Meanwhile, frightful sacrifices are being made by Rome. All her glorious oaks, all her gardens of delight, her casinos, full of the monuments of genius and taste, are perishing in the defence. The houses, the trees which had been spared at the gate of St. Pancrazio, all afforded shelter to the foe, and caused so much loss of life, that the Romans have now fully acquiesced in destruction agonizing to witness. Villa Borghese is finally laid waste, the villa of Raphael has perished, the trees are all cut down at Villa Albani, and the house, that most beautiful ornament of Rome, must, I suppose, go too. The stately marble forms are already driven from their place in that portico where Winckelmann sat and talked with such delight. Villa Salvage is burnt, with all its fine frescos, and that bank of the Tiber shorn of its lovely plantations. Rome will never recover the cruel ravage of these days, perhaps only just begun. I had often thought of living a few months near St. Peter’s, that I might go as much as I liked to the church and the museum, have Villa Pamfili and Monte Mario within the compass of a walk. It is not easy to find lodgings there, as it is a quarter foreigners never inhabit; but, walking about to see what pleasant places there were, I had fixed my eye on a clean, simple house near Ponte St. Angelo. It bore on a tablet that it was the property of Angela — — ; its little balconies with their old wooden rails, full of flowers in humble earthen vases, the many bird-cages, the air of domestic quiet and comfort, marked it as the home of some vestal or widow, some lone woman whose heart was centred in the ordinary and simplest pleasures of a home. I saw also she was one having the most limited income, and I thought, “She will not refuse to let me a room for a few months, as I shall be as quiet as herself, and sympathize about the flowers and birds.” Now the Villa Pamfili is all laid waste. The French encamp on Monte Mario; what they have done there is not known yet. The cannonade reverberates all day under the dome HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of St. Peter’s, and the house of poor Angela is levelled with the ground. I hope her birds and the white peacocks of the Vatican gardens are in safety; — but who cares for gentle, harmless creatures now? I have been often interrupted while writing this letter, and suppose it is confused as well as incomplete. I hope my next may tell of something decisive one way or the other. News is not yet come from Lesseps, but the conduct of Oudinot and the formation of the new French ministry give reason to hope no good. Many seem resolved to force back Pius IX. among his bleeding flock, into the city ruined by him, where he cannot remain, and if he come, all this struggle and sorrow is to be borne over again. Mazzini stands firm as a rock. I know not whether he hopes for a successful issue, but he believes in a God bound to protect men who do what they deem their duty. Yet how long, O Lord, shall the few trample on the many? I am surprised to see the air of perfect good faith with which articles from the London Times, upon the revolutionary movements, are copied into our papers. There exists not in Europe a paper more violently opposed to the cause of freedom than the Times, and neither its leaders nor its foreign correspondence are to be depended upon. It is said to receive money from Austria. I know not whether this be true, or whether it be merely subservient to the aristocratical feeling of England, which is far more opposed to republican movements than is that of Russia; for in England fear embitters hate. It is droll to remember our reading in the class-book. “Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are”; — to think how bitter the English were on the Italians who succumbed, and see how they hate those who resist. And their cowardice here in Italy is ludicrous. It is they who run away at the least intimation of danger, — it is they who invent all the “fe, fo, fum” stories about Italy, — it is they who write to the Times and elsewhere that they dare not for their lives stay in Rome, where I, a woman, walk everywhere alone, and all the little children do the same, with their nurses. More of this anon. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

June 19, Tuesday: Margaret Fuller wrote to her sister, Mrs. E.K. Channing: Rome, June 19, 1849. As was Eve, at first, I suppose every mother is delighted by the birth of a man-child. There is a hope that he will conquer more ill, and effect more good, than is expected from girls. This prejudice in favor of man does not seem to be destroyed by his shortcomings for ages. Still, each mother hopes to find in hers an Emanuel. I should like very much to see your children, but hardly realize I ever shall. The journey home seems so long, so difficult, so expensive. I should really like to lie down here, and sleep my way into another sphere of existence, if I could take with me one or two that love and need me, and was sure of a good haven for them on that other side. The world seems to go so strangely wrong! The bad side triumphs; the blood and tears of the generous flow in vain. I assist at many saddest scenes, and suffer for those whom I knew not before. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Those whom I knew and loved, — who, if they had triumphed, would have opened for me an easier, broader, higher-mounting road, — are everyday more and more involved in earthly ruin. Eternity is with us, but there is much darkness and bitterness in this portion of it. A baleful star rose on my birth, and its hostility, I fear, will never be disarmed while I walk below. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

June 21, Thursday evening: A small party of sightseers from Buffalo had gathered on Luna Island to view the American Falls. Elizabeth DeForest, six years of age, was standing with her mother about two feet above the water, about twenty feet from the point where the water was going over the edge. At about 7:45PM, a young man known to the DeForest family, Charles Addington, tapped Lizzie teasingly on the shoulder. “I’m going to throw you in,” he said. Evidently he intended only to frighten the little girl, but as he swung her body out over the water, somehow she slipped from his grasp. He immediately threw himself into the water after her and shoved her in the direction of the shore. The shrieks of Mrs. DeForest were being heard all the way to Prospect Point, nearly a quarter mile away. Another man in the party also entered the water, and attempted to reach out to the little girl. Although this second man managed to save himself by grabbing a bush on the bank, the current pulled Charles Addington and Elizabeth DeForest over the brink of the Niagara Falls.

(This incident is reported under the rubric of suicide in accordance with the formal definition sponsored by Durkheim in his classic sociological treatise SUICIDE.)

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from a Rome under siege by the French army: Rome, June 21, 1849. It is now two weeks since the first attack of Oudinot, and as yet we hear nothing decisive from Paris. I know not yet what news may have come last night, but by the morning’s mail we did not even receive notice that Lesseps had arrived in Paris. Whether Lesseps was consciously the servant of all these base intrigues, time will show. His conduct was boyish and foolish, if it was not treacherous. The only object seemed to be to create panic, to agitate, to take possession of Rome somehow, though what to do with it, if they could get it, the French government would hardly know. Pius IX., in his allocution of the 29th of April last, has explained himself fully. He has disavowed every liberal act which ever seemed to emanate from him, with the exception of the amnesty. He has shamelessly recalled his refusal to let Austrian blood be shed, while Roman flows daily at his request. He has implicitly declared that his future government, could he return, would be absolute despotism, — has dispelled the last lingering illusion of those still anxious to apologize for him as only a prisoner now in the hands of the Cardinals and the king of Naples. The last frail link is broken that bound to him the people of Rome, and could the French restore him, they must frankly avow themselves, abandon entirely and fully the position they took in February, 1848, and declare themselves the allies of Austria and of Russia. Meanwhile they persevere in the Jesuitical policy that has already disgraced and is to ruin them. After a week of vain assaults, Oudinot sent to Rome the following letter, which I translate, as well as the answers it elicited. LETTER OF GENERAL OUDINOT, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Intended for the Roman Constituent Assembly, the Triumvirate, the Generalissimo, and the Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard. “General, — The events of war have, as you know, conducted the French army to the gates of Rome. “Should the entrance into the city remain closed against us, I should see myself constrained to employ immediately all the means of action that France has placed in my hands. “Before having recourse to such terrible necessity, I think it my duty to make a last appeal to a people who cannot have toward France sentiments of hostility. “The Roman army wishes, no doubt, equally with myself, to spare bloody ruin to the capital of the Christian world. “With this conviction, I pray you, Signore General, to give the enclosed proclamation the most speedy publicity. If, twelve hours after this despatch shall have been delivered to you, an answer corresponding to the honor and the intentions of France shall not have reached me, I shall be constrained to give the forcible attack. “Accept, &c. “Villa Pamfili, 12 June, 1849, 5 P.M.” He was in fact at Villa Santucci, much farther out, but could not be content without falsifying his date as well as all his statements. “PROCLAMATION. “Inhabitants of Rome, — We did not come to bring you war. We came to sustain among you order, with liberty. The intentions of our government have been misunderstood. The labors of the siege have conducted us under your walls. Till now we have wished only occasionally to answer the fire of your batteries. We approach these last moments, when the necessities of war burst out in terrible calamities. Spare them to a city fall of so many glorious memories. “If you persist in repelling us, on you alone will fall the responsibility of irreparable disasters.” The following are the answers of the various functionaries to whom this letter was sent: — ANSWER OF THE ASSEMBLY. “General, — The Roman Constitutional Assembly informs you, in reply to your despatch of yesterday, that, having concluded a convention from the 31st of May, 1849, with M. de Lesseps, Minister Plenipotentiary of the French Republic, a convention which we confirmed soon after your protest, it must consider that convention obligatory for both parties, and indeed a safeguard of the rights of nations, until it has been ratified or declined by the government of France. Therefore the Assembly must regard as a violation of that convention every hostile act of the French army since the above-named 31st of May, and all others that shall take place before the resolution of your government can be made known, and before the expiration of the time agreed upon for the armistice. You demand, General, an answer correspondent to the intentions and power of France. Nothing could be more conformable with the intentions and power of France than to cease a flagrant violation of the rights of nations. “Whatever may be the results of such violation, the people of Rome are not responsible for them. Rome is strong in its right, and decided to maintain the conventions which attach it to your HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI nation; only it finds itself constrained by the necessity of self-defence to repel unjust aggressions. “Accept, &c., for the Assembly, “The President, GALLETTI. “Secretaries, FABRETTI, PANNACCHI, COCCHI.” “ANSWER OF THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE NATIONAL GUARD. “General, — The treaty, of which we await the ratification, assures this tranquil city from every disaster. “The National Guard, destined to maintain order, has the duty of seconding the resolutions of the government; willingly and zealously it fulfils this duty, not caring for annoyance and fatigue. “The National Guard showed very lately, when it escorted the prisoners sent back to you, its sympathy for France, but it shows also on every occasion a supreme regard for its own dignity, for the honor of Rome. “Any misfortune to the capital of the Catholic world, to the monumental city, must be attributed not to the pacific citizens constrained to defend themselves, but solely to its aggressors. “Accept, &c. “STURBINETTI, General of the National Guard, Representative of the People”. ANSWER OF THE GENERALISSIMO. “Citizen General, — A fatality leads to conflict between the armies of two republics, whom a better destiny would have invited to combat against their common enemy; for the enemies of the one cannot fail to be also enemies of the other. “We are not deceived, and shall combat by every means in our power whoever assails our institutions, for only the brave are worthy to stand before the French soldiers. “Reflecting that there is a state of life worse than death, if the war you wage should put us in that state, it will be better to close our eyes for ever than to see the interminable oppressions of oar country. “I wish you well, and desire fraternity. “ROSSELLI.” ANSWER OF THE TRIUMVIRATE. “We have the honor to transmit to you the answer of the Assembly. “We never break our promises. We have promised to defend, in execution of orders from the Assembly and people of Rome, the banner of the Republic, the honor of the country, and the sanctity of the capital of the Christian world; this promise we shall maintain. “Accept, &c. “The Triumvirs, ARMELLINI. MAZZINI. SAFFI.” Observe the miserable evasion of this missive of Oudinot: “The fortune of war has conducted us.” What war? He pretended to come as a friend, a protector; is enraged only because, after his deceits at Civita Vecchia, Rome will not trust him within her walls. For this he daily sacrifices hundreds of lives. “The Roman people cannot be hostile to the French?” No, indeed; they were not disposed to be so. They had been stirred to emulation by the example of France. They had warmly hoped in her as their true ally. It required all that Oudinot has done to turn their faith to contempt and aversion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Cowardly man! He knows now that he comes upon a city which wished to receive him only as a friend, and he cries, “With my cannon, with my bombs, I will compel you to let me betray you.” The conduct of France — infamous enough before — looks tenfold blacker now that, while the so-called Plenipotentiary is absent with the treaty to be ratified, her army daily assails Rome, — assails in vain. After receiving these answers to his letter and proclamation, Oudinot turned all the force of his cannonade to make a breach, and began, what no one, even in these days, has believed possible, the bombardment of Rome. Yes! the French, who pretend to be the advanced guard of civilization, are bombarding Rome. They dare take the risk of destroying the richest bequests made to man by the great Past. Nay, they seem to do it in an especially barbarous manner. It was thought they would avoid, as much as possible, the hospitals for the wounded, marked to their view by the black banner, and the places where are the most precious monuments; but several bombs have fallen on the chief hospital, and the Capitol evidently is especially aimed at. They made a breach in the wall, but it was immediately filled up with a barricade, and all the week they have been repulsed in every attempt they made to gain ground, though with considerable loss of life on our side; on theirs it must be great, but how great we cannot know. Ponte Molle, the scene of Raphael’s fresco of a battle, in the Vatican, saw again a fierce struggle last Friday. More than fifty were brought wounded into Rome. But wounds and assaults only fire more and more the courage of her defenders. They feel the justice of their cause, and the peculiar iniquity of this aggression. In proportion as there seems little aid to be hoped from man, they seem to claim it from God. The noblest sentiments are heard from every lip, and, thus far, their acts amply correspond. On the eve of the bombardment one or two officers went round with a fine band. It played on the piazzas the Marseillaise and Roman marches; and when the people were thus assembled, they were told of the proclamation, and asked how they felt. Many shouted loudly, Guerra! Viva la Republica Romana! Afterward, bands of young men went round singing the chorus, “Vogliamo sempre quella, Vogliamo Liberta.” (“We want always one thing; we want liberty.”) Guitars played, and some danced. When the bombs began to come, one of the Trasteverini, those noble images of the old Roman race, redeemed her claim to that descent by seizing a bomb and extinguishing the match. She received a medal and a reward in money. A soldier did the same thing at Palazza Spada, where is the statue of Pompey, at whose base great Cæsar fell. He was promoted. Immediately the people were seized with emulation; armed with pans of wet clay, they ran wherever the bombs fell, to extinguish them. Women collect the balls from the hostile cannon, and carry them to ours. As thus very little injury has been done to life, the people cry, “Madonna protects us against the bombs; she wills not that Rome should be destroyed.” Meanwhile many poor people are driven from their homes, and provisions are growing very dear. The heats are now terrible for us, and must be far more so for the French. It is said a vast number are ill of fever; indeed, it cannot be otherwise. Oudinot himself has it, and perhaps this is one explanation of the mixture of violence and weakness in his actions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI He must be deeply ashamed at the poor result of his bad acts, — that at the end of two weeks and so much bravado, he has done nothing to Rome, unless intercept provisions, kill some of her brave youth, and injure churches, which should be sacred to him as to us. St. Maria Trastevere, that ancient church, so full of precious remains, and which had an air of mild repose more beautiful than almost any other, is said to have suffered particularly. As to the men who die, I share the impassioned sorrow of the Triumvirs. “O Frenchmen!” they wrote, “could you know what men you destroy! They are no mercenaries, like those who fill your ranks, but the flower of the Italian youth, and the noblest among the aged. When you shall know of what minds you have robbed the world, how ought you to repent and mourn!” This is especially true of the Emigrant and Garibaldi legions. The misfortunes of Northern and Southern Italy, the conscription which compels to the service of tyranny those who remain, has driven from the kingdom of Naples and from Lombardy all the brave and noble youth. Many are in Venice or Rome, the forlorn hope of Italy. Radetzky, every day more cruel, now impresses aged men and the fathers of large families. He carries them with him in chains, determined, if he cannot have good troops to send into Hungary, at least to revenge himself on the unhappy Lombards. Many of these young men, students from Pisa, Pavia, Padua, and the Roman University, lie wounded in the hospitals, for naturally they rushed first to the combat. One kissed an arm which was cut off; another preserves pieces of bone which were painfully extracted from his wound, as relics of the best days of his life. The older men, many of whom have been saddened by exile and disappointment, less glowing, are not less resolved. A spirit burns noble as ever animated the most precious deeds we treasure from the heroic age. I suffer to see these temples of the soul thus broken, to see the fever-weary days and painful operations undergone by these noble men, these true priests of a higher hope; but I would not, for much, have missed seeing it all. The memory of it will console amid the spectacles of meanness, selfishness, and faithlessness which life may yet have in store for the pilgrim. June 23. Matters verge to a crisis. The French government sustains Oudinot and disclaims Lesseps. Harmonious throughout, shameless in falsehood, it seems Oudinot knew that the mission of Lesseps was at an end, when he availed himself of his pacific promises to occupy Monte Mario. When the Romans were anxious at seeing French troops move in that direction, Lesseps said it was only done to occupy them, and conjured the Romans to avoid all collision which might prevent his success with the treaty. The sham treaty was concluded on the 30th of May, a detachment of French having occupied Monte Mario on the night of the 29th. Oudinot flies into a rage and refuses to sign; M. Lesseps goes off to Paris; meanwhile, the brave Oudinot attacks on the 3d of June, after writing to the French Consul that Ire should not till the 4th, to leave time for the foreigners remaining to retire. He attacked in the night, possessing himself of Villa Pamfili, as he had of Monte Mario, by treachery and surprise. Meanwhile, M. Lesseps arrives in Paris, to find himself seemingly or really in great disgrace with the would-be Emperor and his cabinet. To give reason for this, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI who had publicly declared to the Assembly that M. Lesseps had no instructions except from the report of the sitting of the 7th of May, shamefully publishes a letter of special instructions, hemming him in on every side, which M. Lesseps, the “Plenipotentiary,” dares not disown. What are we to think of a great nation, whose leading men are such barefaced liars? M. Guizot finds his creed faithfully followed up. The liberal party in France does what it can to wash its hands of this offence, but it seems weak, and unlikely to render effectual service at this crisis. Venice, Rome, Ancona, are the last strong-holds of hope, and they cannot stand for ever thus unsustained. Night before last, a tremendous cannonade left no moment to sleep, even had the anxious hearts of mothers and wives been able to crave it. At morning a little detachment of French had entered by the breach of St. Pancrazio, and intrenched itself in a vineyard. Another has possession of Villa Poniatowski, close to the Porta del Popolo, and attacks and alarms are hourly to be expected. I long to see the final one, dreadful as that hour may be, since now there seems no hope from delay. Men are daily slain, and this state of suspense is agonizing. In the evening ‘tis pretty, though terrible, to see the bombs, fiery meteors, springing from the horizon line upon their bright path, to do their wicked message. ‘T would not be so bad, methinks, to die by one of these, as wait to have every drop of pure blood, every childlike radiant hope, drained and driven from the heart by the betrayals of nations and of individuals, till at last the sickened eyes refuse more to open to that light which shines daily on such pits of iniquity. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

June 30, Saturday: The Marchése Ossoli’s troops, quartered in the Vatican gardens, were ordered to man a battery at the Pincian hill, the most exposed position in Rome. Expecting Ossoli to be killed by the French bombardment, Margaret Fuller went to be with him.

(Although Margaret would not be killed, this is reported under the rubric of suicide because it fully qualifies in accordance with the formal definition sponsored by Durkheim in his classic sociological treatise SUICIDE.)

Henry Thoreau wrote to Professor Louis Agassiz. Concord Mass June 30th — 49 Dear Sir, Being disappointed in not finding you in Boston a week or two since, I requested Dr. Gould to make some inquiries of you for me; but now, as I shall not be able to see that gentleman for some time, I have decided to apply to you directly. Suffice it to say, that one of the directors of the Bangor (ME.) Lyce- um has asked me to ascertain simply –and I think this a good Yankee way of doing the business– Whether you will read two or three lectures before that institution early in the next lecture season, and if so, what remuneration you will expect. Of course they would be glad to hear more lectures, but they are HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI afraid that they may not have money enough to pay for them. You may recognise in your correspondent the individual who for- warded to you through Mr Cabot many firkins of fishes and turtles a few years since, and who also had the pleasure of an introduction to you at Marlboro’ Chapel. Will you please to answer this note as soon as convenient? yrs respectfully Henry D. Thoreau

July: Margaret Fuller wrote from Italy to W.H. Channing: July, 1849. I cannot tell you what I endured in leaving Rome, abandoning the wounded soldiers, — knowing that there is no provision made for them, when they rise from the beds where they have been thrown by a noble courage, and have suffered with a noble patience. Some of the poorer men, who rise bereft even of the right arm, —one having lost both the right arm and the right leg,— I could have provided for with a small sum. Could I have sold my hair, or blood from my arm, I would have done it. Had any of the rich Americans remained in Rome, they would have given it to me; they helped nobly at first, in the service of the hospitals, when there was far less need; but they had all gone. What would I have given could I but have spoken to one of the Lawrences, or the Phillipses! They could and would have saved this misery. These poor men are left helpless in the power of a mean and vindictive foe. You felt so oppressed in the Slave States; imagine what I felt at seeing all the noblest youth, all the genius of this dear land, again enslaved! ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

After the defeat of the Italian Republican army by the 40,000 French troops sent by Louis Napoleon, Charles- Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte of course needed to leave Rome. However, when he landed at Marseilles he was ordered by Louis Napoleon to leave France. He travelled on, to England, and attended a meeting of the British Association in Birmingham. He then visited Sir William Jardine in southern Scotland. He then began work on preparing a methodical classification of all the birds in the world, visiting museums across Europe to study their collections. Eventually he would be allowed to return to France and for the rest of his life consider Paris his home.

July 6, Friday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune on the bombardment and capture of Rome by the French army: Rome, July 6, 1849. If I mistake not, I closed my last letter just as the news arrived here that the attempt of the democratic party in France to resist the infamous proceedings of the government had failed, and thus Rome, as far as human calculation went, had not a hope for her liberties left. An inland city cannot long sustain a siege when there is no hope of aid. Then followed the news of the surrender of Ancona, and Rome found herself alone; for, though Venice continued to hold out, all communication was cut off. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The Republican troops, almost to a man, left Ancona, but a long march separated them from Rome. The extreme heat of these days was far more fatal to the Romans than to their assailants, for as fast as the French troops sickened, their place was taken by fresh arrivals. Ours also not only sustained the exhausting service by day, but were harassed at night by attacks, feigned or real. These commonly began about eleven or twelve o’clock at night, just when all who meant to rest were fairly asleep. I can imagine the harassing effect upon the troops, from what I feel in my sheltered pavilion, in consequence of not knowing a quiet night’s sleep for a month. The bombardment became constantly more serious. The house where I live was filled as early as the 20th with persons obliged to fly from the Piazza di Gesu, where the fiery rain fell thickest. The night of the 21st-22d, we were all alarmed about two o’clock, A.M. by a tremendous cannonade. It was the moment when the breach was finally made by which the French entered. They rushed in, and I grieve to say, that, by the only instance of defection known in the course of the siege, those companies of the regiment Union which had in charge a position on that point yielded to panic and abandoned it. The French immediately entered and intrenched themselves. That was the fatal hour for the city. Every day afterward, though obstinately resisted, the enemy gained, till at last, their cannon being well placed, the city was entirely commanded from the Janiculum, and all thought of further resistance was idle. It was true policy to avoid a street-fight, in which the Italian, an unpractised soldier, but full of feeling and sustained from the houses, would have been a match even for their disciplined troops. After the 22d of June, the slaughter of the Romans became every day more fearful. Their defences were knocked down by the heavy cannon of the French, and, entirely exposed in their valorous onsets, great numbers perished on the spot. Those who were brought into the hospitals were generally grievously wounded, very commonly subjects for amputation. My heart bled daily more and more at these sights, and I could not feel much for myself, though now the balls and bombs began to fall round me also. The night of the 28th the effect was truly fearful, as they whizzed and burst near me. As many as thirty fell upon or near the Hotel de Russie, where Mr. Cass has his temporary abode. The roof of the studio in the pavilion, tenanted by Mr. Stermer, well known to the visitors of Rome for his highly-finished cabinet pictures, was torn to pieces. I sat alone in my much exposed apartment, thinking, “If one strikes me, I only hope it will kill me at once, and that God will transport my soul to some sphere where virtue and love are not tyrannized over by egotism and brute force, as in this.” However, that night passed; the next, we had reason to expect a still more fiery salute toward the Pincian, as here alone remained three or four pieces of cannon which could be used. But on the morning of the 30th, in a contest at the foot of the Janiculum, the line, old Papal troops, naturally not in earnest like the free corps, refused to fight against odds so terrible. The heroic Marina fell, with hundreds of his devoted Lombards. Garibaldi saw his best officers perish, and himself went in the afternoon to say to the Assembly that further resistance was unavailing. The Assembly sent to Oudinot, but he refused any conditions, — refused even to guarantee a safe departure to Garibaldi, his HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI brave foe. Notwithstanding, a great number of men left the other regiments to follow the leader whose courage had captivated them, and whose superiority over difficulties commanded their entire confidence. Toward the evening of Monday, the 2d of July, it was known that the French were preparing to cross the river and take possession of all the city. I went into the Corso with some friends; it was filled with citizens and military. The carriage was stopped by the crowd near the Doria palace; the lancers of Garibaldi galloped along in full career. I longed for Sir Walter Scott to be on earth again, and see them; all are light, athletic, resolute figures, many of the forms of the finest manly beauty of the South, all sparkling with its genius and ennobled by the resolute spirit, ready to dare, to do, to die. We followed them to the piazza of St. John Lateran. Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic, and so sad. Whoever knows Rome knows the peculiar solemn grandeur of that piazza, scene of the first triumph of Rienzi, and whence may be seen the magnificence of the “mother of all churches,” the baptistery with its porphyry columns, the Santa Scala with its glittering mosaics of the early ages, the obelisk standing fairest of any of those most imposing monuments of Rome, the view through the gates of the Campagna, on that side so richly strewn with ruins. The sun was setting, the crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth were marshalling in that solemn place. They had been driven from every other spot where they had offered their hearts as bulwarks of Italian independence; in this last strong-hold they had sacrificed hecatombs of their best and bravest in that cause; they must now go or remain prisoners and slaves. Where go, they knew not; for except distant Hungary there is not now a spot which would receive them, or where they can act as honor commands. They had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the Greek cap, or else round hat with Puritan plume. Their long hair was blown back from resolute faces; all looked full of courage. They had counted the cost before they entered on this perilous struggle; they had weighed life and all its material advantages against liberty, and made their election; they turned not back, nor flinched, at this bitter crisis. I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their baggage cars; some were already pale and fainting, still they wished to go. I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly goods. The women were ready; their eyes too were resolved, if sad. The wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback. He himself was distinguished by the white tunic; his look was entirely that of a hero of the Middle Ages, — his face still young, for the excitements of his life, though so many, have all been youthful, and there is no fatigue upon his brow or cheek. Fall or stand, one sees in him a man engaged in the career for which he is adapted by nature. He went upon the parapet, and looked upon the road with a spy-glass, and, no obstruction being in sight, he turned his face for a moment back upon Rome, then led the way through the gate. Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye, that had no tear for that moment. Go, fated, gallant band! and if God care not indeed for men as for the sparrows, most of ye go forth to perish. And Rome, anew the Niobe! Must she lose also these beautiful and brave, that promised her regeneration, and would have given it, but for the perfidy, the overpowering HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI force, of the foreign intervention? I know that many “respectable” gentlemen would be surprised to hear me speak in this way. Gentlemen who perform their “duties to society” by buying for themselves handsome clothes and furniture with the interest of their money, speak of Garibaldi and his men as “brigands” and “vagabonds.” Such are they, doubtless, in the same sense as Jesus, Moses, and Eneas were. To me, men who can throw so lightly aside the ease of wealth, the joys of affection, for the sake of what they deem honor, in whatsoever form, are the “respectable.” No doubt there are in these bands a number of men of lawless minds, and who follow this banner only because there is for them no other path. But the greater part are the noble youths who have fled from the Austrian conscription, or fly now from the renewal of the Papal suffocation, darkened by French protection. As for the protectors, they entirely threw aside the mask, as it was always supposed they would, the moment they had possession of Rome. I do not know whether they were really so bewildered by their priestly counsellors as to imagine they would be well received in a city which they had bombarded, and where twelve hundred men were lying wounded by their assault. To say nothing of the justice or injustice of the matter, it could not be supposed that the Roman people, if it had any sense of dignity, would welcome them. I did not appear in the street, as I would not give any countenance to such a wrong; but an English lady, my friend, told me they seemed to look expectingly for the strong party of friends they had always pretended to have within the walls. The French officers looked up to the windows for ladies, and, she being the only one they saw, saluted her. She made no reply. They then passed into the Corso. Many were assembled, the softer Romans being unable to control a curiosity the Milanese would have disclaimed, but preserving an icy silence. In an evil hour, a foolish priest dared to break it by the cry of Viva Pio Nono! The populace, roused to fury, rushed on him with their knives. He was much wounded; one or two others were killed in the rush. The people howled then, and hissed at the French, who, advancing their bayonets, and clearing the way before them, fortified themselves in the piazzas. Next day the French troops were marched to and fro through Rome, to inspire awe in the people; but it has only created a disgust amounting to loathing, to see that, with such an imposing force, and in great part fresh, the French were not ashamed to use bombs also, and kill women and children in their beds. Oudinot then, seeing the feeling of the people, and finding they pursued as a spy any man who so much as showed the way to his soldiers, — that the Italians went out of the cafés if Frenchmen entered, — in short, that the people regarded him and his followers in the same light as the Austrians, — has declared martial law in Rome; the press is stifled; everybody is to be in the house at half past nine o’clock in the evening, and whoever in any way insults his men, or puts any obstacle in their way, is to be shot. The fruits of all this will be the same as elsewhere; temporary repression will sow the seeds of perpetual resistance; and never was Rome in so fair a way to be educated for a republican form of government as now. Especially could nothing be more irritating to an Italian population, in the month of July, than to drive them to their homes at half past nine. After the insupportable heat of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI day, their only enjoyment and refreshment are found in evening walks, and chats together as they sit before their cafés, or in groups outside some friendly door. Now they must hurry home when the drum beats at nine o’clock. They are forbidden to stand or sit in groups, and this by their bombarding protector! Comment is unnecessary. French soldiers are daily missing; of some it is known that they have been killed by the Trasteverini for daring to make court to their women. Of more than a hundred and fifty, it is only known that they cannot he found; and in two days of French “order” more acts of violence have been committed, than in two months under the Triumvirate. The French have taken up their quarters in the court-yards of the Quirinal and Venetian palaces, which are full of the wounded, many of whom have been driven well-nigh mad, and their burning wounds exasperated, by the sound of the drums and trumpets, — the constant sense of an insulting presence. The wounded have been warned to leave the Quirinal at the end of eight days, though there are many who cannot be moved from bed to bed without causing them great anguish and peril; nor is it known that any other place has been provided as a hospital for them. At the Palazzo di Venezia the French have searched for three emigrants whom they wished to imprison, even in the apartments where the wounded were lying, running their bayonets into the mattresses. They have taken for themselves beds given by the Romans to the hospital, — not public property, but private gift. The hospital of Santo Spirito was a governmental establishment, and, in using a part of it for the wounded, its director had been retained, because he had the reputation of being honest and not illiberal. But as soon as the French entered, he, with true priestly baseness, sent away the women nurses, saying he had no longer money to pay them, transported the wounded into a miserable, airless basement, that had before been used as a granary, and appropriated the good apartments to the use of the French! ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

July 8, Sunday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune: July 8. The report of this morning is that the French yesterday violated the domicile of our Consul, Mr. Brown, pretending to search for persons hidden there; that Mr. Brown, banner in one hand and sword in the other, repelled the assault, and fairly drove them down stairs; that then he made them an appropriate speech, though in a mixed language of English, French, and Italian; that the crowd vehemently applauded Mr. Brown, who already was much liked for the warm sympathy he had shown the Romans in their aspirations and their distresses; and that he then donned his uniform, and went to Oudinot to make his protest. How this was received I know not, but understand Mr. Brown departed with his family yesterday evening. Will America look as coldly on the insult to herself, as she has on the struggle of this injured people? To-day an edict is out to disarm the National Guard. The generous “protectors” wish to take all the trouble upon themselves. Rome HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI is full of them; at every step are met groups in the uniform of France, with faces bronzed in the African war, and so stultified by a life without enthusiasm and without thought, that I do not believe Napoleon would recognize them as French soldiers. The effect of their appearance compared with that of the Italian free corps is that of body as compared with spirit. It is easy to see how they could be used to purposes so contrary to the legitimate policy of France, for they do not look more intellectual, more fitted to have opinions of their own, than the Austrian soldiery.

July 10, Tuesday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune: July 10. The plot thickens. The exact facts with regard to the invasion of Mr. Brown’s house I have not been able to ascertain. I suppose they will be published, as Oudinot has promised to satisfy Mr. Cass. I must add, in reference to what I wrote some time ago of the position of our Envoy here, that the kind and sympathetic course of Mr. Cass toward the Republicans in these troubles, his very gentlemanly and courteous bearing, have from the minds of most removed all unpleasant feelings. They see that his position was very peculiar, — sent to the Papal government, finding here the Republican, and just at that moment violently assailed. Unless he had extraordinary powers, he naturally felt obliged to communicate further with our government before acknowledging this. I shall always regret, however, that he did not stand free to occupy the high position that belonged to the representative of the United States at that moment, and peculiarly because it was by a republic that the Roman Republic was betrayed. But, as I say, the plot thickens. Yesterday three families were carried to prison because a boy crowed like a cock at the French soldiery from the windows of the house they occupied. Another, because a man pursued took refuge in their court-yard. At the same time, the city being mostly disarmed, came the edict to take down the insignia of the Republic, “emblems of anarchy.” But worst of all they have done is an edict commanding all foreigners who had been in the service of the Republican government to leave Rome within twenty-four hours. This is the most infamous thing done yet, as it drives to desperation those who stayed because they had so many to go with and no place to go to, or because their relatives lie wounded here: no others wished to remain in Rome under present circumstances. I am sick of breathing the same air with men capable of a part so utterly cruel and false. As soon as I can, I shall take refuge in the mountains, if it be possible to find an obscure nook unpervaded by these convulsions. Let not my friends be surprised if they do not hear from me for some time. I may not feel like writing. I have seen too much sorrow, and, alas! without power to aid. It makes me sick to see the palaces and streets of Rome full of these infamous foreigners, and to note the already changed aspect of her population. The men of Rome had begun, filled with new hopes, to develop unknown energy, — they walked quick, their eyes sparkled, they delighted in duty, in responsibility; in a year of such life their effeminacy would have been vanquished. Now, dejectedly, unemployed, they lounge along the streets, feeling that all the implements of labor, all HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the ensigns of hope, have been snatched from them. Their hands fall slack, their eyes rove aimless, the beggars begin to swarm again, and the black ravens who delight in the night of ignorance, the slumber of sloth, as the only sureties for their rule, emerge daily more and more frequent from their hiding- places. The following Address has been circulated from hand to hand. “TO THE PEOPLE OF ROME. “Misfortune, brothers, has fallen upon us anew. But it is trial of brief duration, — it is the stone of the sepulchre which we shall throw away after three days, rising victorious and renewed, an immortal nation. For with us are God and Justice, — God and Justice, who cannot die, but always triumph, while kings and popes, once dead, revive no more. “As you have been great in the combat, be so in the days of sorrow, — great in your conduct as citizens, by generous disdain, by sublime silence. Silence is the weapon we have now to use against the Cossacks of France and the priests, their masters. “In the streets do not look at them; do not answer if they address you. “In the cafés, in the eating-houses, if they enter, rise and go out. “Let your windows remain closed as they pass. “Never attend their feasts, their parades. “Regard the harmony of their musical bands as tones of slavery, and, when you hear them, fly. “Let the liberticide soldier be condemned to isolation; let him atone in solitude and contempt for having served priests and kings. “And you, Roman women, masterpiece of God’s work! deign no look, no smile, to those satellites of an abhorred Pope! Cursed be she who, before the odious satellites of Austria, forgets that she is Italian! Her name shall be published for the execration of all her people! And even the courtesans! let them show love for their country, and thus regain the dignity of citizens! “And our word of order, our cry of reunion and emancipation, be now and ever, VIVA LA REPUBLICA! “This incessant cry, which not even French slaves can dispute, shall prepare us to administer the bequest of our martyrs, shall be consoling dew to the immaculate and holy bones that repose, sublime holocaust of faith and of love, near our walls, and make doubly divine the Eternal City. In this cry we shall find ourselves always brothers, and we shall conquer. Viva Rome, the capital of Italy! Viva the Italy of the people! Viva the Roman Republic! “A ROMAN. “Rome, July 4, 1849.” Yes; July 4th, the day so joyously celebrated in our land, is that of the entrance of the French into Rome! I know not whether the Romans will follow out this programme with constancy, as the sterner Milanese have done. If they can, it will draw upon them endless persecutions, countless exactions, but at once educate and prove them worthy of a nobler life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Yesterday I went over the scene of conflict. It was fearful even to see the Casinos Quattro Venti and Vascello, where the French and Romans had been several days so near one another, all shattered to pieces, with fragments of rich stucco and painting still sticking to rafters between the great holes made by the cannonade, and think that men had stayed and fought in them when only a mass of ruins. The French, indeed, were entirely sheltered the last days; to my unpractised eyes, the extent and thoroughness of their works seemed miraculous, and gave me the first clear idea of the incompetency of the Italians to resist organized armies. I saw their commanders had not even known enough of the art of war to understand how the French were conducting the siege. It is true, their resources were at any rate inadequate to resistance; only continual sorties would have arrested the progress of the foe, and to make them and man the wall their forces were inadequate. I was struck more than ever by the heroic valor of our people, — let me so call them now as ever; for go where I may, a large part of my heart will ever remain in Italy. I hope her children will always acknowledge me as a sister, though I drew not my first breath here. A Contadini showed me where thirty-seven braves are buried beneath a heap of wall that fell upon them in the shock of one cannonade. A marble nymph, with broken arm, looked sadly that way from her sun-dried fountain; some roses were blooming still, some red oleanders, amid the ruin. The sun was casting its last light on the mountains on the tranquil, sad Campagna, that sees one leaf more turned in the book of woe. This was in the Vascello. I then entered the French ground, all mapped and hollowed like a honeycomb. A pair of skeleton legs protruded from a bank of one barricade; lower, a dog had scratched away its light covering of earth from the body of a man, and discovered it lying face upward all dressed; the dog stood gazing on it with an air of stupid amazement. I thought at that moment, recalling some letters received: “O men and women of America, spared these frightful sights, these sudden wrecks of every hope, what angel of heaven do you suppose has time to listen to your tales of morbid woe? If any find leisure to work for men to-day, think you not they have enough to do to care for the victims here?” I see you have meetings, where you speak of the Italians, the Hungarians. I pray you do something; let it not end in a mere cry of sentiment. That is better than to sneer at all that is liberal, like the English, — than to talk of the holy victims of patriotism as “anarchists” and “brigands”; but it is not enough. It ought not to content your consciences. Do you owe no tithe to Heaven for the privileges it has showered on you, for whose achievement so many here suffer and perish daily? Deserve to retain them, by helping your fellow-men to acquire them. Our government must abstain from interference, but private action is practicable, is due. For Italy, it is in this moment too late; but all that helps Hungary helps her also, — helps all who wish the freedom of men from an hereditary yoke now become intolerable. Send money, send cheer, — acknowledge as the legitimate leaders and rulers those men who represent the people, who understand their wants, who are ready to die or to live for their good. Kossuth I know not, but his people recognize him; Manin I know not, but with what firm nobleness, what perserving virtue, he has acted for Venice! Mazzini I know, the man and his acts, great, pure, and constant, — a man to whom HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI only the next age can do justice, as it reaps the harvest of the seed he has sown in this. Friends, countrymen, and lovers of virtue, lovers of freedom, lovers of truth! be on the alert; rest not supine in your easier lives, but remember “Mankind is one, And beats with one great heart.”

August 31, Friday: According to BIRTHS, MARRIAGES AND DEATHS OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS (Groton, 1894), Married Alvan Davis (age 31) & Elizabeth Lawrence (age 27) both of Groton.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune, from Rome, a retrospective of the events of the conflict there:

[NEED TO SCAN TNIS NEWSPAPER COLUMN]

November 15, Thursday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Florence on the state of Italy: The reception to-day of some “Tribunes” whets my blunted purpose to write. Amid the pains and disappointments with which the past months have been overflowing, it is refreshing to read how cordially America sympathized She did not hug herself in selfish content with her more prosperous fortune; she glowed at the hope of relief for the suffering nations of Europe; she deeply mourned its overthrow; she is indignant at the treachery that consummated it. I love my country for the spirit she has shown; it proves that the lust for gold, her peculiar temptation, has not yet cankered her noble heart.... CONTINUE READING....

A committee conducted an investigation of the Fox Sisters at Rochester, New York’s Sons of Temperance Hall, and discovered no evidence of deceit on the part of these Canadian girls. The audience demanded another investigation. SPIRITUALISM

Kate Maggie

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1850

January 6, Sunday: Greenwood, Grace Sara Jane (Clarke) Lippincott, 1823-1904; New Brighton PA. To The Washingtonian; Washington DC. Thanks them for reviewing her book GREENWOOD LEAVES. Autograph Letter Signed. 2 pages, 17.7 cm92

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Firenzi on her ideas of the next Italian revolution:

[NEED TO SCAN TNIS NEWSPAPER COLUMN]

February 6, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Waldo Emerson from Saco, Maine about delivering “Cape Cod” in South Danvers, Massachusetts on the night of the 18th. Saco, Maine, Wednesday 6 Feb Dear Henry I was at South Danvers on Monday Evening, & promised Mr C. Northend, Secretary of the Lyceum, to invite you for Monday 1 8th Feb. to read a lecture to his institution. I told him there were two lectures to describe Cape Cod, which interested him & his friends, & they hoped that the two might somehow be rolled into one to give them some sort of complete story of the journey. I hope it will not quite discredit my negotiation if I confess that they heard with joy that Concord people laughed till they cried, when it was read to them. I understand Mr N., that there is a possibility but no probability that his absent colleague of the Lyceum has filled up that evening by an appointment— But Mr N. will be glad to hear from you that you will come, & if any cause exist why not, he will immediately reply to you. They will pay your expenses, & $10.00. You will go from the Salem depot in an omnibus to Mr N.’s house. Do go if you can. Address Charles Northend, Esq. South Danvers. Yours ever R. W. Emerson.

Margaret Fuller wrote to her mother from Firenzi: Florence, February 6, 1850. Dearest Mother, — After receiving your letter of October, I answered immediately; but as Richard mentions, in one dated December 4th, that you have not heard, I am afraid, by some post- office mistake, it went into the mail-bag of some sail-ship, instead of steamer, so you were very long without hearing. I regret it the more, as I wanted so much to respond fully to your letter, — so lovely, so generous, and which, of all your acts of love, was perhaps the one most needed by me, and which has touched me the most deeply. I gave you in that a flattering picture of our life. And those pleasant days lasted till the middle of December; but then came on a cold unknown to Italy, and which has lasted ever since. As

92. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885. Kent State University, Library, Special Collections HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the apartments were not prepared for such weather, we suffered a good deal. Besides, both Ossoli and myself were taken ill at New-Year’s time, and were not quite well again, all January: now we are quite well. The weather begins to soften, though still cloudy, damp, and chilly, so that poor baby can go out very little; on that account he does not grow so fast, and gets troublesome by evening, as he tires of being shut up in two or three little rooms, where he has examined every object hundreds of times. He is always pointing to the door. He suffers much with chilblains, as do other children here; however, he is, with that exception, in the best health, and is a great part of the time very gay, laughing and dancing in the nurse-maid’s arms, and trying to sing and drum, in imitation of the bands, which play a great deal in the Piazza. Nothing special has happened to me. The uninhabitableness of the rooms where I had expected to write, and the need of using our little dining-room, the only one in which is a stove, for dressing baby, taking care of him, eating, and receiving visits and messages, have prevented my writing for six or seven weeks past. In the evening, when baby went to bed, about eight, I began to have time, but was generally too tired to do anything but read. The four hours, however, from nine till one, beside the bright little fire, have been very pleasant. I have thought of you a great deal, remembering how you suffer from cold in the winter, and hope you are in a warm, comfortable house, have pleasant books to read, and some pleasant friends to see. One does not want many; only a few bright faces to look in now and then, and help thaw the ice with little rills of genial conversation. I have fewer of these than at Rome, — but still several. * * * * * Horace Sumner, youngest son of father’s friend, Mr. Charles P. Sumner, lives near us, and comes every evening to read a little while with Ossoli. He has solid good in his heart and mind. We have a true regard for him, and he has shown true and steadfast sympathy for us; when I am ill or in a hurry, he helps me like a brother. Ossoli and Sumner exchange some instruction in English and Italian. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI March 16, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF MARCH 16

Waldo Emerson delivered “The Superlative in Literature, Manners, and Races.”

According to page 79 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), there are distinct markings of sexist politics to be discerned within the novel published on this day by Ticknor and Fields, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE 93 SCARLET LETTER; OR,THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:

theabsorbingcontemplationofthescarletletterthestoryentitled“THESCARLET LETTER”taleof“TheScarletLetter”thescarletletterandeventoucheditwithher fingerthewearerofthescarletlettertakethescarletletteroffthescarletletterthre waluridwearerofthescarletletterfingeronthescarletletterthescarletletterflam ingonherbreastthescarletletteronherbreastornamentthescarletletterwhichitwas herdoomtowearthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletteronHester’sbos omgazemightneveroncebefixeduponthescarletlettertouchedthescarletletterthe scarletletterthescarletletterendowedwithlifethescarletletterthewomanofthe scarletletterthelikenessofthescarletletterthescarletletterthewearerofthesca rletletterherchildandthescarletletterlinesofthescarletletterthatdecoratedthem aternalbosomthescarletletteronherbosomthescarletletteronherbreastherfingero nthescarletletterlookuponthescarletletterasthetokenthescarletletterThesca rletletterhadnotdoneitsofficeThescarletletterburnedonHesterPrynne’sbosom“Ih avelefttheetothescarletletter”Iwhomthescarletletterhasdisciplinedtotruthunder thetortureofthescarletletterasforthescarletletter“Mother”saidshe“whatdoesthe scarletlettermean?”investigationsaboutthescarletletterthescarletletterHema deastepnigheranddiscoveredthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletterT hescarletletterwasherpassportthescarletletterthescarletletteragainthescarl etletterbrought“Lookyourlastonthescarletletteranditswearer!”thescarletletter thescarletletterenvelopeditsfatedwearer“Thymotherisyonderwomanwiththesca rletletter”hadoftenheardofthescarletletterthescarletletterinthemarketplaceHe againextendedhishandtothewomanofthescarletletterLothescarletletterthesca rletletterthemiddaysunshineonthescarletletterwearerofthescarletletterThesto ryofthescarletlettergrewintoalegendrecluseofthescarletlettertheabsorbi

HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Near the end of THE SCARLET LETTER, Hawthorne in a summary tells us about Hester’s eventual change of heart, about how she at last forsook radicalism and recognized that the woman who would lead the reform movements of the future and establish women’s rights must be less “stained with sin,” less “bowed down with shame” than she. This woman must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy.” More than one reader has correctly surmised that this ending to the novel constitutes a veiled complement to Hawthorne’s little Dove, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and a veiled criticism of Margaret Fuller — radical, advocate of women’s rights, and subject of gossip because of her child and questionable marriage. Hawthorne’s ambivalent feelings toward Fuller indeed informed this and other parts of the novel, and although a number of women have been discussed as models for Hester, including Anne Hutchinson, Ebe Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Fuller seems to have served in this capacity most provokingly. As Francis E. Kearns has pointed out, a number of parallels exist between Fuller and Hester: both had the problem of facing a Puritan society encumbered by a child of questionable legitimacy; both were concerned with social reform and the role of woman in society; both functioned as counselor and comforter to women; and both had children entitled to use the armorial seals of a non-English noble family. A more important parallel, which Kearns does not mention, is that for Hawthorne both women were linked to the figures of Liberty and Eve, that is, to the ideas of revolution and temptation, which lie at the heart of the novel. For certain sure the benevolent Boston presence of George Stillman Hillard and the benign influence of Waldo Emerson, among other notables, had been immortalized in Hawthorne’s preamble “The Custom-House”:

93. A claim of copyright has been made for THE SCARLET LETTER in 1962, for FANSHAWE and THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE in 1964, for THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES in 1965, and for THE MARBLE FAUN in 1968, by Ohio State UP. (We presume that those ostensibly appropriative and global copyright claims could actually have covered not more than whatever value was added to the works by that press at that time, such as their reformatting and pagination and suchlike.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

[INSERT COMMENTARY ABOUT DECAPITATION HERE]

This “psychological bondage” book offered its appreciative audience a heroine who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a woman her best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt her, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else she might try always makes her lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and maintain sexual purity, that constitutes female courage. Had slaves formed a reading market in that era, the author could easily have authored a companion volume about a black man who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a slave his best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt him, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else he might try always makes his lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and polish shoes, that constitutes slave courage. Then, of course, the author could have created a grand synthesis, in a tale of a female slave who learns, finally, that her role as female and her role as slave quite reinforce one another.... To use a 19th-Century phrase, “women and Negroes.” Do you get the idea I actively dislike this romance? No, I actively dislike the mentality of its author Hawthorne. The best thing I have seen on this subject was written by Jean Fagan Yellin:

Where Hiram Powers had distanced an enchained white woman in space and called her a Greek Slave, Nathaniel Hawthorne distanced an enchained white woman in time and called her Hester Prynne.

Clearly, anyone who is bonded to (or in bondage to — it’s much the same, isn’t it?) such a person has a tough row to hoe (you note I cast this suggestion in the present tense — it’s still the case). In particular Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, who had witnessed slavery while living for an extended period in her youth on a sugar plantation in Cuba, had a tough attitudinal row to hoe, being married to such an author-tarian. Sophia could have hardly become an active abolitionist like her sisters Mary and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Her solution? –Sophia went for denial, and refused to give credence to various unsettling reports such as that some slave HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI women had to strip to the buff on the auction block (“which I am sure is an exaggeration for I have read of these auctions often and even the worst facts are never so bad as absolute nudity”).

Then she also capable of ignoring the BOOK OF JOB in her BIBLE long enough to suppose that a good and benevolent God providentially “makes up to every being the measure of happiness which he loses thro’ the instrumentality of others” — so that it really is of no consequence how we treat each other. And then she could HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI attempt to “lose myself in other subjects of thought,” embracing a sophisticated version of the Emersonian trick of resignation. She makes herself sound like a Minnesotan!94

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Waldo Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Henry Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of George Stillman Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Bronson Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

As of mid-century, with the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, it is clear that the

94. We may well note that although Henry Thoreau would have a copy of Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER in his personal library, he would cross out the reference to that item — indicating that the volume was no longer present (we infer that either the volume was lost, or given away). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI figure of Uncle Sam had become a fixture of our American imagination:

THE SCARLET LETTER: In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf – but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood – at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass – here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government, is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later – oftener soon than late – is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

May 14, Tuesday:In Philadelphia, Robert Collyer found employment as a blacksmith fashioning claw hammers. Because he had accepted piecework wages and because he was energetic and able, he soon began to make what for him was real money. He would join a local Methodist church and soon begin preaching. He and his wife Ann Longbottom Collyer would be residing near Philadelphia for nine years, during which time she would produce five children two of whom would survive.

Margaret Fuller’s leavetaking letter from Europe was posted to her mother, and indicates a clear recognition of the perils of sea travel: Florence, May 14, 1850. Dear Mother, — I will believe I shall be welcome with my treasures, — my husband and child. For me, I long so much to see HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI you! Should anything hinder our meeting upon earth, think of your daughter, as one who always wished, at least, to do her duty, and who always cherished you, according as her mind opened to discover excellence. Give dear love, too, to my brothers; and first to my eldest, faithful friend, Eugene; a sister’s love to Ellen; love to my kind good aunts, and to my dear cousin E. God bless them! I hope we shall be able to pass some time together yet, in this world. But if God decrees otherwise, — here and HEREAFTER, my dearest mother, Your loving child, MARGARET. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

May 17, Friday: The passage the Ossolis took to come to America, fleeing impossible conditions in Italy, was absolutely the cheapest they could find — a merchant vessel, the Elizabeth, fully loaded with a cargo of marble. Shortly before this vessel sailed from Livorno for New-York harbor, Margaret Fuller wrote “I can but accept all the pages as they turn.” Fuller’s manuscript on the Italian Revolution had been rejected by a publisher, her habitations had been under police surveillance, and she was no longer receiving journalism assignments from the New-York Herald Tribune (presumably due to rumors circulating in New-York about her private life). She had a letter in her pocket recently received from America, informing her that the Reverend Waldo Emerson and the Reverend William Henry Channing desired that she not return. Before the Elizabeth would clear the Mediterranean its captain would die of the small pox. Fuller’s infant was twice in the same room with the captain before the nature of his illness was known. The ship would be quarantined for a period in the harbor at Gibraltar. During the voyage across the Atlantic the infant would show the variola bumps and scabs for nine days, but would survive. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July 18, Thursday: The Elizabeth was brought to anchor off New York’s Fire Island. This was a cargo ship carrying a heavy ballast of valuable marble in its hold, and as supercargo Giovanni Angelo and his partner Margaret Fuller, the refugee marchése e marchésa d’Ossoli, with their 2-year-old toddler Angelo Eugenio Filippo who had been ill to the point of death during the voyage — but was recuperating.The 1st mate, in command since the captain had died of the small pox, believing that his vessel was off the coast of New Jersey, announced to the passengers that the next day they would arrive in New-York harbor. Margaret Fuller began to lay out Nino’s landing clothes — but that evening the wind would pick up and by midnight it would be at gale force. Actually, they weren’t off the coast of New Jersey but had made their continental landfall to the north of that, off Long Island and Fire Island.

July 19, Friday: At 3:30AM, holding course with close-reefed sails, the Elizabeth struck a Fire Island sandbar. The ship’s lifeboats were soon smashed. As it grew lighter figures could be made out on the beach but these humans didn’t seem to be doing anything by way of a rescue, only waiting and watching. In fact these were not rescuers but resident scavengers waiting for their storm booty. At noon the first mate, in command of the Elizabeth since its skipper had died of the small pox, picked himself out a likely plank and jumped overboard. His instructions to those he left behind: “Save yourselves!” There was only one life preserver, which would by tradition have gone to Margaret Fuller, but as they all waited aboard the vessel and saw that it was breaking up in the surge, she offered that life preserver to a crewman who was volunteering to take his chances going overboard to summon aid (wreck #18 below):

TIMELINE OF SHIPWRECKS

The toddler had been slung into a canvas bag around the neck of a sailor. A Tribune reporter reached the beach at about 11AM. At about noon the Fire Island Lighthouse lifeboat and rescue howitzer arrived but, despite the fact that the ship was only a few hundred yards out into the breakers, rescue attempts were made difficult by wind and waves that were building into a hurricane. The lifeboat would never be launched. At about 3PM, with perhaps a thousand people on the beach at that point watching (half of whom were looting as cases of goods washed ashore), the ship began to come apart as pieces of its marble cargo broke through the hull. Some of the people aboard made it ashore by clinging to pieces of wreckage. When a sailor attempted to get the toddler ashore, the attempt failed and the tiny body would be submerged for about twenty minutes before being located and carried still warm out of the waves (the body would be placed in a chest donated by one of the sailors). Just before leaping overboard the cook heard Fuller, in her white nightgown, say “I see nothing but death before me.” When the ship broke up all who had not made it to shore were drowned (of the total of 22 aboard, a total of 10 including the baby could not be gotten across the surf to shore). Ossoli was seen to reach up from HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the water and attempt to grab a piece of rigging before disappearing beneath the waves.

The bodies of Giovanni and Margaret were not immediately recovered. When Ellery Channing reached that beach, some people who were still standing around informed him that they would have made a rescue attempt had they known someone “important” was on board.95 The reporter took some letters found on the beach in a box back to New-York and dried them and turned them over to Horace Greeley. Nathaniel Hawthorne had not met Giovanni Angelo but commented, according to his son’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE, A

95. Four editions of the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA held that their drownings occurred on July 16th and this error would not get corrected until 1974 — which would be hardly worth mentioning were it not such a graphic illustration of the general lack of value we place on a pushy woman’s contribution to our clownish society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI BIOGRAPHY, that

Providence was, after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.

Yeah, and a kind Providence put those clownish variola scarifications on the fated child’s face!

Behind this term “Providence” mobilized by Hawthorne we can see lurking the notion that this was an unquestionably murderous, yet unquestionably kind, act of God. His deity was merely disposing of a female who had gotten out of her place, sort of like crushing an ant that had wandered onto the author’s dinnerplate. God as the sanitary police for the Old Boys Network. The schadenfreudian remarks Nathaniel made from time to time about the Ossolis may have had less to do with his generally livid gender chauvinism, and less to do with the two of them as a couple, or with the two of them as particular individuals, than with Hawthorne’s special ambivalence toward the twisted sister with whom he had had those starry-night walks while his wife was inconvenienced, or his general misanthropy toward any woman who would do such an unwomanly thing as to write:

I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell.

Dear reader, do you agree with Nathaniel that fortune was kind to Margaret and her family? Do you, perhaps, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI harbor a hope that fortune will smile on you and on your family as it did not smile on her and her family? Do you suspect, as so many scholars studying this period have suspected, that Margaret perhaps harbored some sort of a death wish, and that it was this death wish which prevented her from leaping overboard into the breakers and attempting to make it to the shore that was only a few yards away? Remember, if you will, that Margaret had a spinal deformity, which very likely was some part of the cause of part of pretty boy Nathaniel’s hostility toward her and which very likely was the entire cause of his hostility toward her husband –what kind of clown could it be, who could marry a deformed woman, and have sex with her and produce a child?– and remember, also, if you will, that Margaret herself had long before been forced to abandon any suspicion she might have had in her earlier years, of the basic fairness of life. We were born to be mutilated, she commented, and, she might have added, we were born also, to be mocked:

I have no belief in beautiful lives; we were born to be mutilated: Life is basically unjust.

Several days after the USS Elizabeth had disintegrated, when all that lay in the breakers were some rough blocks of Italian marble and some hull timbers half buried in the sand, a sea captain named James Wick would show up at the offices of the New-York Herald Tribune on Manhattan Island with a packing crate containing the corpses of a man and a woman. Greeley was informed that these were the bodies of the “Italian count” Ossoli and Greeley’s war correspondent Margaret Fuller. He “refused to have anything to do with them,” according to Tribune reporter Felix Dominy.

The horses rattled the empty chariots, longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground lay, dearer to the vultures than to their wives.

So Captain Wick and his mate, to get rid of the bodies of Greeley’s war correspondent and her clownish husband without getting themselves into trouble, would bury this packing crate at night on Coney Island without marking the spot.96 We are reminded of something Henry Thoreau would jot down in his journal some nine months subsequent to this event, between April 19 and April 22, 1851, and something he would write into CAPE COD, and we are led to wonder whether Thoreau had in some manner come to suspect that his “friend” Greeley had something to do with the fact that it was these bodies in particular that had not been recovered from the wreck of the USS Elizabeth. For Thoreau did make an uncharacteristically bitter remark during this period, a remark about the moral character of editors in this country, a group of whom Greeley was arguably the single one who was the best known personally by Thoreau:

… probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as are the editors of the periodical press in this country.

Later in this day, in Boston, an appeal brought on behalf of Professor John White Webster by the minister of the Unitarian church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the Reverend George Putnam, D.D., failed to move the Governor’s Council on Pardons. Murder being contrary to the law of God, with one dissenting vote they recommended to the Governor of the commonwealth that he murder this murderer.

96. A letter from Felix Dominy’s son, that is among the Fuller papers at Harvard, attests to this incident and is described in Chevigny, Bell Gale. THE WOMAN AND THE MYTH: MARGARET FULLER’S LIFE AND WRITINGS. Old Westbury NY: The Feminist Press, 1976. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July 23, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Horace Greeley, advising that he was sending Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau to recover from the beach any of Margaret Fuller’s writing that could be salvaged.97 He advanced his delegates the sum of $70.00 for the expenses of their trip to Fire Island. While Ellery was away, Ellen Fuller Channing and the children went to be with her grieving mother at her brother Arthur Fuller’s home, in Manchester, New Hampshire where Arthur was a Unitarian pastor. Later on in life Fuller’s employer Greeley would deliver himself of a remark which deserves to be inscribed near the grave of her toddler Nino: [T]wo or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.98

However, this day was not a appropriate occasion for such bumptious presumptuous male chauvinism, either from one’s employer or from anyone else. It was a day, instead, that called for straightforward reporting of detail as in this letter posted by Bayard Taylor: Fire Island, Tuesday, July 23. To the Editors of the Tribune: — I reached the house of Mr. Smith Oakes, about one mile from the spot where the Elizabeth was wrecked, at three o’clock this morning. The boat in which I set out last night from Babylon, to cross the bay, was seven hours making the passage. On landing among the sand-hills, Mr. Oakes admitted me into his house, and gave me a place of rest for the remaining two or three hours of the night. This morning I visited the wreck, traversed the beach for some extent on both sides, and collected all the particulars that are now likely to be obtained, relative to the closing scenes of this terrible disaster. The sand is strewn for a distance of three or four miles with fragments of planks, spars, boxes, and the merchandise with which the vessel was laden. With the exception of a piece of her broadside, which floated to the shore intact, all the timbers have been so chopped and broken by the sea, that scarcely a stick of ten feet in length can be found. In front of the wreck these fragments are piled up along high- water mark to the height of several feet, while farther in among the sand-hills are scattered casks of almonds stove in, and their contents mixed with the sand, sacks of juniper-berries, oil-flasks, &c. About half the hull remains under water, not more than fifty yards from the shore. The spars and rigging belonging to the foremast, with part of the mast itself, are still attached to the ruins, surging over them at every swell. Mr. Jonathan Smith, the agent of the underwriters, intended to have the surf-boat launched this morning, for the purpose of cutting away the rigging and ascertaining how the wreck lies; but the sea is still too high. From what I can learn, the loss of the Elizabeth is mainly to be attributed to the inexperience of the mate, Mr. H.P. Bangs, who acted as captain after leaving Gibraltar. By his own statement, he supposed he was somewhere between Cape May and Barnegat, on Thursday evening. The vessel was consequently running northward, and struck head on. At the second thump, a hole was broken in her side, the seas poured through and over her, and she began going to pieces. This happened at ten minutes 97. NOTA BENE, do not be confused by these formulations: it was the Reverend William Henry Channing who accompanied Thoreau from Concord to Fire Island and it was the Concord poet William Ellery Channing II who came out from New-York to join them. 98. “I think he has been crazy for years.” — John Bigelow, five days before Greeley died in a mental clinic in Pleasantville, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI before four o’clock. The passengers were roused from their sleep by the shock, and hurried out of the cabin in their night- clothes, to take refuge on the forecastle, which was the least exposed part of the vessel. They succeeded with great difficulty; Mrs. Hasty, the widow of the late captain, fell into a hatchway, from which she was dragged by a sailor who seized her by the hair. The swells increased continually, and the danger of the vessel giving way induced several of the sailors to commit themselves to the waves. Previous to this they divested themselves of their clothes, which they tied to pieces of plank and sent ashore. These were immediately seized upon by the beach pirates, and never afterward recovered. The carpenter cut loose some planks and spars, and upon one of these Madame Ossoli was advised to trust herself, the captain promising to go in advance, with her boy. She refused, saying that she had no wish to live without the child, and would not, at that hour, give the care of it to another. Mrs. Hasty then took hold of a plank, in company with the second mate, Mr. Davis, through whose assistance she landed safely, though terribly bruised by the floating timber. The captain clung to a hatch, and was washed ashore insensible, where he was resuscitated by the efforts of Mr. Oakes and several others, who were by this time collected on the beach. Most of the men were entirely destitute of clothing, and some, who were exhausted and ready to let go their hold, were saved by the islanders, who went into the surf with lines about their waists, and caught them. The young Italian girl, Celesta Pardena, who was bound for New York, where she had already lived in the family of Henry Peters Gray, the artist, was at first greatly alarmed, and uttered the most piercing screams. By the exertions of the Ossolis she was quieted, and apparently resigned to her fate. The passengers reconciled themselves to the idea of death. At the proposal of the Marquis Ossoli some time was spent in prayer, after which all sat down calmly to await the parting of the vessel. The Marchioness Ossoli was entreated by the sailors to leave the vessel, or at least to trust her child to them, but she steadily refused. Early in the morning some men had been sent to the lighthouse for the life-boat which is kept there. Although this is but two miles distant, the boat did not arrive till about one o’clock, by which time the gale had so increased, and the swells were so high and terrific, that it was impossible to make any use of it. A mortar was also brought for the purpose of firing a line over the vessel, to stretch a hawser between it and the shore. The mortar was stationed on the lee of a hillock, about a hundred and fifty rods from the wreck, that the powder might be kept dry. It was fired five times, but failed to carry a line more than half the necessary distance. Just before the forecastle sunk, the remaining sailors determined to leave. The steward, with whom the child had always been a great favorite, took it, almost by main force, and plunged with it into the sea; neither reached the shore alive. The Marquis Ossoli was soon afterwards washed away, but his wife remained in ignorance of his fate. The cook, who was the last person that reached the shore alive, said that the last words he heard her speak were: “I see nothing but death before me, — I shall never reach the shore.” It was between two and three o’clock in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI afternoon, and after lingering for about ten hours, exposed to the mountainous surf that swept over the vessel, with the contemplation of death constantly forced upon her mind, she was finally overwhelmed as the foremast fell. It is supposed that her body and that of her husband are still buried under the ruins of the vessel. Mr. Horace Sumner, who jumped overboard early in the morning, was never seen afterwards. The dead bodies that were washed on shore were terribly bruised and mangled. That of the young Italian girl was enclosed in a rough box, and buried in the sand, together with those of the sailors. Mrs. Hasty had by this time found a place of shelter at Mr. Oakes’s house, and at her request the body of the boy, Angelo Eugene Ossoli, was carried thither, and kept for a day previous to interment. The sailors, who had all formed a strong attachment to him during the voyage, wept like children when they saw him. There was some difficulty in finding a coffin when the time of burial came, whereupon they took one of their chests, knocked out the tills, laid the body carefully inside, locked and nailed down the lid. He was buried in a little nook between two of the sand-hills, some distance from the sea. The same afternoon a trunk belonging to the Marchioness Ossoli came to shore, and was fortunately secured before the pirates had an opportunity of purloining it. Mrs. Hasty informs me that it contained several large packages of manuscripts, which she dried carefully by the fire. I have therefore a strong hope that the work on Italy will be entirely recovered. In a pile of soaked papers near the door, I found files of the Democratie Pacifique and Il Nazionale of Florence, as well as several of Mazzini’s pamphlets, which I have preserved. An attempt will probably be made to-morrow to reach the wreck with the surf-boat. Judging from its position and the known depth of the water, I should think the recovery, not only of the bodies, if they are still remaining there, but also of Powers’s statue and the blocks of rough Carrara, quite practicable, if there should be a sufficiency of still weather. There are about a hundred and fifty tons of marble under the ruins. The paintings, belonging to Mr. Aspinwall, which were washed ashore in boxes, and might have been saved had any one been on the spot to care for them, are for the most part utterly destroyed. Those which were least injured by the sea-water were cut from the frames and carried off by the pirates; the frames were broken in pieces, and scattered along the beach. This morning I found several shreds of canvas, evidently more than a century old, half buried in the sand. All the silk, Leghorn braid, hats, wool, oil, almonds, and other articles contained in the vessel, were carried off as soon as they came to land. On Sunday there were nearly a thousand persons here, from all parts of the coast between Rockaway and Montauk, and more than half of them were engaged in secreting and carrying off everything that seemed to be of value. The two bodies found yesterday were those of sailors. All have now come to land but those of the Ossolis and Horace Sumner. If not found in the wreck, they will be cast ashore to the westward of this, as the current has set in that direction since the gale. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Yours, &c. * * * * * THE WRECK OF THE ELIZABETH. From a conversation with Mrs. Hasty, widow of the captain of the ill-fated Elizabeth, we gather the following particulars of her voyage and its melancholy termination. We have already stated that Captain Hasty was prostrated, eight days after leaving Leghorn, by a disease which was regarded and treated as fever, but which ultimately exhibited itself as small-pox of the most malignant type. He died of it just as the vessel reached Gibraltar, and his remains were committed to the deep. After a short detention in quarantine, the Elizabeth resumed her voyage on the 8th ultimo, and was long baffled by adverse winds. Two days from Gibraltar, the terrible disease which had proved fatal to the captain attacked the child of the Ossolis, a beautiful boy of two years, and for many days his recovery was regarded as hopeless. His eyes were completely closed for five days, his head deprived of all shape, and his whole person covered with pustules; yet, through the devoted attention of his parents and their friends, he survived, and at length gradually recovered. Only a few scars and red spots remained on his face and body, and these were disappearing, to the great joy of his mother, who felt solicitous that his rare beauty should not be marred at his first meeting with those she loved, and especially her mother. At length, after a month of slow progress, the wind shifted, and blew strongly from the southwest for several days, sweeping them rapidly on their course, until, on Thursday evening last, they knew that they were near the end of their voyage. Their trunks were brought up and repacked, in anticipation of a speedy arrival in port. Meantime, the breeze gradually swelled to a gale, which became decided about nine o’clock on that evening. But their ship was new and strong, and all retired to rest as usual. They were running west, and supposed themselves about sixty miles farther south than they actually were. By their reckoning, they would be just off the harbor of New York next morning. About half past two o’clock, Mr. Bangs, the mate in command, took soundings, and reported twenty-one fathoms. He said that depth insured their safety till daylight, and turned in again. Of course, all was thick around the vessel, and the storm howling fiercely. One hour afterward, the ship struck with great violence, and in a moment was fast aground. She was a stout brig of 531 tons, five years old, heavily laden with marble, &c., and drawing seventeen feet water. Had she been light, she might have floated over the bar into twenty feet water, and all on board could have been saved. She struck rather sidewise than bows on, canted on her side and stuck fast, the mad waves making a clear sweep over her, pouring down into the cabin through the skylight, which was destroyed. One side of the cabin was immediately and permanently under water, the other frequently drenched. The passengers, who were all up in a moment, chose the most sheltered positions, and there remained, calm, earnest, and resigned to any fate, for a long three hours. No land was yet visible; they knew not where they were, but they knew that their chance of surviving was small indeed. When the coast was first visible through the driving storm in the gray light of morning, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the sand-hills were mistaken for rocks, which made the prospect still more dismal. The young Ossoli cried a little with discomfort and fright, but was soon hushed to sleep. Our friend Margaret had two life-preservers, but one of them proved unfit for use. All the boats had been smashed in pieces or torn away soon after the vessel struck; and it would have been madness to launch them in the dark, if it had been possible to launch them at all, with the waves charging over the wreck every moment. A sailor, soon after light, took Madame Ossoli’s serviceable life- preserver and swam ashore with it, in quest of aid for those left on board, and arrived safe, but of course could not return his means of deliverance. By 7 A.M. it became evident that the cabin must soon go to pieces, and indeed it was scarcely tenantable then. The crew were collected in the forecastle, which was stronger and less exposed, the vessel having settled by the stem, and the sailors had been repeatedly ordered to go aft and help the passengers forward, but the peril was so great that none obeyed. At length the second mate, Davis, went himself, and accompanied the Italian girl, Celesta Pardena, safely to the forecastle, though with great difficulty. Madame Ossoli went next, and had a narrow escape from being washed away, but got over. Her child was placed in a bag tied around a sailor’s neck, and thus carried safely. Marquis Ossoli and the rest followed, each convoyed by the mate or one of the sailors. All being collected in the forecastle, it was evident that their position was still most perilous, and that the ship could not much longer hold together. The women were urged to try first the experiment of taking each a plank and committing themselves to the waves. Madame Ossoli refused thus to be separated from her husband and child. She had from the first expressed a willingness to live or die with them, but not to live without them. Mrs. Hasty was the first to try the plank, and, though the struggle was for some time a doubtful one, did finally reach the shore, utterly exhausted. There was a strong current setting to the westward, so that, though the wreck lay but a quarter of a mile from the shore, she landed three fourths of a mile distant. No other woman, and no passenger, survives, though several of the crew came ashore after she did, in a similar manner. The last who came reports that the child had been washed away from the man who held it before the ship broke up, that Ossoli had in like manner been washed from the foremast, to which he was clinging; but, in the horror of the moment, Margaret never learned that those she so clung to had preceded her to the spirit land. Those who remained of the crew had just persuaded her to trust herself to a plank, in the belief that Ossoli and their child had already started for the shore, when just as she was stepping down, a great wave broke over the vessel and swept her into the boiling deep. She never rose again. The ship broke up soon after (about 10 A.M. Mrs. Hasty says, instead of the later hour previously reported); but both mates and most of the crew got on one fragment or another. It was supposed that those of them who were drowned were struck by floating spars or planks, and thus stunned or disabled so as to preclude all chance of their rescue. We do not know at the time of this writing whether the manuscript of our friend’s work on Italy and her late struggles has been saved. We fear it has not been. One of her trunks is known to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI have been saved; but, though it contained a good many papers, Mrs. Hasty believes that this was not among them. The author had thrown her whole soul into this work, had enjoyed the fullest opportunities for observation, was herself a partaker in the gallant though unsuccessful struggle which has redeemed the name of Rome from the long rust of sloth, servility, and cowardice, was the intimate friend and compatriot of the Republican leaders, and better fitted than any one else to refute the calumnies and falsehoods with which their names have been blackened by the champions of aristocratic “order” throughout the civilized world. We cannot forego the hope that her work on Italy has been saved, or will yet be recovered. * * * * * The following is a complete list of the persons lost by the wreck of the ship Elizabeth: —

Giovanni, Marquis Ossoli. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Their child, Eugene Angelo Ossoli. Celesta Pardena, of Rome. Horace Sumner, of Boston. George Sanford, seaman (Swede). Henry Westervelt, seaman (Swede). George Bates, steward. * * * * * Death of Margaret Fuller. A great soul has passed from this mortal stage of being by the death of MARGARET FULLER, by marriage Marchioness Ossoli, who, with her husband and child, Mr. Horace Sumner of Boston,99 and others, was drowned in the wreck of the brig Elizabeth from Leghorn for this port, on the south shore of Long Island, near Fire Island, on Friday afternoon last. No passenger survives to tell the story of that night of horrors, whose fury appalled many of our snugly sheltered citizens reposing securely in their beds. We can adequately realize what it must have been to voyagers approaching our coast from the Old World, on vessels helplessly exposed to the rage of that wild southwestern gale, and seeing in the long and anxiously expected land of their youth and their love only an aggravation of their perils, a death-blow to their hopes, an assurance of their temporal doom! Margaret Fuller was the daughter of Hon. Timothy Fuller, a lawyer of Boston, but nearly all his life a resident of Cambridge, and a Representative of the Middlessex District in Congress from 1817 to 1825. Mr. Fuller, upon his retirement from Congress, purchased a farm at some distance from Boston, and abandoned law for agriculture, soon after which he died. His widow and six children still survive. 99. Horace Sumner, one of the victims of the lamentable wreck of the Elizabeth, was the youngest son of the late Hon. Charles P. Sumner, of Boston, for many years Sheriff of Suffolk County, and the brother of George Sumner, Esq., the distinguished American writer, now resident at Paris, and of Hon. Charles Sumner of Boston, who is well known for his legal and literary eminence throughout the country. He was about twenty-four years of age, and had been abroad for nearly a year, travelling in the South of Europe for the benefit of his health. The past winter was spent by him chiefly in Florence, where he was on terms of familiar intimacy with the Marquis and Marchioness Ossoli, and was induced to take passage in the same vessel with them for his return to his native land. He was a young man of singular modesty of deportment, of an original turn of mind, and greatly endeared to his friends by the sweetness of his disposition and the purity of his character. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Margaret, if we mistake not, was the first-born, and from a very early age evinced the possession of remarkable intellectual powers. Her father regarded her with a proud admiration, and was from childhood her chief instructor, guide, companion, and friend. He committed the too common error of stimulating her intellect to an assiduity and persistency of effort which severely taxed and ultimately injured her physical powers.100 At eight years of age he was accustomed to require of her the composition of a number of Latin verses per day, while her studies in philosophy, history, general science, and current literature were in after years extensive and profound. After her father’s death, she applied herself to teaching as a vocation, first in Boston, then in Providence, and afterward in Boston again, where her “Conversations” were for several seasons attended by classes of women, some of them married, and including many from the best families of the “American Athens.” In the autumn of 1844, she accepted an invitation to take part in the conduct of the Tribune, with especial reference to the department of Reviews and Criticism on current Literature, Art, Music, &c.; a position which she filled for nearly two years, — how eminently, our readers well know. Her reviews of Longfellow’s Poems, Wesley’s Memoirs, Poe’s Poems, Bailey’s “Festus,” Douglas’s Life, &c. must yet be remembered by many. She had previously found “fit audience, though few,” for a series of remarkable papers on “The Great Musicians,” “Lord Herbert of Cherbury,” “Woman,” &c., &c., in “The Dial,” a quarterly of remarkable breadth and vigor, of which she was at first co-editor with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but which was afterward edited by him only, though she continued a contributor to its pages. In 1843, she accompanied some friends on a tour via Niagara, Detroit, and Mackinac to Chicago, and across the prairies of Illinois, and her resulting volume, entitled “Summer on the Lakes,” is one of the best works in this department ever issued from the American press. It was too good to be widely and instantly popular. Her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” — an extension of her essay in the Dial — was published by us early in 1845, and a moderate edition sold. The next year, a selection from her “Papers on Literature and Art” was issued by Wiley and Putnam, in two fair volumes of their “Library of American Books.” We believe the original edition was nearly or quite exhausted, but a second has not been called for, while books nowise comparable to it for strength or worth have run through half a dozen editions.101 These “Papers” embody some of her best contributions to the Dial, the Tribune, and perhaps one or two which had not appeared in either. In the summer of 1845, Miss Fuller accompanied the family of a devoted friend to Europe, visiting England, Scotland, France, and passing through Italy to Rome, where they spent the ensuing winter. She accompanied her friends next spring to the North of Italy, and there stopped, spending most of the summer at Florence, and returning at the approach of winter to Rome, where she was soon after married to Giovanni, Marquis Ossoli, who had made her acquaintance during her first winter in the Eternal City. They have since resided in the Roman States until the last 100. I think this opinion somewhat erroneous, for reasons which I have already given in the edition recently published of WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The reader is referred to page 352 of that work, and also to page 38, where I believe my sister personified herself under the name of Miranda, and stated clearly and justly the relation which, existed between her father and herself. — ED. 101. A second edition has since been published. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI summer, after the surrender of Rome to the French army of assassins of liberty, when they deemed it expedient to migrate to Florence, both having taken an active part in the Republican movement which resulted so disastrously, — nay, of which the ultimate result is yet to be witnessed. Thence in June they departed and set sail at Leghorn for this port, in the Philadelphia brig Elizabeth, which was doomed to encounter a succession of disasters. They had not been many days at sea when the captain was prostrated by a disease which ultimately exhibited itself as confluent small-pox of the most malignant type, and terminated his life soon after they touched at Gibraltar, after a sickness of intense agony and loathsome horror. The vessel was detained some days in quarantine by reason of this affliction, but finally set sail again on the 8th ultimo, just in season to bring her on our coast on the fearful night between Thursday and Friday last, when darkness, rain, and a terrific gale from the southwest (the most dangerous quarter possible), conspired to hurl her into the very jaws of destruction. It is said, but we know not how truly, that the mate in command since the captain’s death mistook the Fire Island light for that on the Highlands of Neversink, and so fatally miscalculated his course; but it is hardly probable that any other than a first-class, fully manned ship could have worked off that coast under such a gale, blowing him directly toward the roaring breakers. She struck during the night, and before the next evening the Elizabeth was a mass of drifting sticks and planks, while her passengers and part of her crew were buried in the boiling surges. Alas that our gifted friend, and those nearest to and most loved by her, should have been among them! We trust a new, compact, and cheap edition or selection, of Margaret Fuller’s writings will soon be given to the public, prefaced by a Memoir. It were a shame to us if one so radiantly lofty in intellect, so devoted to human liberty and well-being, so ready to dare and to endure for the upraising of her sex and her race, should perish from among us, and leave no memento less imperfect and casual than those we now have. We trust the more immediate relatives of our departed friend will lose no time in selecting the fittest person to prepare a Memoir, with a selection from her writings, for the press.102 America has produced no woman who in mental endowments and acquirements has surpassed Margaret Fuller, and it will be a public misfortune if her thoughts are not promptly and acceptably embodied. * * * * * Margaret Fuller Ossoli By C.P. Cranch. O still, sweet summer days! O moonlight nights! After so drear a storm how can ye shine? O smiling world of many-hued delights, How canst thou ‘round our sad hearts still entwine The accustomed wreaths of pleasure? How, O Day, Wakest thou so full of beauty? Twilight deep, How diest thou so tranquilly away? And how, O Night, bring’st thou the sphere of sleep? For she is gone from us, — gone, lost for ever, — In the wild billows swallowed

102. The reader is aware that such a Memoir has since been published, and that several of her works have been republished likewise. I trust soon to publish a volume of Madame Ossoli’s Miscellaneous Writings. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI up and lost, — Gone, full of love, life, hope, and high endeavor, Just when we would have welcomed her the most. Was it for this, O woman, true and pure! That life through shade and light had formed thy mind To feel, imagine, reason, and endure, — To soar for truth, to labor for mankind? Was it for this sad end thou didst bear thy part In deeds and words for struggling Italy, — Devoting thy large mind and larger heart That Rome in later days might yet be free? And, from that home driven out by tyranny, Didst turn to see thy fatherland once more, Bearing affection’s dearest ties with thee; And as the vessel bore thee to our shore, And hope rose to fulfilment, — on the deck, When friends seemed almost beckoning unto thee: O God! the fearful storm, — the splitting wreck, — The drowning billows of the dreary sea! O, many a heart was stricken dumb with grief! We who had known thee here, — had met thee there Where Rome threw golden light on every leaf Life’s volume turned in that enchanted air, — O friend! how we recall the Italian days Amid the Cæsar’s ruined palace halls, — The Coliseum, and the frescoed blaze Of proud St. Peter’s dome, — the Sistine walls, — The lone Campagna and the village green, — The Vatican, — the music and dim light Of gorgeous temples, — statues, pictures, seen With thee: those sunny days return so bright, Now thou art gone! Thou hast a fairer world Than that bright clime. The dreams that filled thee here Now find divine completion, and, unfurled Thy spirit-wings, find out their own high sphere. Farewell! thought-gifted, noble-hearted one! We, who have known thee, know thou art not lost; The star that set in storms still shines upon The o’ershadowing cloud, and, when we sorrow most, In the blue spaces of God’s firmament Beams out with purer light than we have known. Above the tempest and the wild lament Of those who weep the radiance that is flown. * * * * * The Death of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. By Mary C. Ames. O Italy! amid thy scenes of blood, She acted long a woman’s noble part! Soothing the dying of thy sons, proud Rome! Till thou wert bowed, O city of her heart! When thou hadst fallen, joy no longer flowed In the rich sunlight of thy heaven; And from thy glorious domes and shrines of art, No quickening impulse to her life was given. From the deep shadow of thy cypress hills, From the soft beauty of thy classic plains, The noble-hearted, with, her treasures, turned To the far land where Freedom proudly reigns. After the rocking of long years of storms, Her weary spirit looked and longed for rest; Pictures of home, of loved and kindred forms, Rose warm and life-like in her aching breast. But the wild ocean rolled before her home; And, listening long unto its fearful moan, She thought of myriads who had found their rest Down in its caverns, silent, deep, and lone. Then rose the prayer within her heart of hearts, With the dark phantoms of a coming grief, That “Nino, Ossoli, and I may go Together; — that the anguish may be brief.” The bark spread out her pennons proud and free, The sunbeams frolicked with the wanton waves; Smiled through the long, long HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI days the summer sea, And sung sweet requiems o’er her sunken graves. E’en then the shadow of the fearful King Hung deep and darkening o’er the fated bark; Suffering and death and anguish reigned, ere came Hope’s weary dove back to the longing ark. This was the morning to the night of woe; When the grim Ocean, in his fiercest wrath, Held fearful contest with the god of storms, Who lashed the waves with death upon his path. O night of agony! O awful morn, That oped on such a scene thy sullen eyes! The shattered ship, — those wrecked and broken hearts, Who only prayed, “Together let us die.” Was this thy greeting longed for, Margaret, In the high, noontide of thy lofty pride? The welcome sighed for, in thine hours of grief, When pride had fled and hope in thee had died? Twelve hours’ communion with the Terror-King! No wandering hope to give the heart relief! And yet thy prayer was heard, — the cold waves wrapt Those forms “together,” and the woe was “brief.” Thus closed thy day in darkness and in tears; Thus waned a life, alas! too full of pain; But O thou noble woman! thy brief life, Though full of sorrows, was not lived in vain. No more a pilgrim o’er a weary waste, With light ineffable thy mind is crowned; Heaven’s richest lore is thine own heritage; All height is gained, thy “kingdom” now is found. * * * * * To the Memory of Margaret Fuller. By E. Oakes Smith. We hailed thee, Margaret, from the sea, We hailed thee o’er the wave, And little thought, in greeting thee, Thy home would be a grave. We blest thee in thy laurel crown, And in the myrtle’s sheen, — Rejoiced thy noble worth to own, Still joy, our tears between. We hoped that many a happy year Would bless thy coming feet; And thy bright fame grow brighter here, By Fatherland made sweet. Gone, gone! with all thy glorious thought, — Gone with thy waking life, — With the green chaplet Fame had wrought, — The joy of Mother, Wife. Oh! who shall dare thy harp to take, And pour upon the air The clear, calm music, that should wake The heart to love and prayer! The lip, all eloquent, is stilled And silent with its trust, — The heart, with Woman’s greatness filled, Must crumble to the dust: But from thy great heart we will take New courage for the strife; From petty ills our bondage break, And labor with new life. Wake up, in darkness though it be, To better truth and light; Patient in toil, as we saw thee, In searching for the light; And mindless of the scorn it brings, For ’t is in desert land That angels come with sheltering wings To lead us by the hand. Courageous one! thou art not lost, Though sleeping in the wave; Upon its chainless billows tost, For thee is fitting grave. * * * * * On the Death of Margaret Fuller. By G.P.R. James. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI High hopes and bright thine early path bedecked, And aspirations beautiful though wild, — A heart too strong, a powerful will unchecked, A dream that earth-things could be undefiled. But soon, around thee, grew a golden chain, That bound the woman to more human things, And taught with joy — and, it may be, with pain — That there are limits e’en to Spirit’s wings. Husband and child, — the loving and beloved, — Won, from the vast of thought, a mortal part, The impassioned wife and mother, yielding, proved Mind has itself a master — in the heart. In distant lands enhaloed by, old fame Thou found’st the only chain thy spirit knew, But captive ledst thy captors, from the shame Of ancient freedom, to the pride of new. And loved hearts clung around thee on the deck, Welling with sunny hopes ‘neath sunny skies: The wide horizon round thee had no speck, — E’en Doubt herself could see no cloud arise. Thy loved ones clung around thee, when the sail O’er wide Atlantic billows onward bore Thy freight of joys, and the expanding gale Pressed the glad bark toward thy native shore. The loved ones clung around thee still, when all Was darkness, tempest, terror, and dismay, — More closely clung around thee, when the pall Of Fate was falling o’er the mortal clay. With them to live, — with them, with them to die, Sublime of human love intense and fine! — Was thy last prayer unto the Deity; And it was granted thee by Love Divine. In the same billow, — in the same dark grave, — Mother, and child, and husband, find their rest. The dream is ended; and the solemn wave Gives back the gifted to her country’s breast. * * * * * On the Death of Marquis Ossoli and his Wife, Margaret Fuller. by Walter Savage Landor. Over his millions Death has lawful power, But over thee, brave Ossoli! none, none! After a long struggle, in a fight Worthy of Italy to youth restored, Thou, far from home, art sunk beneath the surge Of the Atlantic; on its shore; in reach Of help; in trust of refuge; sunk with all Precious on earth to thee, — a child, a wife! Proud as thou wert of her, America Is prouder, showing to her sons how high Swells woman’s courage in a virtuous breast. She would not leave behind her those she loved: Such solitary safety might become Others, — not her; not her who stood beside The pallet of the wounded, when the worst Of France and Perfidy assailed the walls Of unsuspicious Rome. Rest, glorious soul, Renowned for strength of genius, Margaret! Rest with the twain too dear! My words are few, And shortly none will hear my failing voice, But the same language with more full appeal Shall hail thee. Many are the sons of song Whom thou hast heard upon thy native plains, Worthy to sing of thee; the hour is come; Take we our seats and let the dirge begin. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July 24, Tuesday: At the consecration of the Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn, Massachusetts, Charles Chauncy Shackford delivered an address.

Henry Thoreau dashed off a note to Horace Greeley in New-York –who obviously already knew that embarrassing bodies would not be found, and obviously was going to say nothing to anyone about this– and hastily set out for New York to search the beaches of Fire Island for literary and physical remains. He recovered a sand-clogged coat that had belonged to the marchése and tore a button from it as a keepsake. Some unimportant papers were turned up, but not the important book-length manuscript on the course of the revolution that had been refused publication in Italy nor any incidental letters or documents that might embarrass Waldo Emerson or other of Margaret Fuller’s American literary associates. Or, at least, that is what our history books and biographies now report: I prefer to speculate that, if Thoreau did turn up any papers, or if he had turned up any papers of consequence, he would have been a whole lot smarter than to turn these papers over to Emerson to be destroyed!103

103. Although Fuller’s manuscript on the Italian revolution was lost in the shipwreck or destroyed by her editors with the pretense that it had been lost, we do have some idea what was described in it. See the New York editor Theodore Dwight’s history THE ROMAN REPUBLIC OF 1849; WITH ACCOUNTS OF THE INQUISITION, AND THE SIEGE OF ROME, published in New-York by R. Van Dien in 1851, and bear in mind that where Dwight celebrates Garibaldi, Fuller would have been celebrating Mazzini. In the judgment of William L. Vance, author of the 2-volume AMERICA’S ROME, the reverential attitude which Fuller adopted toward the Italian Revolution of 1849 can only be paralleled by the attitude which the poet Ezra Pound adopted toward the early years of the Fascist era prior to 1936:

What Margaret Fuller was, among Americans, to the Roman Republic of 1849, Pound was to Mussolini’s Italy.

(Vance agrees also that Thomas Carlyle, Emerson’s English buddy, would have looked upon Benito Mussolini as a great hero of human history, and that James Russell Lowell, the Harvard professor and first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, would have welcomed Mussolini as “an Italian brain ... large enough to hold it [the Idea of Rome], and to give unity to those discordant members.”) Plaudits for Fuller were so exceptionally and uncharacteristically bitter that they indicate quite clearly, that there was a good deal going on that these old boys were unwilling to talk about but that they very badly needed to justify to themselves: — Writing nine years after her drowning at age 40, Nathaniel Hawthorne called her a “great humbug” with an “unpliable, and in many respects defective and evil nature.” — Waldo Emerson referred to her “mountainous me,” and this phrase was picked up by the generality of people and used as an epithet against her. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who knew her in Italy, cautioned that “If I wished anyone to do her justice, I should say, as I have said, ‘Never read what she has written’” (my apologies for making EBB a member of the “old boys club,” but if that shoe fits her she will need to wear it). — Henry James, Jr. suggested that she “left nothing behind her, her written utterance being naught.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

“Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes.” TIMELINE OF SHIPWRECKS

July 25, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau visited Nino’s new grave on Fire Island and remarked the fact that Horace Greeley had not shown up at the wreck scene, and remarked the fact that four bodies remained to be accounted for –Horace Sumner, and a sailor, and the two Ossolis. Clearly, this Captain James Wick, having illegally disposed of the bodies of the Ossolis after he found out they weren’t worth anything to the employer, was not going to be spreading it around, what he had done. The truth about the disposal of Margaret Fuller’s corpse would not be known for many years. Among the fascinated observers on shore that day had been Felix Dominy, keeper of the Fire Island Lighthouse and part-time correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, and his 9-year-old son Arthur. More than five decades later, Arthur Dominy was a superintendent for the Life Saving Service, in its 3rd district. On June 29, 1901, that son, Arthur Dominy, then in his early 50s, wrote a long letter to a Mrs. Anna Parker Pruyn in Albany, detailing the events of the shipwreck as he vividly remembered them: “I was nine years of age, and every incident in this connection is as clearly imprinted on my memory as though it happened yesterday.” “I can see the doomed vessel lying in the terrible sea that at times completely covered her, as plainly as if a photograph were in front of me.” “In a day or two if my memory is right a brother of Margaret Fuller came to Fire Island took the child away with him and left HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI instructions that if the bodies of the Count or Countess came on shore and could be identified to ship them to New York in Mr. Greely’s care.... Some days elapsed before the bodies of the Count and Countess came on shore, and they were badly washed but clearly and easily identified.” “Two doctors who were on the beach and examined them were perfectly satisfied that they were the correct ones.... The remains of both were boxed and sent to New York by vessel owned and commanded by Capt. James Wicks of Penataquit, now Bay Shore, in Mr. Greely’s care. The Capt. reported to him upon his arrival but Mr. Greely refused to receive them or to have anything to do with them.” “The Captain in his plight became somewhat frightened, fearing he might get into trouble through having the bodies on board, got his vessel underweigh and went to Coney Island where he and his man took them on shore and buried them in the night, and where they no doubt lie today unmarked. I had a conversation with the Captain some years after and asked him if he thought he could locate the spot where he buried them. He said he did not think he could go anywhere near it as it was a very dark night and he and the man were half scared out of their wits by the nature of the business.” “There have been at various times articles published in newspapers and magazines bearing upon this matter and most of them wind up into declaring that the bones of Margaret were washing around the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, when the facts are as above reported.”

“Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes.” TIMELINE OF SHIPWRECKS

Thoreau wrote to Waldo Emerson: Fire Island Beach Thursday morn. July 25 ’50 HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Dear Friend, I am writing this at the house of Smith Oakes, within one mile of the wreck. He is the one who rendered the most assistance. Wm H Channing came down with me, but I have not seen Arthur Fuller – nor Greeley, Nor Spring. Spring & Sumner were here yesterday but left soon. Mr Oakes & wife tell me (all the survivors came or were brought directly to their house) that the ship struck at 10 minutes after 4 AM. and all hands, being mostly in their night clothes made haste to the forecastle – the water coming in at once. There they remained the, passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it doing what they could. Every wave lifted the forecastle roof & washed over those within. The first man got ashore at 9. Many from 9 to noon–. At floodtide about 3 1/2 o’clock when the ship broke up entirely – they came out of the forecastle & Margaret sat with her back to the foremast with her hands over her knees – her husband & child already drowned – a great wave came & washed her off. The Steward? had just before taken her child & started for shore; both were drowned. The broken desk in a bag – containing no very valuable papers – a large black leather trunk – with an upper and under apartment— the upper holding books & papers— A carpet bag probably Ossolis and one of his? shoes – are all the Ossolis’ effects known to have been found. Four bodies remain to be found – the two Ossolis – Horace Sumner – & a Sailor– I have visited the child’s grave— Its body will probably be taken away today. The wreck is to be sold at auction – excepting the hull – today The mortar would not go off. Mrs Hasty the Captains Wife, told Mrs Oakes that she & Margaret divided their money–& tied up the halves in handkerchiefs around their persons that Margaret took 60 or 70 dollars. Mrs Hasty who can tell all about Margaret up to 11 ’oclock on Friday is said to be going to Portland ME. today— She & Mrs Fuller must & probably will come together. The cook, the last to leave, & the Steward? will know the rest. I shall try to see them. In the meanwhile I shall do what I can to recover property & obtain particulars here abouts. Wm H. Channing – did I write it? has come with me. Arthur Fuller has this moment reached this house. He reached the beach last night – we got here yesterday noon. A good part of the vessel still holds together where she struck, & something may come ashore with her fragments. The last body was found on Tuesday 3 miles west. Mrs Oakes dried the papers which were in the trunk – and she says they appeared to be of various kinds. “Would they cover that table”?, a small round one— “They would spread out”— Some were tied up. There were 20 or 30 books in the same half of the trunk. —another, smaller trunk empty, came ashore. — but there is no mark on it— She speaks of Paiolina as if she might have been a “sort of nurse to the child”— I expect to go to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Patchogue whence the pilferers must have chiefly come –& advertise &c &c.

Here are some of Thoreau’s preserved note fragments on his activities: I found the engravings at Oakes’. They said that they were left out of the trunk. The gown and one article of the child’s dress at Daniel Jones’, Patchogue — and the other article of the child’s dress at John Heinners in the same village. They said that they picked them up 1 1/2 or 2 miles east of the wreck. There were more things there and elsewhere which were either not worth taking — or not worth waiting to see. I saw a calico dress like the pattern which I bought at Skinners It had silk fringes & was much torn also some drawers and a night gown all torn & without mark. Elikom Jones agreed to forward to Mr. Dominy a lady’s shift which a Quorum man had got, & which he thought had the letters S.M.F. on it. At Carman Rowlands Patchogue I saw a gentleman’s shirt. At Wm Gregory’s in the same village a cart load of rags & remains of a childs petticoat. He said that his brother had much more. At Wm Smiths, near Patchogue a childs striped apron & a lady’s skirt fringed. Orrin Rose & Obadiah Greene of Sayville had something. a silk dress — “lilac ground, middling dark stripe” which I could not wait to get. Mrs. Hasty & the Captain had left New York before I returned. The only ones of the survivors who remained on board till the vessel broke up are the Carpenter & the Cook. I conversed with the former & the mate, but the Cook was not then to be found; he was the only American among the crew, and was the only one, they said who was unsteady — he was intoxicated most of the time on shore. The following is the account of Charles W. Davis 1st Mate — A Hanoverian, who went out from New Orleans. They had pleasant weather up to latitude 58º, so that they painted HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September 1, Saturday: From occasional notes in the record that mention destruction of records as an option, we may infer that a certain amount of record burning was going on in the processing of Margaret Fuller materials. For instance, Waldo Emerson wrote in a letter of this date that “Ellery, yesterday, brought me all my letters to Margaret; and said, that he had sent Sam. G. Ward his; & will tomorrow send to you the package of letters & Journals which Margaret rolled up & marked with your name — in the inscription leaving you some option to save or burn. I hope you will let the burning be as figurative as, the commentators say, the sacrificing was by Jephthah of his daughter.” Similarly, in a letter of November 1850 he would write, “I had large & vague expectation of what amount of manuscript you would send, & perhaps had some disappointment in the actual reading. — I had hoped from what Ellery said, there were two or three Journals, & that you would not burn them.” Similarly, he would open an 1852 letter to Sturgis with “When have I breathed a word concerning old papers of mine? Burn them when you will. Or they may come as you propose to my fire. Certainly one would not in these autographic days be glad to find them in young gentlemen’s albums.” Clearly, in such a context, destruction of records was one of the options always under consideration, so we are never entitled to presume that we have an intact record rather than a record from which any elements considered unsavory have been most carefully expunged.

Emerson to his journal:

Yesterday took that secluded Marlboro road with W.E.C. [Ellery Channing] in a wagon. Every rock was painted “Marlboro.” & we proposed to take the longest day in the year, & ride to Marlboro, that flying Italy. We went to Willis’s Pond in Sudbury & paddled across it, & took a swim in its water, coloured like sugarbaker’s molasses. Nature, E. thought, is less interesting. Yesterday Thoreau told me it was more so, & persons less. I think it must always combine with man. Life is ecstatical, & we radiate joy & honour & gloom on the days & landscapes we converse with. But I must remember a real or imagined period in my youth, when they who spoke to me of nature, were religious, & made it so, & made it deep: now it is to the young sentimentalists frippery; & a milliner’s shop has as much reason & worth.

Sept. 1st can rarely find many– They have a more transparent look–large blue long stemmed dangling–fruit of the swamp concealed. I detect the pennyroyal which my feet have bruised. Butter & eggs still hold out to bloom I notice that cows never walk abreast but in single file commonly making a narrow cow path–or the herd walks in an irregular & loose wedge. They retain still the habits of all the deer tribe acquired when the earth was all covered with forest–of travelling from necessity in narrow paths in the woods At sundown a herd of cows returning homeward from pasture over a sandy tract pause to paw the sand and challenge the representatives of another field raising a cloud of dust between the beholder & the setting sun. & then the herd boys rush to mingle in the foray & separate the combatants two cows with horns interlocked the one pushing the other down the bank. My grandmother called her cow home at night from the pasture over the hill by thumping on a mortar out of which the cow was accustomed to eat salt. At Nagog I saw a hundred bushels of huckleberries in one field. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1851

January 23, Thursday: The relationship between Bronson Alcott and the young lady Ednah Dow Littlehale –who must at this point have been rather at loose ends because her father had died at about the time her beloved teacher Margaret Fuller had been drowned– was really beginning to warm up:

Perhaps I find a deeper satisfaction in the Genius and personal qualities of this young woman, than in any one I am privileged to meet just now. A clear-minded noble person and of broader comprehensions than I meet with often; friendly, too, and steadfast, a woman for service and with solid substance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July: The treaty of Traverse des Sioux, by which Dakota headmen ceded all their lands in Iowa, and some in Minnesota, to the US federal government. MINNESOTA

Herman Melville purchased Burton’s ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY in a used bookstore in Pittsfield MA — only to discover on the flyleaf that his father had owned that very volume in 1816.

The chip doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Bronson Alcott was marveling at how his shriveled “heart” was becoming engorged under the ministrations of the attractive and pleasant young lady, Ednah Dow Littlehale. They were walking together each dawn on HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the Boston Common:

She came — the maiden and passed the morning: a long and lavish morning with me, and left me the principal owner of a heart green with youthful regards, of sweet regard for herself the friend and stimulus to Genius.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY Here is a description of this well-endowed daughter of the well-to-do Boston merchant Sargeant Smith HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Littlehale, by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

She was a brunette, had a great deal of rich, black hair with large dark eyes, and was talking eagerly between intervals with some male companion.... Not equalling the ablest of early women leaders, like Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, in extent of early training, she was equalled by no other in a certain clearness of mind and equilibrium of judgement....

MARGARET FULLER ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Toward the end of July: The situation was fraught, it was a setup, a middle-aged man was about to make a fool of himself over a well-endowed young lady. Fortunately, a Boston society lady had options, could chose to escape from the heat of the city summer and the passion of the middle-aged fool by a holiday excursion to New Hampshire and to Brattleboro VT. There, while Ednah Dow Littlehale and Bronson Alcott were exchanging a series of very nice letters in which she was laying out an agenda to become his assistant in a prospective school (following in the footsteps of a number of previous ladies such as her own beloved instructor Margaret Fuller), she was also meeting and being romanced by one Seth Wells Cheney, an artist 41 years of age, a man who had made a considerable amount of money in the silk trade but whose young wife had died a year earlier of tuberculosis.

Mister Eligible, let me feel your pain! The couple climbed Mount Monadnock together for the sunset, and then descended that mountain — together — in the dark.

Fuller’s former pupil Ednah Littlehale was not the only person who was profiting from the memory of her during this July-October period. Waldo Emerson has recorded some of these activities in his journal:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody ransacks her memory for anecdotes of Margaret’s youth, her selfdevotion, her disappointments which she tells with fervency, but I find myself always putting the previous question. These things have no value, unless they lead somewhere. If a Burns, if a De Stael, if an artist is the result, our attention is preengaged; but quantities of rectitude, mountains of merit, chaos of ruins, are of no account without result — ’tis all mere nightmare; false instincts; wasted lives. Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said, is, that she represents an interesting hour & group in American cultivation; then, that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence; and a kind of justice requires of us a monument, because crowds of vulgar people taunt her with want of position.

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

September: The grave of Margaret Fuller’s toddler “Nino” was relocated: Monument to the Ossoli Family. [From the New York Tribune.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The family of Margaret Fuller Ossoli have just erected to her memory, and that of her husband and child, a marble monument in Mount Auburn cemetery, in Massachusetts. It is located on Pyrola Path, in a beautiful part of the grounds, and has near it some noble oaks, while the hand of affection has planted many a flower. The body of Margaret Fuller rests in the ocean, but her memory abides in many hearts. She needs no monumental stone, but human affection loves thus to do honor to the departed. The following is the inscription on the monument: — Erected In Memory of MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, Born in Cambridge, Mass., May 23, 1810. By birth, a Citizen of New England; by adoption, a Citizen of Rome; by genius, belonging to the World. In youth, an insatiate Student, seeking the highest culture; in riper years, Teacher, Writer, Critic of Literature and Art; in maturer age, Companion and Helper of many earnest Reformers in America and Europe. And In Memory of her Husband, GIOVANNI ANGELO, MARQUIS OSSOLI. He gave up rank, station, and home for the Roman Republic, and for his Wife and Child. And In Memory of that Child, ANGELO EUGENE PHILIP OSSOLI, Born in Rieti, Italy, Sept. 5, 1848, Whose dust reposes at the foot of this stone. They passed from life together by shipwreck, July 19, 1850. United in life by mutual love, labors, and trials, the merciful Father took them together, and In death they were not divided. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Sleep Sweetly, Gentle Child.104 [The only child of the Marchioness Ossoli, well known as Margaret Fuller, is buried in the Valley Cemetery, at Manchester, N.H. There is always a vase of flowers placed near the grave, and a marble slab, with a cross and lily sculptured upon it, bears this inscription: “In Memory of Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, who was born at Rieti, in Italy, 5th September, 1848, and perished by shipwreck off Fire Island, with both his parents, Giovanni Angelo and Margaret Fuller Ossoli, on the 19th of July, 1850.”] Sleep sweetly, gentle child! though to this sleep The cold winds rocked thee, on the ocean’s breast, And strange, wild murmurs o’er the dark, blue deep Were the last sounds that lulled thee to thy rest, And while the moaning waves above thee rolled, The hearts that loved thee best grew still and cold. Sleep sweetly, gentle child! though the loved tone That twice twelve months had hushed thee to repose Could give no answer to the tearful moan That faintly from thy sea-moss pillow rose. That night the arms that closely folded thee Were the wet weeds that floated in the sea. Sleep sweetly, gentle child! the cold, blue wave Hath pitied the sad sighs the wild winds bore, And from the wreck it held one treasure gave To the fond watchers weeping on the shore; — Now the sweet vale shall guard its precious trust, While mourning hearts weep o’er thy silent dust. Sleep sweetly, gentle child! love’s tears are shed Upon the garlands of fair Northern flowers That fond hearts strew above thy lowly bed, Through all our summer’s glad and pleasant hours: For thy sake, and for hers who sleeps beneath the wave, Kind hands bring flowers to fade upon thy grave. Sleep sweetly, gentle child! the warm wind sighs Amid the dark pines through this quiet dell, And waves the light flower-shade that lies Upon the white-leaved lily’s sculptured bell; — The “Valley’s” flowers are fair, the turf is green; — Sleep sweetly here, wept-for Eugene! Sleep sweetly, gentle child! this peaceful rest Hath early given thee to a home above, Safe from all sin and tears, for, ever blest To sing sweet praises of redeeming love. — The love that took thee to that world of bliss Ere thou hadst learned the sighs and griefs of this. JULIET. Laurel Brook, N.H., September, 1851.

104. These lines are beautiful and full of sweet sympathy. The home of the mother and brother of Margaret Fuller being now removed from Manchester to Boston, the remains of the little child, too dear to remain distant from us, have been removed to Mount Auburn. The same marble slab is there with, its inscription, and the lines deserve insertion here. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI September: Henry Thoreau surveyed for a proposed new street near the Railroad Depot. Length 30" x Width 21". In 1844 when the railroad had been opened in Concord, he had been asked to suggest the route of a new street from the corner of Main and Sudbury Road to the Depot, and in fact he had drawn up several alternatives. The one chosen is the present Middle Street and required the moving of the Concord Academy Building from the spot where Academy Lane and Middle Street meet. This proposal is the present Middle Street from Academy Lane to Thoreau Lane. The old Concord Academy stood on the spot so it had to be moved to the south side of the new street. (The Academy building in which the Thoreau brothers had taught was made over into a double house for Ellery Channing. The Concord Free Public Library has several preserved sketches for this area. One shows the land of Wetherbee on Belknap Street which became the property on which the old Davis Store from Main Street came to rest, and was occupied by William Barrett from 1859 to 1898.)

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/24b.htm

Channing wrote in a letter complaining about Waldo Emerson: “a terrible man to deal with — one has to be armed at all points. He threshes you out very soon; is admirably skillful, able to go anywhere and do anything. Those nearest to him feel him hard and cold; no one knows even what he is doing or studying.... Nobody knows what his real philosophy is; his books do not tell it. I have known him for years intimately and have not found it out. Women do not like him: he cannot establish a personal relation with anyone, yet he can get on agreeably with everyone.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI At some point during the month Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early 105 lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

[Paragraph 52] A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for her bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity,—the activity of flies about a molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

In Godey’s Lady’s Book, Henry T. Tuckerman characterized Alexander von Humboldt as “the Napoleon of science.” This title, although apparently innocuous, would soon be combined with our iniquitous lust for the conquest of nature, so that Humboldt would soon be being worshipped, and eventually would find himself condemned, as something he had simply not been: an exploiter. Professor Laura Dassow Walls points out that during Humboldt’s old age while “his voice was aging and distant,” his legacy would be seized upon by positivists such as Louis Agassiz even though he “could and did protest with every means at this disposal.” His name became synonymous with empire and with the exploitation of nature, while native American

105. Thoreau was referring to his experience at Fire Island in late July 1850. The American bark Elizabeth, with Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and their son aboard, had sailed from Italy on May 17, 1850, bound for New-York, but wrecked on the coast of Fire Island on July 19th. Thoreau was dispatched to the scene of the wreck to recover the bodies of the Ossolis and their belongings, and when he arrived he found the beach strewn with the unsalvageable portion of the cargo—heaps of rags, juniper- berries, and bitter almonds (see Kenneth Walter Cameron, “Thoreau’s Notes on the Shipwreck at Fire Island,” Emerson Society Quarterly 52 [3d Quarter 1968]: 97-99; and Paula Blanchard, MARGARET FULLER: FROM TRANSCENDENTALISM TO REVOLUTION [NY: Delacorte Press, 1978], pages 329-37). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI populations were being removed and ecological communities disrupted in the name of our Manifest Destiny. How ironic it is today that current approaches to science, which stress the role our own knowledge plays as part of the world we seek to understand, have lost sight of Humboldt’s work. Today, Humboldtian concepts like plant communities, isotherms, and magnetic storms are routine, the “ecology of ideas” is an exciting new concept — and Alexander von Humboldt’s once-glorious name has long since b id d i t th di ft l f th f t t ( 107) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI December 12, Friday: Joel Roberts Poinsett died near Statesburg, South Carolina. A wasted life. It requires more than this to make a human being.

In an attempt to settle a controversy of long standing, during this month Henry Thoreau was proposing a boundary line between Concord and Carlisle. The Town Report for 1851-1852 says he was paid $42.00. Scale of 50 rods to the inch. Var. 9 7/8. This shows the relation of a line A B continued to the boundary lines and homes taking the black from the Map of Concord, the red from original observations coinciding with the map and line A B. The map shows Kibbe Place, Westford Road, Carlisle Road, Old Carlisle Road, Cedar Swamp, Perez Blood, F. Devens, J. Hodgman, J. Mason, and S. Conant.106

Moncure Daniel Conway wrote Waldo Emerson a second time, expressing the conceit that though he had many correspondents, Emerson’s was the only Letter (letter with a capital L) he had ever received.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

Well, he was but 19 years of age, a swimmer, played chess and whist, was fond of billiards — we shouldn’t expect that much conversational facility. Here is how, much later on in life, the Reverend Conway would characterize this period of youthful soulsearching among the Quakers of Sandy Spring, Maryland: I had no friend who could help me on the intellectual, moral, and philosophical points involved. Roger Brooke and William Henry Farquhar were rationalists by birthright; they had never had any dogmas to unlearn, nor had they to suffer the pain of being sundered from relatives and friends. In my loneliness I stretched appealing hands to Emerson. After his death my friend Edward Emerson sent me my letters to his father, and the first is dated at Rockville, November 4, 1851. Without any conventional opening (how could I call my prophet “Dear Sir”!) my poor trembling letter begins with a request to know where the “Dial” can be purchased, and proceeds: — I will here take the liberty of saying what nothing but a concern as deep as Eternity should make me say. I am a minister of the Christian Religion, — the only way for 106. Subsequent to Thoreau’s work this line would be still in dispute. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the world to reënter Paradise, in my earnest belief. I have just commenced that office at the call of the Holy Ghost, now in my twentieth year. About a year ago I commenced reading your writings. I have read them all and studied them sentence by sentence. I have shed many burning tears over them; because you gain my assent to Laws which, when I see how they would act on the affairs of life, I have not courage to practise. By the Law sin revives and I die. I sometimes feel as if you made for me a second Fall from which there is no redemption by any atonement. To this there came a gracious response: — Concord, Mass., 13th November, 1851. Dear Sir, — I fear you will not be able, except at some chance auction, to obtain any set of the “Dial.” In fact, smaller editions were printed of the later and latest numbers, which increases the difficulty. I am interested by your kind interest in my writings, but you have not let me sufficiently into your own habit of thought, to enable me to speak to it with much precision. But I believe what interests both you and me most of all things, and whether we know it or not, is the morals of intellect; in other words, that no man is worth his room in the world who is not commanded by a legitimate object of thought. The earth is full of frivolous people, who are bending their whole force and the force of nations on trifles, and these are baptized with every grand and holy name, remaining, of course, totally inadequate to occupy any mind; and so sceptics are made. A true soul will disdain to be moved except by what natively commands it, though it should go sad and solitary in search of its master a thousand years. The few superior persons in each community are so by their steadiness to reality and their neglect of appearances. This is the euphrasy and rue that purge the intellect and ensure insight. Its full rewards are slow but sure; and yet I think it has its reward in the instant, inasmuch as simplicity and grandeur are always better than dapperness. But I will not spin out these saws farther, but hasten to thank you for your frank and friendly letter, and to wish you the best deliverance in that contest to which every soul must go alone. Yours, in all good hope, R.W. EMERSON. This letter I acknowledged with a longer one (December 12, 1851), in which I say: “I have very many correspondents, but I might almost say yours is the only Letter that was ever written to me.”

December 12, Friday: In regard to my friends I feel that I know & have communion with a finer & subtler part of themselves which does not put me off when they put me off — which is not cold to me — when they are cold — not till I am cold. I hold by a deeper and stronger tie than absence can sunder. Ah dear nature — the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread. I have been surveying for 20 or 30 days — living coarsely — even as respects my diet — for I find that that will always alter to suit my employment– Indeed leading a quite trivial life — & tonight for the first time had made HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI a fire in my chamber & endeavored to return to myself. I wished to ally myself to the powers that rule the universe– I wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful & devoted life — which meandered through retired & fertile meadows far from towns. I wished to do again — or for once, things quite congenial to my highest inmost and most sacred nature — To lurk in crystalline thought like the trout under verdurous banks — where stray mankind should only see my bubble come to the surface. I wished to live ah! as far away as a man can think. I wished for leisure & quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels — with its proper currents. When I might not waste the days — might establish daily prayer & thanksgiving in my family. Might do my own work & not the work of Concord & Carlisle — which would yield me better than money. (How much forbearance — aye sacrifice & loss, goes to every accomplishment! I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last) I bethought myself while my fire was kindling to open one of Emerson’s books which it happens that I rarely look at — to try what a chance sentence out of that could do for me. Thinking at the same time of a conversation I had with him the other night — I finding fault with him for the stress he had laid on some of Margaret Fuller’s whims & superstitions — But he declaring gravely that she was one of those persons whose experience warranted her attaching importance to such things — as the sortes Virgilianae for instance of which her numerous friends could tell remarkable instances– At any rate I saw that he was disposed regard such things more seriously than I. The first sentence which I opened upon in his book was this.– “If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find that ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours of obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit associates in society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record, would be. He will learn, that it is not much matter what he reads, what he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the scholar’s part of everything. &c &c” Most of this corresponded well enough to my mood — and this would be as good an instance of the sortes virgilianae as most to quote. But what makes this coincidence very little if at all remarkable to me is the fact — of the obviousness of the moral — so that I had perhaps thought the same thing myself 20 times during the day — & yet had not been contented with that account of it — leaving me thus to be amused by the coincidence rather than impressed as by an intimation out of the deeps. The Irishman (MacCarty) who helped me survey day before yesterday would not sit on a rock with me to eat his dinner (there being snow on the ground) from a notion that there was nothing so deadly as sitting on a rock — sure to give you a cold in the back. He would rather stand. So the doctors said — down in the Province of New Brunswick– But I warranted him that he would not get a cold in his back & so he minded me as a new doctor. A grey headed boy good for nothing but to eat his dinner. These Irishmen have no heads. Let me inquire strictly into a man’s descent, and if his remotest ancestors were Erse let me not have him to help me survey. One or two I have seen — handy men — but I learned that their fathers who came from Ireland were of the Scotch Irish. This fellow was sure to do the wrong thing from the best motives — & the only time he was spry was when he was running to correct his own blunders out of his own head — then I saw the broad red soles of his new cowhide boots — alternately rising & falling like the buckets of a waterwheel.– When he had lost his plum & went to get it — then he showed the red soles of his boots. Nothing is so sure to make itself known as the truth — for what else waits to be known? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1852

James Fenimore Cooper’s AFLOAT AND ASHORE, THE BRAVE, CHAINBEARER, CRATER, HEADSMAN, HEIDENMAUER, HOME AS FOUND, HOMEWARD BOUND, JACK TIER, LIONEL LINCOLN, MEMORIAL OF J.F. COOPER, MERCEDES OF CASTILE, MILES WALLINGFORD, MONIKINS, OAK-OPENINGS, THE PATHFINDER, THE PILOT, PIONEERS, THE PRAIRIE, PRECAUTION, REDSKINS, SATANSTOE, SEA LIONS, THE SPY, TRAVELING BACHELOR, TWO ADMIRALS, THE WATER-WITCH, WEPT OF WISH-TON-WISH, WING-AND-WING, and WYANDOTTE. Edgar Allan Poe’s TALES OF MYSTERY were posthumously published. On the more serious side, E. Monnegut’s MARGARET FULLER was published in Paris, and Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s heavily censored MEMOIRS were issued in Boston in two volumes, and John Henry Newman issued his THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY. Also, Professor Victor Cousin’s COURS D’HISTOIRE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE MODERNE appeared in an English version. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI In London, Lajos Kossuth became an intimate of Giuseppe Mazzini, and joined his revolutionary committee. ITALY

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE YOUNG VOYAGEURS; OR, THE BOY HUNTERS IN THE NORTH. The author engaged in a plan for Kossuth to travel incognito across Europe as his man-servant “James Hawkins” under a Foreign Office passport “for the free passage of Captain Mayne Reid, British subject, travelling on the Continent with a man-servant.”

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE (initially being issued in London by Chapman and Hall as 2 volumes octavo in blind-stamped brown cloth with spines lettered in gilt, prior to being printed in America) there was talk of the reading of THE DIAL:

Being much alone, during my recovery, I read interminably [page 677] in Mr. Emerson’s Essays, the Dial, Carlyle’s works, George Sand’s romances, (lent me by Zenobia,) and other books which one or another of the brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of the advance-guard of human progression; or, sometimes, the voice came sadly from among the shattered ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future. They were well adapted (better, at least, than any other intellectual products, the volatile essence of which had heretofore tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably farther into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier’s works, also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good deal of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize between his system and our own. There was far less resemblance, it is true, than the world chose to imagine; inasmuch as the two theories differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their main principles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI There was also talk of the reading of Waldo Emerson’s essays:

At some point during this year the proud author sat for his portrait in the studio of G.P.A. Healy at West Street and Washington Street in Boston. His new book was in part about “the Juvenalian and Thoreauvian ideology of Blithedale,” an experiment in community which was “in spite of its Edenic pretensions, located in an area of market gardens catering to the needs of the expanding ‘New England metropolis’.” When “Wakefield” was published in 1836, most of Hawthorne’s audience, like Hawthorne himself, would only have known of the conditions of urban life treated in the sketch by having read about them. Hawthorne takes advantage of the exoticism of a European metropolitan setting, just as Poe was to have done a few years later in “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Yet by 1852, when THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE was published, the urbanization of American was no longer an abstract possibility; it was, thanks to economic growth, industrial development, and large-scale immigration, an increasingly insistent reality. The intellectual and social movements represented by the Blithedale community were, in large measure, a response to these historic changes. The process of urbanization is therefore never entirely out of sight in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. Expressing the ideas implicit in the agrarian experiment, Coverdale offers several standard Transcendentalist criticisms of urban life. Driving through the streets of Boston, he describes “how the buildings, on either side, seemed to press too closely upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely room enough to throb between them” (3:11). Observing how the snow falling upon the city is blackened by smoke, and molded by boots, Coverdale makes it into a metaphor for the way in which human nature is corrupted by the “falsehood, formality, and error” (3:11) of city life. In HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI addition, Coverdale identifies cities as the sources of the “selfish competition,” which powers the “weary treadmill of established society” (3:19). Yet, although Coverdale will occasionally express the Juvenalian and Thoreauvian ideology of Blithedale, he implicitly recognizes, late in the book, that it may be futile to attempt to arrest the advance of urban civilization. When he observes a crowd at a village lyceum, it seems to him to be “rather suburban than rural” (3:197). The decline of authentic rusticity has been implied earlier when we learn that Blithedale, in spite of its Edenic pretensions, is located in an area of market gardens catering to the needs of the expanding “New England metropolis.” From the very beginning of THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, we know that the utopian experiment has failed and that Coverdale has returned to the urban existence he originally fled. During this year Kossuth was fundraising practically everywhere in America, including in the First Church at Northampton. He had a letter of introduction to the Motts of Philadelphia, and they invited him to dinner at their home. The Governor’s advisers insisted that he call there only for an informal chat while refraining from breaking bread with any such notorious abolitionists — lest news of such an indiscretion get out and he be embarrassed. During his visit and chat, Friend Lucretia somehow formed the opinion that although this politician was afraid to say so, in his heart he would have to be opposed to human slavery in any form. (Madam Pulzysky, Kossuth’s sister, also visited the Motts, and by way of contrast she was willing to argue the advantages of human slavery with them.)

What sort of man was this Kossuth? Utterly ruthless. Cold-blooded murder was not beyond him, when the result would prove useful. When he had needed to safeguard the royal gems of Hungary, for instance, including the crown of St. Stephen which was held to be necessary for the coronation of any true king of Hungary, he had had them buried at a spot on the banks of the Danube, and he had employed for this work “a detachment of prisoners who were shot after the concealment was complete.” His plot was that this portable property was to be recovered later, packed in marmalade, and carried via Constantinople to “the well-known Philhellene” of Boston, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. However, when it came to be time, during this year, to dig up the jewels and pack them in marmalade for shipment to Boston, the man whom he would entrust to do this would betray his trust. –Eventually the jewels, including the crown of St. Stephen, would come into the control of the government of Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Kossuth somehow suborned the cooperation of William James Stillman in his abortive scheme to recover the jewels, and this American artist sailed off to Hungary on this wild-goose chase.

According to page 153 and pages 161-6 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), virtually everything about Henry Thoreau during this period is to be accounted for in terms of the manifold influences upon him and upon the times, of European revolutionaries such as Kossuth here:

Faced with this threat of mental contamination, our guy allegedly has become literally obsessed with maintaining his self-concept and his self-satisfaction: Thoreau, stirred by Lajos Kossuth’s visit and news of European affairs, returned to the manuscript of WALDEN and revised and expanded it throughout 1852. Although engaged by current events, Thoreau fought a spiritual battle to remain aloof, “to preserve the mind’s chastity” by reading “not the Times” but “the Eternities.” Imagining that he had won, he celebrated his victory in WALDEN.... Kossuth’s visit to the United States and Concord brought to a head a struggle Thoreau had been engaged in for some time. During the years following the European revolutions of 1848-1849, Thoreau struggled to develop his spiritual side and rid himself of what he considered a degrading interest in current events. He also tried to communicate to Waldo Emerson and the world his own capacity for heroism. After the disappointing reception of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS in the summer of 1849, Thoreau had become uncertain about how to proceed with his life. Setting the third draft of WALDEN aside as unpublishable, he studied Hinduism, visited Cape Cod several times, took a trip to Canada, and began his Indian book project. The next year, 1851, he started to focus his energies, and, as Lewis Leary has said, these twelve months were a watershed in his life, a time of consolidation, of self- discovery, of preparation for some important new effort. “I find myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work...,” he wrote in his journal on September 7, 1851. “I am prepared not so much for contemplation, as for forceful expression.” Subsequently, 1852 became Thoreau’s annus mirabilis, the year his months of living deliberately yielded a value of its own, he lavished upon it the care and craft that turned it into his richest literary achievement; he also wrote at this time most of his essay “Life without Principle,” which, as Walter Harding has observed, “contains virtually all the fundamental principles upon which he based his life”; and, more important, he radically revised and reshaped WALDEN, changing it from a factual account of his life in the woods into the embryo of a profound spiritual HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI autobiography, illuminated by the idea of spiritual renewal, shaped and informed by the cycle of the seasons. The catalyst for the metamorphosis of WALDEN was Thoreau’s desire to resolve, in writing if not in fact, the conflict he felt between the spiritual and the animal in himself. On the one hand, his recent communion with nature had yielded, as it had in his youth, transcendence — not of the world of material fact, but rather of the world of trivial fact. At times he achieved a state of pure spirituality in the woods. On August 17, 1851, for example, he recorded in his journal, “My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.... I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me.” At such times, he reexperienced the ecstasy of his youth, when, as he put it, “the morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men.” Despite these experiences, which he valued greatly, another aspect of Thoreau’s personality cared about society, cared passionately about justice, about the actions of governments, about the fate of actual men in the nineteenth century. This part of him, however, he associated with his impure animal nature, and he sought to purge it. Thoreau had no way of knowing whether the body was Margaret Fuller’s or not, but she was surely on his mind, and her endeavor to convince others of the legitimacy of her “title” may have been as well. His description, which obviously contrasts with his earlier one, reveals the power and significance the facts possessed in his eyes. Here as always he cared too much about the human to dismiss its annihilation with convincing disdain. During the last months of 1850 and all of 1851, Thoreau dedicated himself to living deliberately, to fronting what he called the essential. During these months, he spent many hours walking through the fields and woods of Concord, recording his observations in his journal. At the same time, he read the newspapers and found himself engaged by what he found. The political news from Europe focused upon the failure of the republican movement, the reaction and reprisals, the futile attempts by exiles such as Mazzini and Kossuth to enlist aid in the struggle for a new round of upheavals. Austria, meanwhile, charged that the United States, especially its new Secretary of State Daniel Webster, was encouraging anti-Austrian sentiment and intruding in the affairs of Europe. On November 17, 1850, Thoreau revealed both his disdain for the news of the day and his concern about its power to capture his attention: “It is a strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to our doors and utter their complaints at our elbows. I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, — more importunate than an Italian beggar.” At times the newspapers contributed to the problem he called “the village,” which kept him from getting to the woods in spirit, although he walked miles into it bodily. One way he tried to overcome this problem was through the process of diminution, which can be seen in the following outburst of May 1, 1851: “Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men.” Quoting from “The Spirit of Lodin,” ... he claims to “look down from my height on nations, / And they become ashes before me.” By adopting an Olympian point of view, Thoreau elevates himself and diminishes men both in size and importance. Like Waldo Emerson in the “Mind and Manners” lectures, he also reaffirms his belief that the regeneration of the self, the building up of the single solitary soul, is far more important than the activities of masses of men, be they parties, tribes, or nations. Throughout 1851, as Thoreau continued to read the papers, he developed a loathing for them linked to that part of himself unable to ignore them. The news, he came to assert, could profane the “very sanctum sanctorum” of the mind: I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my mind with the most insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news, — in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect.... By all manners of boards and traps, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, ... it behooves us to preserve the purity and sanctity of the mind.... It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember. If I am to be a channel or thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain springs, and not the town sewers, — the Parnassian streams. “I do not think much of the actual,” he wrote himself. “It is something which we have long since done with. It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” During the writing of the 4th version of WALDEN, which coincided with Kossuth’s tour of the country, Thoreau created a myth about himself as someone who had risen above the affairs of men, someone who felt the animal dying out in him and the spiritual being established. In WALDEN, the European revolutions of 1848-1849, the reaction and reprisals that followed, all the attention given in the newspapers to Kossuth’s visit, to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, to a possible war between France and Great Britain, all these go unmentioned, and the absence reveals how earnestly, perhaps even how desperately, Thoreau sought to diminish their importance to his life. In his journals we see his fascination with and antagonism toward the news of national and international affairs. He devotes half of his essay “Life without Principle,” moreover, to a castigation of the news, telling the reader about its dangers, its foulness, its profanity — even mentioning Kossuth by name and ridiculing the “stir” about him: “That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!... For all the fruit 107 of that stir we have the Kossuth hat.” In WALDEN, however, he purifies his book and his persona by ignoring contemporary world affairs. Characterizing himself (untruthfully) as one “who rarely looks into the newspapers,” he claims that “nothing new 107. The Kossuth hat was a black, low-crowned felt hat with left brim fastened to crown, having a peacock feather. The story of its “invention” by John Nicholas Genin (1819-1878) and its rise to high fashion is told in Donald S. Spencer’s LOUIS KOSSUTH AND YOUNG AMERICA — A STUDY IN SECTIONALISM AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1848-1852 (Columbia, London: U of Missouri P, 1977, pages 59-61). This proprietor of a hat shop on Broadway in New-York next to the American Museum, Genin, also designed a best- selling Jenny Lind Riding Hat. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.” Thoreau’s struggle to achieve an oriental aloofness from the affairs of men seems to have first become a serious endeavor for him in the summer of 1850, when Emerson asked him to go to Fire Island to retrieve the body and possessions of Margaret Fuller. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr. has pointed out, “Death gave life a new imperative for Thoreau.” Despite Fuller’s rejections of his DIAL contributions in the early 1840s, Thoreau became her friend and admirer, and during her last summer in Concord, he took her boat riding at dawn on the river. The task he faced at Fire Island thus could not have been pleasant, yet in his journal and in letters to others, he strove to project a philosophical serenity about what he found. In a letter to his admirer H.G.O. Blake, he wrote that he had in his pocket a button torn from the coat of Giovanni Angelo, marchése d’Ossoli: “Held up, it intercept the light, — and actual button, — and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.” Thoreau had not known Ossoli, so his aloof serenity here comes easily; he had known Fuller though, and his attempt to rise above the fact of her death shows strain. When Thoreau arrived at the site of the wreck, Fuller’s body had not been found, but he stayed in the area and a week later learned that something once human had washed ashore. As he approached it, he saw bones, and in the draft of this letter to Blake he asserted, “There was nothing at all remarkable about them. They were simply some bones lying on the beach. They would not detain the walker there more than so much seaweed. I should think that the fates would not take the trouble to show me any bones again, I so slightly appreciated the favor.” He recalled the experience in his journal some three months later, however, and there revealed the difficulty he had in dismissing what he had seen: “I once went in search of the relics of a human body...,” he wrote, “which had been cast up the day before on the beach, though the sharks had stripped off the flesh.... It was as conspicuous on that sandy plain as if a generation had labored to pile up a cairn there.... It reigned over the shore. That dead body possessed the shore as no living one could. It showed a title to the sands which no living ruler could.” In the winter of 1851-1852, Thoreau’s struggle to assure his own purity became obsessive. Sherman Paul has traced his dissatisfaction with himself to surveying, which Thoreau found trivial and coarsening. Mary Elkins Moller has speculated that Thoreau was also having sexual fantasies about Mrs. Lidian Emerson and felt ashamed of them. Whatever the truth of these views (and I think the second takes Thoreau’s references to chastity too literally), the fact remains that Thoreau at this time was also struggling to escape from his interest in current events. Surprisingly, this private denouncer of the press had become a subscriber to Horace Greeley’s Weekly Tribune, a fact that heightened the tension he felt about preserving his mind’s chastity. On January 20, 1852, he wrote, I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper in a week, for I now take the weekly Tribune, and for a HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI few days past, it seems to me, I have not dwelt in Concord; the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.... To read the things distant and sounding betrays us into slighting these which are then apparently near and small. We learn to look abroad for our mind and spirit’s daily nutriment, and what is this dull town to me? ...All summer and far into the fall I unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now I find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to me. My walks were full of incidents. I attended not to the affairs of Europe, but to my own affairs in Concord fields. Thoreau’s quest for purity and serenity had become particularly difficult because of the excitement surrounding Lajos Kossuth’s visit and the new interest Waldo Emerson had taken in things Thoreau considered trivial, including Kossuth. The gradual estrangement of the two men may have begun while Emerson was in England in 1847-1848, writing letters home for Lidian and Thoreau which were little more than catalogues of the great people he had met. Although we know this was his way of providing himself a record of his activities, it probably disappointed. After his return from Europe, Emerson had lectured throughout the country, praising England and its people, but when he engaged Thoreau in a conversation on the topic, Henry, not surprisingly, said that the English were “mere soldiers” and their business was “winding up.” In the summer of 1851, Emerson, unaware of the new scope and grandeur of Thoreau’s journal, unaware of the growth in his spiritual development, wrote off his friend as one who “will not stick.” “He is a boy,” Emerson added, “& will be an old boy. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding Empires, but not, if at the end of years, it is only beans.” In a like manner, Thoreau at about this time began to see that his friend would continue to disappoint him. He bristles at Emerson’s patronizing attitude; he disagreed with his treatment of Margaret Fuller in the MEMOIRS; and most of all he resented his new worldliness. In ENGLISH TRAITS (1856) Emerson, drawing on his lectures of 1848-1850, would celebrate the manners of the British aristocracy and assert that “whatever tends to form manners or to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of friendship will respect every social guard which our manners can establish.” For Thoreau, there was “something devilish in manners” that could come between friends, and writing of Emerson in the winter of 1851, he complained, “One of the best men I know often offends me by uttering made words — the very best words, of course, or dinner speeches, most smooth and gracious and fluent repartees.... O would you but be simple and downright! Would you but cease your palaver! It is the misfortune of being a gentleman and famous.” As Joel Porte has observed, the failure of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and Emerson’s “manifest success” had probably contributed to Thoreau’s bitterness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI A pushy little ultra-conservative mofo, the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen had what was termed at the time “a remarkable talent for giving offense.” Precisely while Kossuth was riding the crest of the wave of American political correctness, Bowen publicly denounced that revolutionary. (Nota Bene: This differs from Henry Thoreau’s reaction not merely as public denunciation differs from private distaste but also as cheap motivation differs from abundant reason.)

But this is all very easy to figure out, at least as far as Larry J. Reynolds is concerned — what has happened was merely that Kossuth has come between Waldo Emerson and Thoreau! – Wow, now that we understand that, it all becomes perfectly clear. Continuing to quote, from pages 166-70 of this extraordinarily confident EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE influence study: In the early months of 1852, Kossuth’s visit to Concord widened the separation between Thoreau and Emerson into a permanent gulf. As Thoreau spent more and more time communing with nature, trying to cleanse himself of what he called the “news,” Emerson saw fit to criticize him for these efforts. Frustrated, Thoreau declared in his journal, “I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even.” Emerson, who would soon lecture on the “Conduct of Life” in Canada and then deliver his “Address to Kossuth” in Concord, could not see the heroism in Thoreau’s aloofness. Thoreau, meanwhile, who sought to become a better man through his solitary walks, felt unappreciated and frustrated. On May 4, in an entry both defensive and immodest, he dismissed the great Kossuth and those like Emerson who honored him: This excitement about Kossuth is not interesting to me, it is so superficial. It is only another kind of dancing or of politics. Men are making speeches to him all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth.... You can pass your hand under the largest mob, a nation in revolution even, and, however solid a bulk they may make, like a hail-cloud in the atmosphere, you may not meet so much as a cobweb of support. They may not rest, even by a point, on eternal foundations. But an individual standing on truth you cannot pass your hand under, for his foundations reach to the centre of the universe. So superficial these men and their doings, it is life on a leaf or a chip which has nothing but air or water beneath. The length and tone of this entry reveals the importance of the matter to him; obviously, he considers himself the “individual standing on truth,” whose depth far exceeds that of any “nation in revolution” or military hero. And one week later, during the excitement surrounding Kossuth’s visit to Concord, during the afternoon of Emerson’s speech and reception, Thoreau, in order to show how little he thought of these matters, entered only the following in his journal: “P.M. — Kossuth here.” All of Thoreau’s struggle with current events, with Kossuth’s visit, with Emerson’s worldliness and disesteem lay behind the important fourth version of WALDEN. As he revised and expanded his manuscript throughout 1852, Thoreau endowed his persona with HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI a serene aloofness, creating a hero interested in eternal truths, not pointless political ones. Having discovered that “a sane and growing man revolutionizes every day” and that no “institutions of man can survive a morning experience,” he fashioned an answer to his best friend, who thought Kossuth a great man and Henry Thoreau an unsociable boy. As he revised WALDEN, Thoreau made major additions.... The thrust of almost all of these additions is to show how nature, which is holy and heroic, can bestow those virtues on one who practices chastity. His central statement on chastity was added, of course, to “Higher Laws” and asserts that “we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as out higher nature slumbers.... Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.... He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Not surprisingly, Thoreau presents himself as having achieved this assuredness. He is among the blessed. The chastity Thoreau has in mind is as much intellectual as physical, and to attain it one must abstain not merely from sexual intercourse but also from trivial thoughts and interests. In his addition to “Solitude” he explains the process it involves: “By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.” The result is a feeling of doubleness, whereby a person “may be either a drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it.” He admits that “this doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes,” but he makes it clear that it is worth the price. In “The Ponds” he adds paragraphs stressing the “serenity and purity” of Walden and suggests a correspondence between it and himself. “Many men have been likened to it,” he writes, “But few deserve that honor.” That he has earned the honor through his way of life is a point made repeatedly. In his addition to “Baker Farm”, Thoreau highlights the blessedness which communion with nature has accorded him. Like Walt Whitman’s persona in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or more recently Loren Eiseley’s star thrower, Thoreau’s hero becomes literally illuminated by nature. He stands one day at the base “of a rainbow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinged the grass and leaves around, and dazzling [him] as if [he] looked through colored crystal.” TO emphasize the religious implications of the experience, he adds, “As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect.” In the additions to the “Conclusion,” Thoreau makes explicit the successful effort to achieve spiritual renewal through aloofness. “I delight to come to my bearings, —” he declares, “not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.” The place he would sit, of course, is far above men and their doings, which diminishes them in his eyes. And this particular view is the one dramatized in his most famous addition, the classic battle of the ants in “Brute Neighbors.” The episode HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI comes from an entry made in his journal on January 22, 1852, while Kossuth was visiting Washington and while Horace Greeley in his Tribune and James Watson Webb in his Courier and Enquirer were debating the nature of the Hungarian War. Thoreau, like most of his contemporaries, found himself engaged (against his will, however) by what called “the great controversy now going on in the world between the despotic and the republican principle,” and this is why he associates the two tribes of warring ants with the European revolutionary scene and calls them “the red republicans and the black despots or imperialists.” His description of their war has become famous because of its frequent use in anthologies, and is surely right when he says that one reason for its selection is that it is “easily taken from its context.” Raymond Adams errs though in adding that “it is an episode that hardly has so much as a context.” By virtue of both its hidden connection to revolutionary Europe and its subtle connection to the theme of spiritual serenity, the episode is part of larger contexts that shaped its features. As Thoreau describes the battle of the ants, he reveals that side of his personality engaged by physical heroism in the actual world. The ferocity and resolve of the combatants, the mutilation and gore that attend their life-and-death struggle thoroughly engage him. “I felt for the rest of that day,” he admits, “as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door.” On the other hand, through the use of the mock-heroic, Thoreau generates an irony that allows him to stress once more the spiritual side of his persona, the side that dismisses politics, revolutions, and wars as trivial. The mother of a single red ant, we are told, has charged her son “to return with his shield or upon it,” and the fighting ants, the narrator speculates, could, not to his surprise, have “had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and played their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants.” With such irony Thoreau diminishes the importance, not of the ants, but of the men they resemble. Just as he claimed that Kossuth and his American admirers were involved in “life on a leaf or a chip,” he here brings the metaphor to life and makes the same statement about warring nations. The purpose of this addition, and of his others, is to show that true heroism is associated with aloof serenity, not brutal warfare. When Thoreau revised his journal entry for inclusion in WALDEN, he claimed the ant battle occurred “in the Presidency of James Knox Polk, five years before the passage of Daniel Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill,” thus making it contemporaneous with his stay at the pond and registering his criticism, as he had in “Civil Disobedience,” of the Mexican War. Ultimately, the issue of slavery disturbed him far more than revolution in Europe, and he found it difficult to resist the temptation to speak out against it. In later versions of WALDEN, Thoreau expanded upon the ideas he introduced in 1852, extending his treatment of the triumph of the spiritual over the animal and filling out his account of the progress of the seasons, which, of course, complements the theme of renewal. Meanwhile, paradoxically, he remained a deeply passionate man, more engaged than others of HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI his acquaintance by the “trivial Nineteenth Century.” When the slave Anthony Burns was arrested in 1854, Thoreau, burning with rage, publicly denounced the Massachusetts authorities in his inflammatory “Slavery in Massachusetts”: “I walk toward one of our ponds,” he thundered, “but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? ...Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.” Five years later, of course, he stepped forward to defend John Brown more ardently than anyone else in the country. Clearly then, in 1852, when Thoreau endowed the persona of WALDEN with remarkable purity and serenity, he was mythologizing himself; he was, in response to the “tintinnabulum from without,” creating a new kind of hero for a revolutionary age.

Have we got this very clear now? According to Larry J. Reynolds, it has been demonstrated that Thoreau, a boy playing at life, was not merely fighting a spiritual battle to remain aloof but indeed was fantasizing that he had won this battle, and celebrating his final victory. But Thoreau has been detected as nevertheless full of bitterness, as resentful, as feeling unappreciated and frustrated. Fundamentally a “defensive and immodest” pretense rather than any sort of record of a spiritual journey, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS merely celebrated cheaply in words what its author could not accomplish in fact: the big win in a struggle between the spiritual in its author and the warrior-wannabee. This is Thoreau as a mere self-deluding boy who, when confronted by a real life hero out of the real world of struggle, struggles to stand “aloof” in order to console himself by considering himself to be the true hero, to be indeed the “individual standing on truth” whose real worth far exceeds the appreciation offered to any such mere celebrity wrapped up in mere mundane push-and- shove concerns. It is hard to imagine that Reynolds is not terming Thoreau a self-deluded coward.

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI During her visit to Thomas Carlyle in 1846 Margaret Fuller had commented “I accept the universe” and Carlyle seems to have overlooked the fact that Fuller was merely negating the thesis of Ivan in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, “I do not accept the world.”

Gad! She’d better!

When, in this year in Philadelphia at the first Women’s Rights Convention, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld’s Quaker sister Sarah Moore Grimké proposed Fuller’s “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion” as the motto of the movement, she was proposing a motto very similar to this “I accept the universe” sentiment. (Both Angelina and Sarah also contributed letters to be read at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse NY in September 1852. Susan B. Anthony was in attendance at this convention. Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s nomination as the convention’s president was rejected when she offended other ladies by displaying herself in a dress which exposed her neck and her arms.)

During the same year, Susan B. Anthony was incorporating women’s rights into three other reform movements: temperance, labor, and education. She was helping to organize the “Whole World’s Temperance Convention” in New-York. (The “World’s Temperance Convention,” held in the same city, had refused to recognize women delegates -— or “half” the world, as these women said.) That year, she also was helping a group of Rochester, New York seamstresses draft a code outlining fair wages for working women in the city.

“The needle is the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country.” — Professor Maria Mitchell

And, at a New York State Teacher’s Association meeting, also in Rochester, she was demanding that women be allowed to participate in discussions formerly opened only to men. FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The expanded edition of the Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s 1844 THE DISCIPLES’ HYMN BOOK: A COLLECTION OF HYMNS FOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE DEVOTION (Boston: Horace B. Fuller) included ten of Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poems.

Marcus Spring purchased 268 acres of land on Raritan Bay in New Jersey about a mile outside Perth Amboy and, with 30 other families dissatisfied with the religious pluralism of the North American Phalanx, established the Raritan Bay Union, a competing utopian community that was to embrace a fixed liturgy and would resemble more closely the Religious Union of Association founded in Boston in 1847 by the Reverend William Henry Channing.

Phillips, Sampson, and Company of Boston was publishing the two-volume MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, the best-selling biography of that decade, as expurgated and altered by good ol’ boys Waldo Emerson, the Reverend Clarke, and the Reverend Channing. Opinioned Horace Greeley:108

Margaret’s book is going to sell! I tell you it has the real stuff in it.

(And Margaret Fuller’s non-literary remains were lying in a packing crate in a shallow unmarked grave on Coney Island.)

May 6, Thursday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway was studying the MEMOIRS of Margaret Fuller.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “It is women who, like mountain flowers, mark with most characteristic precision the gradation of social zones. The hierarchy of classes is plainly visible among them; it is blurred in the other sex. With women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; among men we see it broken by the incalculable varieties of human freedom. The reason is that the man on the whole, makes himself by his own activity, and that the woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that the one modifies and shapes circumstance by his own energy, while the gentleness of the other is dominated by and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so to speak, inclines to be species, and man to be individual. Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which is most constant and most variable. Most constant from the moral point of view, most variable from the social. A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy in the second. All degrees of culture and all conditions of society are clearly marked in their outward appearance, 108. The good ’ol boys could allow her Via Sacra to continue to swarm, her temples to glitter, her hills to tower, her togated procession to sweep, and her warriors to display remorseless beaks, but they could not allow her to describe the grand old emperors of Rome as having been “drunk with blood and gold.” What was this? –A cat may look at a king but a woman mayn’t critique a Caesar? Go figure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI their manners and their tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their instincts, and their desires. The feminine sex represents at the same time natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity of the species and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and divides, it gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through them, according as it interprets its twofold rôle in the one sense or the other. At bottom, woman’s mission is essentially conservative, but she is a conservative without discrimination. On the one side, she maintains God’s work in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly human, in the race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other, she maintains the results of circumstance, all that is passing, local, and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and the frivolous, the good and the bad. Well, what then? Isolate if you can, the fire from its smoke. It is a divine law that you are tracing, and therefore good. The woman preserves; she is tradition as the man is progress. And if there is no family and no humanity without the two sexes, without these two forces there is no history.”

May 6 3 P.M. —To Conantum. Heard the first warbling vireo this morning on the elms. This almost makes a summer. Heard also, as I sat at my desk, the unusual low of cows being driven to their country pastures. Sat all day with the window open, for the outer air is the warmest. The balm-of-Gilead was well blossomed out yesterday, and has been for three or four days probably. The woods seen a mile off in the horizon are more indistinct yesterday and today, these two summer-like clays (it is a summer heat), the green of the pines being blended with the gray or ash of the deciduous trees; partly, perhaps, because the fine haze in the air is the color of the twigs, and partly because the buds are expanded into leaves on many; but this last cause is hardly admissible. Now the wasps have come. My dream frog turns out to be a toad. I watched half a dozen a long time at 3.30 this afternoon in Hubbard’s Pool, where they were frogging (?) lustily. They sat in the shade, either partly in the water, or on a stick; looked darker and narrower in proportion to their length than toads usually do, and moreover are aquatic. I see them jump into the ditches as I walk. After an interval of silence, one appeared to be gulping the wind into his belly, inflating himself so that he was considerably expanded; then he discharged it all into his throat while his body or belly collapsed suddenly, expanding his throat to a remarkable size. Was nearly a minute inflating itself; then swelled out its sac, which is rounded and reminded me of the bag to a worktable, holding its head up the while. It is whitish specked (the bag) on a dull bluish or slate ground, much bigger than all the rest, of the head, and nearly an inch in diameter. It was a ludicrous sight, with their so serious prominent eyes peering over it; and a deafening sound, when several were frogging at once, as I was leaning over them. The mouth [seemed] to be shut always, and perhaps the air was expelled through the nostrils. The strain appeared prolonged as long as the air lasted, and was sometimes quavered or made intermittent, apparently by closing the orifice, whatever it was, or the blast. One, which I brought home, answers well enough to the description of the common toad (Bufo Americanus), though it is hardly so gray. Their piping (?) was evidently connected with their loves. Close by, it is an unmusical monotonous deafening sound, a steady blast, — not a peep nor a croak, but a kind of piping, — but, far away, it is a dreamy, lulling sound, and fills well the crevices of nature. Out of its place, as very near, it would be as intolerable as the thrumming of children. The plower yesterday disturbed a toad in the garden, the first I have heard of. I must catch him and compare them. Their heads are well above the water when they pipe. Saw a striped snake lying by the roadside as if watching for toads, though they must be scarce now, his head just on the edge of the road. The most flexible of creatures, it is so motionless it appears the most rigid, in its waving line. The yellow willows on the causeways are now fairly leaving out. They are more forward in this respect than that early willow, or any other that I see. The trees are already a mass of green, partly concealing the yellow stems, — a tender, fresh light green. No trees look so forward in this respect, and, being in rows, they make the more show, their branches are so thick and numerous, close together. If some have leaves as large, they are much more scattered and make no such show. I did not observe what time the willow bark would strip and make whistles. The female maple is more crimson, the male more scarlet. The horse-chestnut buds are so advanced that they are larger than the leaves of any tree. The elder, the wild cherry, thimble-berries, sweetbriars, cultivated cherry, and early apples, etc., white birches, hazels, aspens, hornbeams, maples, etc., etc., — not quite the hickory and alder, — are opening their buds; the alders are beginning to. It is pleasant when the road winds along the side of a hill with a thin fringe of wood through which to look into the low land. It furnishes both shade and frame for our pictures, — as this Corner road. The first Anemone memorosa, or wood anemone, its petals more slightly tinged with purple than the rue-leaved. See the ferns here at the spring curling up like the proboscis: of the sphinx moth. The first Viola blanda (sweet-scented white), in the moist ground, also, by this spring. It is pretty numerous and may have been out a day or two. I think I could not find so many blue ones. It has a rather strong scent like heliotrope (?). The Convallaria bifolia budded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Sometimes the toad reminds me of the cricket, its note also proceeding from the ground. See now the woodchuck rollicking across a field toward his hole and tumbling into it. See where he has just dug a new hole. Their claws long and rather weak-looking for digging. The woodpeckers tapping. The first columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis) to-day, on Conantum. Shade is grateful, and the walker feels a desire to bathe in some pond or stream for coolness and invigoration. Cowslips show at a distance in the meadows (Miles’s). The new butter is white still, but with these cows’ lips in the grass it will soon be yellow, I trust. This yellowness in the spring, derived from the sun, affects even the cream in the cow’s bag, and flowers in yellow butter at last. Who has not turned pale at the sight of hay butter? These are the cows’ lips. The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man? There are odors enough in nature to remind you of everything, if you had lost every sense but smell. The fever- bush is an apothecary’s shop. The farmers are very busily harrowing and rolling in their grain. The dust flies from their harrows across the field. The tearing, toothed harrow and the ponderous cylinder, which goes creaking and rumbling over the surface, heard afar, and vying with the sphere. The cylinder is a simple machine, and must go into the new symbols. It is an interesting object, seen drawn across a grain-field. The willows are now suddenly of a light, fresh, tender yellowish-green. A green bittern, a gawky bird. As I return over the bridge, shadflies very numerous, Many insects now in the evening sunshine, especially over the water. Houstonia (Hedyotis cœrulea), bluets, now just begun. Dewey calls it Venus’ Pride. Gray says truly, “a very delicate little herb,... producing in DEWEY spring a profusion of handsome bright blue blossoms fading to white, with a yellow eye.” I should say bluish- white. The dwarf andromeda (A. calyculata) just begun; leaves called evergreen; flowers on “one-sided leafy racemes.” Methinks its leaves remain two years, and fall in the spring, the small ones continuing to grow. [This sentence is queried in the margin of the page.] The ground is now strewn with the old red-brown lower leaves, and only the smaller and fresher green ones remain. The common toad, with which I compared the dream toad I brought home, has two horn-like dark marks reaching over the eyes. It is not depressed, but rather has a Tubercle, on the top of the head between the eves. It is also much wider in proportion to length, and is triangular, as I have drawn in report. Yet they are probably the same. The garden toad made the same faint chicken-like, musical croak, when I held him in my hand, with the other, and in the same manner swelling his bag. The garden toad was yellowish beneath, the other white with some small spots. The latter turned much lighter-colored, — from brown to a yellowish and light-brown green, or rather greenish-brown, — while I had him. They have a bright eye, with coppery or golden-coppery iris. It is their redeeming feature. But why do I not hear them in the garden? They appear to frequent the water first, and breed there, then hop to the gardens, and turn lighter and grow thicker.

May 22, Saturday: The Chinese Christian Army took Hsingan.

Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES OF NEW FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE. IN THREE BOOKS ... THE THIRD EDITION, IN TWO VOLUMES (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand. 1808).

May 22. Saturday. On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. Saw painted the red berries of the Arum triphyllum. The pigeon is more red on the breast and more blue than the turtle dove. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so. The seringo-bird cannot be the Savannah sparrow. The piping plover has a big head, white breast, and ring neck. Two kinds of bluets in New York Report.

5 P.M. — Plymouth. The hill whence Billington discovered the pond. The field plantain in blossom and abundant here. A chickweed in bloom in Watson's garden. Is it the same that was so early? A yellow flower, apparently a hieraceum, just ready to blossom. The four-leaved loosestrife, with dark leaves, shows its flower-buds on the ends of its threads. The mayweed is ready to blossom. [Was it not whiteweed?] The German forget-me-not reminded me of my little blue flower in the brook.

Per Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Vol. 17 New Series, No. 438, issued on this date: The authoress of WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, known also in this country by her PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, occupied among her own people a station as notable as that of De Staël among the French, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

or of Rahel von Ense in Germany. Mystic and transcendental as she was, her writings teem with proof of original power, and are HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the expression of a thoughtful and energetic, if also a wayward and undisciplined, mind. One of the two compilers of these MEMOIRS (Emerson and W.H. Channing) observes, that his first impression of her was that of a ‘Yankee Corinna;’ and such is not unlikely to be the last impression of ordinary readers, ourselves among the number. In a letter, dated 1841, we find her saying: ‘I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust’ — an apt illustration of her mental structure and tone of sentiment, compounded of New Worldedness, as represented by Margaret Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her remarkable life-history.

Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, in May 1810. Her father was a shrewd, practical, hard-headed lawyer, whose love for his wife ‘was the green spot on which he stood apart from the commonplaces of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence.’ That wife is described as a fair and flower-like nature, bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. ‘Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic — of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the Golden Age.’109 Mr Fuller, in undertaking the education of his daughter, committed the common error of excessive stimulation — thinking to gain time by forwarding the intellect as early as possible. He was himself a scholar, and hoped to make her the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as might be elsewhere attained. He was a severe and exacting disciplinarian, and permanently marred the nervous system of his child by the system he adopted of requiring her to recite her tasks on his return home at night, which was frequently very late. Hence a premature development of the brain, which, while it made her a youthful prodigy by day — one such youthful prodigy, it has been justly said, is often the pest of a whole neighbourhood — rendered her the nightly victim of spectral illusions, somnambulism, &c.; checked her growth; and eventually brought on continual headaches, weakness, and various nervous affections. As soon as the light was removed from her chamber at night, this ill-tended girl was haunted by colossal faces, that advanced slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came; till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek, which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. ‘No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bade her “leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy” — never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night.’ Her home seems to have been deficient in the charms and associations appropriate to childhood. Finding no relief from without, her already overexcited mind was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. She tells us she was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time; in Latin, which she began 109. MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1852. Mr Fuller’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY, which comprises the first sixty pages of these MEMOIRS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to read at six years old, her father, and subsequently a tutor, trained her to a high degree of precision, expecting her to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and to translate it tersely and unhesitatingly, with the definite clearness of one perfectly au fait in the philosophy of the classics. Thus she became imbued with an abiding interest in the genius of old Rome — ‘the power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose’ — where man takes a ‘noble bronze in camps and battle- fields,’ his brow well furrowed by the ‘wrinkles of council,’ and his eye ‘cutting its way like the sword;’ and thence she loved to escape, at Ovid’s behest, to the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill — delighted to realise in those Greek forms the faith of a refined and intense childhood. Reading was now to her a habit and a passion. Its only rival attraction was the ‘dear little garden’ behind the house, where the best hours of her lonely child-life were spent. Within the house, everything, she says, was socially utilitarian; her books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden, where her thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. A range of blue hills, at about twelve miles’ distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her thoughts not too deep for tears. The books which exercised most power over her at this period were Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Molière — all three students of the ‘natural history of man,’ and inspired by fact, not fancy; reconstructing the world from materials which they collected on every side, not spinning from the desires of their own special natures; and accordingly teaching her, their open-eyed disciple, to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience, but, as she confesses, also doing her harm, since the child, fed with meat instead of milk, becomes too soon mature. For a few months, this bookish life was interrupted, or varied, by the presence of an English lady, whom Margaret invested with ideal perfections as her ‘first friend,’ and whom she worshipped as a star from the east — a morning-star; and at whose departure she fell into a profound depression. Her father sought to dispel this rooted melancholy, by sending her to school — a destiny from which her whole nature revolted, as something alien to its innermost being and cherished associations. To school, however, she went, and at first captivated, and then scandalised her fellow-pupils by her strange ways. Now, she surprised them by her physical faculty of rivalling the spinning dervishes of the East — now, by declaiming verses, and acting a whole répertoire of parts, both laughter-raising and tear-compelling — now, by waking in the night, and cheating her restlessness by inventions that alternately diverted and teased her companions. She was always devising means to infringe upon the school-room routine. This involved her at last in a trouble, from which she was only extricated by the judicious tenderness of her teacher — the circumstances attending which ‘crisis’ are detailed at length in her story of ‘Mariana.’

Her personal appearance at this time, and for some following years, is described by one of her friends as being that of a blooming girl of a florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, which she unwisely endeavoured to HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI suppress or conceal at the price of much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, but baffled physiognomical art. ‘She escaped the reproach of positive plainness, by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, busy eyes, which, though usually half-closed from near-sightedness, shot piercing glances at those with whom she conversed, and, most of all, by the very peculiar and graceful carriage of her head and neck.’ In conversation she was already distinguished, though addicted to ‘quizzing’ — the not unreasonable ground of unpopularity with her female friends. Emerson alludes to her dangerous reputation for satire, which, in addition to her great scholarship, made the women dislike one who despised them, and the men cavil at her as ‘carrying too many guns.’ A fragment from a letter in her sixteenth year will illustrate her pursuits at that period: — ‘I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano till seven, when we breakfast. Next, I read French — Sismondi’s Literature of Southern Europe — till eight; then, two or three lectures in Brown’s Philosophy. About half-past nine, I go to Mr Perkins’s school, and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, if the conversation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an hour over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but I am often interrupted. At six, I walk, or take a drive. Before going to bed, I play or sing, for half an hour or so, to make all sleepy, and, about eleven, retire to write a little while in my journal, exercises on what I have read, or a series of characteristics which I am filling up according to advice.’ Greek, French, Italian, metaphysics, and private authorship — pretty well for a miss in her teens, and surely a promissory-note on the bas bleu joint-stock company! — a note which she discharged in full when it became due. Next year (1826), we find her studying Mme de Staël, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Spanish ballads, ‘with great delight.’ Anon she is engrossed with the elder Italian poets, from Berni down to Pulci and Politian; then with Locke and the ontologists; then with the opera omnia of Sir William Temple. She pursued at this time no systematic study, but ‘read with the heart, and was learning more from social experience than from books.’ The interval of her life, between sixteen and twenty- five, is characterised by one of her biographers as a period of ‘preponderating sentimentality, of romance and dreams, of yearning and of passion.’ While residing at Cambridge, she suffered from profound despondency — conscious of the want of a home for her heart. A sterner schooling awaited her at Groton, whither her father removed in 1833. Here he died suddenly of cholera in 1835. Now she was taught the miserable perplexities of a family that has lost its head, and was called to tread a path for which, as she says, she had no skill and no call, except that it must be trodden by some one, and she alone was ready. In 1836 she went to Boston, to teach Latin and French in an academy of local repute; and in the ensuing year she accepted a ‘very favourable offer,’ to become ‘lady-superior’ in an educational institution at Providence, where she seems to have exercised an influence analogous to that of Dr Arnold at Rugby — treating her pupils as ladies, and thus making them anxious to prove that they deserved to be so treated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

By this time, she had attracted around her many and devoted friends. Her conversational powers were of a high order, by common consent. Mr Hedge describes her speech as remarkably fluent and correct; but deriving its strength not from fluency, choice diction, wit, or sentiment, but from accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment; together with rhetorical finish, it had an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment: so that he says, ‘I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking “like a book” was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it.’ The excitement of the presence of living persons seems to have energised her whole being. ‘I need to be called out,’ are her words, ‘and never think alone, without imagining some companion. It is my habit, and bespeaks a second-rate mind.’ And again: ‘After all, this writing,’ she says in a letter, ‘is mighty dead. Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything — not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the head!’ Mr Alcott of Boston considered her the most brilliant talker of the day. Miss Martineau was fascinated by the same charm. It is thus characterised by the author of Representative Men: ‘Talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest.’ Her self-complacency staggered many at first — as when she spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. ‘I now know,’ she has been heard to say in the coolest style, ‘all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’ Well may Mr Emerson talk of her letting slip phrases that betrayed the presence of ‘a rather mountainous ME.’ Such phrases abound in her conversation and correspondence — mountainous enough to be a hill of offence to the uninitiated and untranscendental. At anyrate, there was no affectation in this; she thoroughly believed in her own superiority; her subscription to that creed was implicit and ex animo. Nor do we detect affectation in her most notable vagaries and crotchets. She loved the truth, and spoke it out — we were about to write, manfully; and why not? At heart, she was, to use the words of an intimate and discerning friend, a right brave and heroic woman — shrinking from no duty because of feeble nerves. Numerous illustrations of this occur in the volumes before us. Thus we find her going from a bridal of passing joyfulness to attend a near relative during a formidable surgical operation — or drawing five hundred dollars to bestow, on a New-York ‘ne’er- do-weel,’ half-patriot, half-author, always in such depths of distress, and with such squadrons of enemies that no charity could relieve, no intervention save him.

In 1839, she removed from Groton, with her mother and family, to Jamaica Plain, a few miles from Boston; and thence, shortly, to Cambridge and New York. Boston, however, was her point d’appui, and in it she formed acquaintances of every class, the most utilitarian and the most idealistic. In 1839, she published a translation of Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann; in 1841, HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the Letters of Bettina; in 1843, the Summer on the Lakes — a narrative of her tour to Lake Superior and Michigan. During the same period she was editor of the Dial, since conducted by Emerson and Ripley, and in which appeared her papers on Goethe and Beethoven, the Rhine, the Romaic Ballads, John Sterling’s Poems, &c.

Exhausted by continuous exertion in teaching and writing for the press, Miss Fuller, in 1844, sought refreshment and health in change of scene; and, desiring rather new employments than cessation from work, she accepted a liberal offer from Mr Horace Greeley of New York, to become a regular contributor to the Tribune; and for that purpose to take up her abode in his house, first spending some time in the Highlands of the Hudson. At New York, she took an active interest, after Mrs Fry’s manner, in the various benevolent institutions, and especially the prisons on Blackwell’s Island. For more than a year she wrote regularly for the Tribune, ‘always freshly, vigorously, but not always clearly.’ The notice attracted by her articles insured fresh hosts of acquaintances, and she became a distinguished character at Miss Lynch’s réunions, and at literary soirées of a similar order. In 1846, she left her native land — for ever, as the melancholy event proved — to join Mr and Mrs Spring in a European tour. Her letters home contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities. Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat, with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais, Béranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked in 1850 on board that doomed ship, the Elizabeth. As a resident in Rome, her safety was seriously imperiled during the French siege of 1849. She was appointed by the ‘Roman Commission for the succour of the wounded,’ to the superintendence of an hospital, and all along took the liveliest interest in the fortunes of Mazzini and the republic. She was then a wife and a mother, having been married privately to the Marquis Ossoli, a Roman, ‘of a noble but impoverished house,’ whom she described, in a letter to her mother, as ‘not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with her,’ being a man ‘absolutely ignorant of books, and with no enthusiasm of character,’ but endowed with excellent practical sense, a nice sense of duty, native refinement, and much sweetness of temper. The peculiar circumstances attending the marriage in that country, and at that agitated crisis, involved Margaret in numerous afflictions, and taxed her powers of endurance to the very uttermost.

She had to suffer compulsory separation from husband and child — the one in hourly peril of a bloody death, the other neglected and pining away in the hands of strangers: penury, loneliness, prostrating sickness, and treachery on the part of those around her, were meanwhile her own lot in the land of strangers. How this season of trial affected her character, may be inferred from the remarks of her friend Mrs Story, then sojourning in Italy, who says, that in Boston she had regarded Margaret as a person on intellectual stilts, with a large share of arrogance, and little sweetness of temper; and adds: ‘How unlike to this was she now! — so delicate, so simple, confiding, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI affectionate; with a true womanly heart and soul, sensitive and generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed of so broad a charity, that she could cover with its mantle the faults and defects of all about her.’ Her devotion to her husband, and her passionate attachment to her little Angelo, were exhibited in the liveliest colour: the influence she exercised, too, by love and sympathy, over Italians of every class with whom she came in contact, appears of a kind more tender, chastened, and womanly than that which previously characterised her. When the republican cause at Rome left no hope of present restoration, Margaret found a tranquil refuge in Florence, devoting her mornings to literary labours, and her evenings to social intercourse with cultivated natives and a few foreign visitors, among whom the Brownings occupied a distinguished place. Greatly straitened in means at this time, the repose she and her husband enjoyed at Florence, in their small and scantily-furnished room, seems to have been peculiarly grateful to both. Soon, however, arrangements were made for their departure to the United States; for Margaret was heart- weary at the political reaction in Europe, and the pecuniary expediency of publishing to advantage her chronicles of the revolution, seconded by a yearning to see her family and friends once more, constrained to this step.

From motives of economy, they took passage in a merchantman from Leghorn, the Elizabeth, the expense being one-half what a return by way of France would have been. The remonstrances of her acquaintance, founded on the fatigues of a two months’ voyage — the comparative insecurity of such a bark — the exposed position of the cabin (on deck) — and so on, were not unaided by Margaret’s own presentiments. Ossoli, when a boy, had been told by a fortune-teller, to ‘beware of the sea,’ and this was the first ship he had ever set his foot in. In a letter where she describes herself ‘suffering, as never before, all the horrors of indecision,’ his wife expresses a fervent prayer that it ‘may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief.’ That ‘or if so’ is affecting — and was realised, except, indeed, that the anguish was not brief, for it lasted twelve terrible hours — a long communion face to face with Death! The bark sailed May 17, 1850. Captain Hasty, ‘so fine a model of the New-England seaman,’ inspired the passengers with cheerful confidence, and for a few days all went prosperously. But early in June, Captain Hasty died of confluent small-pox. The child Angelino caught it, but recovered, and won all hearts by his playful innocence, loving especially to be walked up and down in the arms of the steward, who had just such a boy at home waiting his arrival. On Thursday, July 15, the Elizabeth was off the Jersey coast: at evening-tide, a breeze sprang up, which by midnight had become a hurricane. About four o’clock next morning, she struck on Fire Island beach, and lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean. Mr Channing’s description of the wreck is a most picturesque narrative, but too long for quotation. Very touching is the sketch of the Ossoli group, remaining on board after nearly all the passengers and crew had perished or escaped to land, which was distant only a few hundred yards — the infant crying passionately, shivering in the wet, till soothed and lullabied HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI to sleep by his mother, a calm expectant of death; and Ossoli tranquillising by counsel and prayer their affrighted handmaid from Italy; all exchanging kindly partings, and sending messages home, if any should survive to be their bearer. Though persons were busy gathering into carts, on the shore, whatever spoil was stranded, no life-boat appeared; and the few remaining on the wreck were now fain to trust themselves to the rioting surf. Margaret would not go alone. With her husband and attendant (Celeste), she was just about to try the planks prepared by four seamen, and the steward had just taken little Nino in his arms, pledged to save him or die, ‘when a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell, carrying with it the deck and all upon it. The steward and Angelino were washed upon the beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty minutes after. Celeste and Ossoli were caught for a moment by the rigging, but the next wave swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once. When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.’ No trace was found of her manuscript on Italy: her love-correspondence with Ossoli was the only relic — the last memorial of that howling hurricane, pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend!

With the exception of certain sections of laboured, writhing wordiness, the feverish restlessness and hectic symptoms of which are but too familiar to persons read in the literature of second-rate transcendentalism, these volumes comprise a large amount of matter that will well repay perusal, and portray a character of no ordinary type — a ‘large-brained woman and large-hearted man.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI July 14, Wednesday: It was after the Hawthornes completed their move from Lenox, Massachusetts to West Newton 110 that THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE appeared. This novel had, in the judgment of Henry James, Margaret Fuller as Zenobia, a major character who commits suicide from unrequited love.

The novel also mentioned her by name in a most disconcerting manner, as a friend of the narrator:

As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she [Priscilla] drew it back, and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a way that had probably grown habitual to her....it forcibly struck me that her air, though not her figure, and the expression of her face, but not its features, had a resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of mine, one of the most gifted women of the age. I cannot describe it. The points, easiest to convey to the reader, were, a certain curve of the shoulders, and a partial closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more penetratingly into my own eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if they had been open at full width. It was a singular anomaly of likeness co-existing with perfect dissimilitude.... “Priscilla,” I inquired, “did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?” “No,” she answered. “Because,” said I, “you reminded me of her, just now, and it happens, strangely enough, that this very letter is from her!” Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed. “I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!” she said, rather petulantly. “How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady, merely by holding her letter in my hand?” “Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it,” I replied. “Nor do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it. It was just a coincidence — nothing more.”

Rufus William Griswold appeared in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE as “Doctor Griswold.”

In this year Nathaniel also authored a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce that would make him deserving of a political plum. In this writing he did not name a cow after Fuller or suggest that she might commit suicide, or vent any of his other pet peeves, but he did something far worse: this writing was utterly condemnatory of the sort of abolitionist anti-slavery activities of which his neighbor Henry Thoreau, among others, had been

110.A claim of copyright has been made for THE SCARLET LETTER in 1962, for FANSHAWE and THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE in 1964, for THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES in 1965, and for THE MARBLE FAUN in 1968, by Ohio State UP. (We presume that those ostensibly appropriative and global copyright claims could actually have covered not more than whatever value was added to the works by that press at that time, such as their reformatting and pagination and suchlike.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI guilty, and yet it was not an honest or sincere piece of writing.

Statesman Chum and Pretty Boy

President Franklin Pierce was in fact a proslavery drunkard whose qualification to be President was that he had been a totally undistinguished general in the war upon Mexico. Horace Mann, Sr. commented in regard to the writing of this campaign biography that if Hawthorne could make out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, “it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote.” Hawthorne handled the hot matter of slavery in this campaign biography by suggesting that, for the present, slavery seemed to be in accord with God’s great plan, and that if we simply let it be, eventually in God’s good time –if indeed it was his will that it should be vanquished– human slavery would “vanish like a dream.”

And, the creative writer insisted, this was not mere puffery, it was what he really believed, those “are my real sentiments.” The opportunistic careerism of Pierce, it seemed, had been founded upon the highest moral principle, that of getting results, that of satisfying one’s lust to leave one’s mark upon the world which one has habited. So conveniently, these cronies had overseen the entire course of human history and had observed globally the fact that:

There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adopted to that end.

Thoreau was continuing his reading in the racist volume about human skulls by Professor Samuel George Morton of the University of Pennsylvania, and making notes in his Indian Notebook #6 and his Fact Book:111 CRANIA AMERICANA

July 14. A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words. such words as “humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails. Is it not more attractive to be a sailor than a, farmer? The farmer’s son is restless and wants to go to sea. Is it not better to plow the ocean than the land? In the former case the plow runs further in its furrow before it turns. You may go round the world before the mast, but not behind the plow. Morton quotes Wafer as saying of some albinos among the Indians of Darien that “they are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale European, as they have not the least tincture 111. Note carefully here, how our guy’s spirit seems incapable of being harmed by the toxic nature of these racist materials! Isn’t that simply marvelous? Can that be described by any other word than “marvelous”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of a blush or sanguine complexion.... Their eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very fine, inclining to a curl, and growing to the length of six or eight inches.... They seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially if it shines towards them yet they see very well by moonlight, from which we call them moon-eyed.” E.C. DRAKE In Drake’s “Collection of Voyages.” Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there “the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion,” but we are, perchance, intellectually and morally albinos, children of Endymion whose parents have walked much by moonlight. Walking much by moonlight, conversing ENDYMION with the moon, makes us, then, albinos. Methinks we should rather represent Endymion in colorless marble, or in the whiteness of marble, than painted of the ruddy color of ordinary youths. Saw to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies dispersing before us, [as] we rode along berrying on the Walden road. Their yellow fleets are in the offing. Do I ever see them in numbers off the road? They are a yellow flower that blossoms generally about this time. Like a mackerel fleet, with their small hulls and great sails. Collected now in compact but gorgeous assembly in the road, like schooners in a harbor, a haven; now suddenly dispersing on our approach and filling the air with yellow snowflakes in their zigzag flight, or as when a fair wind calls those schooners out and disperses them over the broad ocean. How deep or perhaps slaty sky-blue are those blueberries that grow in the shade! It is an unexpected and thrilling discovery to find such ethereal fruits in dense drooping clusters under the fresh green of oak and hickory sprouts. Those that grow in the sun appear to be the same species, only to have lost their bloom and freshness, and hence are darker. [Vide page 283] The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them. Trees have commonly two growths in the year, a spring and a fall growth, the latter sometimes equalling the former, and you can see where the first was checked whether by cold or drouth, and wonder what there was in the summer to produce this check, this blight. So is it with man; most have a spring growth only, and never get over this first check to their youthful hopes; but plants of hardier constitution, or perchance planted in a more genial soil, speedily recover themselves, and, though they bear the scar or knot in remembrance of their disappointment, they push forward again and have a vigorous fall growth which is equivalent to a new spring. These two growths are now visible on the oak sprouts, the second already nearly equalling the first. Murder will out. Morton detects the filthiness of the lower class of the ancient Peruvians by the hair of old mummies being “charged with desiccated vermin, which, though buried for centuries in the sand, could not possibly be mistaken for anything else.”

(Thoreau would use the material about the albino “tribe” of native Americans, which he had obtained from Drake’s “Collection of Voyages” and mentioned in the above journal passage, in his essay “Night and Moonlight.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI August 27, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne completed his campaign bio supporting his buddy General Franklin Pierce’s campaign for President of the United States of America:

Preface

THE AUTHOR of this memoir —being so little of a politician that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party— would not voluntarily have undertaken the work here offered to the public. Neither can he flatter himself that he has been remarkably successful in the performance of his task, viewing it in the light of a political biography, and as a representation of the principles and acts of a public man, intended to operate upon the minds of multitudes, during a presidential canvass. This species of writing is too remote from his customary occupations —and, he may, add, from his tastes— to be very satisfactorily done, without more time and practice than he would be willing to expend for such a purpose. If this little biography have any value, it is probably of another kind — as the narrative of one who knew the individual of whom he treats, at a period of life when character could be read with undoubting accuracy, and who, consequently, in judging of the motives of his subsequent conduct has an advantage over much more competent observers, whose knowledge of the man may have commenced at a later date. Nor can it be considered improper, (at least the author will never feel it so, although some foolish delicacy be sacrificed in the undertaking,) that when a friend, dear to him almost from boyish days, stands up before his country, misrepresented by indiscriminate abuse, on the one hand, and by aimless praise, on the other, be should be sketched by one who has had opportunities of knowing him well, and who is certainly inclined to tell the truth. It is perhaps right to say, that while this biography is so far sanctioned by General Pierce, as it comprises a generally correct narrative of the principal events of his life, the author does not understand him as thereby necessarily endorsing all the sentiments put forth by himself, in the progress of the work. These are the author’s own speculations upon the facts before him, and may, or may not, be in accordance with the ideas of the individual whose life he writes. That individual’s opinions, however, —so far as it is necessary to know them,— may be read, in his straightforward and consistent deeds, with more certainty than those of almost any other man now before the public. The author, while collecting his materials, has received liberal aid from all manner of people —whigs and democrats, congressmen, astute lawyers, grim old generals of militia, and gallant young officers of the Mexican war— most of whom, however, he must needs say, have rather abounded in eulogy, of General Pierce, than in such anecdotical matter as is calculated for a biography. Among the gentlemen to whom be is substantially indebted, he would mention Hon. C.G. Atherton, Hon. S.H. Ayer, Hon. Joseph Hall, Chief Justice Gilchrist, Isaac O. Barnes, Esq., Col. T.J. Whipple, and Mr. C.J. Smith. He has likewise derived much assistance from an able and accurate sketch, that originally appeared in the Boston POST and was drawn up, as he believes, by the junior editor of that journal.

CONCORD, (Mass.) August 27, 1852.

This piece of fraudulent misrepresentation would put its author in line to receive a political plum.

In this writing he did not egregiously name a cow after Margaret Fuller112 or suggest that she might commit suicide, or vent any of his other pet peeves, but he did something far worse: this writing was utterly condemnatory of the sort of abolitionist anti-slavery activities of which his neighbor Henry Thoreau, among 112. Footnotes to history: Hawthorne had named a cow at Brook Farm, who was forever kicking over her milk pail and tyrannizing the other cows, after Fuller — and this has led generations of historians, frankly irritated by a woman’s intrusion into history, to record she had joined that community whereas she had merely offered lessons there. Although it is not known that this fractious cow committed suicide, historians also have speculated that Fuller drowned at age 40 because somehow her negative attitude drove the USS Elizabeth aground in that hurricane — or something like that (you read your own psychohistory as I haven’t the will). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI others, had been guilty, and yet it was not an honest or sincere piece of writing.

Statesman Chum and Pretty Boy

President Pierce was in fact a proslavery drunkard whose qualifications to be President were that A.) he had been a totally undistinguished general in the war upon Mexico, and that B.) although a northern politician, he was a safe one, which is to say, he was proslavery and therefore eminently acceptable to the South (Southern Democrats recognized that to get elected their party needed some semblance of a “balanced” ticket). Horace Mann, Sr. commented in regard to the writing of this campaign biography that if Hawthorne could make out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, “it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote.” Hawthorne handled the hot matter of slavery in this campaign biography by suggesting that, for the present, slavery seemed to be in accord with God’s great plan, and that if we simply let it be, eventually in God’s good time – if indeed it was his will that it should be vanquished– human slavery would “vanish like a dream.”

And, the creative writer insisted, this was not mere puffery, it was what he really believed, those “are my real sentiments.” The opportunistic careerism of Franklin Pierce, it seemed, had been founded upon the highest moral principle, that of getting results, that of satisfying one’s lust to leave one’s mark upon the world which one has habited. So conveniently, these cronies had overseen the entire course of human history and had HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI observed globally the fact that:

There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adopted to that end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1853

Spring: The 150-foot steamboat West Newton out of Fort Snelling on the Mississippi River arrived in what was going to become Nicollet County, Minnesota, farther up the Minnesota River than any such boat had previously ventured.

It carried three companies of soldiers from Forts Snelling and Dodge with their families, carpenters, and supplies for the creation of a containment fort at the edge of the newer, smaller Dakota Indian Reservation. This fort they would name Fort Ridgely in memory of three men named Ridgely who had died during the war upon Mexico, although by the Woodland Dakotas that it contained on this reservation it would be known as “The Soldiers’ House.”

It was probably during this spring that Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal about Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

It is a bitter satire on our social order, just at present, the number of bad cases. Margaret Fuller having attained the highest & broadest culture that any American woman has possessed, came home with an Italian gentleman whom she had married, & their infant son, & perished by shipwreck on the rocks of Fire Island, off New York; and her friends said, “Well, on the whole, it was not so lamentable, & perhaps it was the best thing that could happen to her. For, had she lived, what could she have done? How could she have supported herself, her husband, & child?” And, most persons, hearing this, acquiesced in this view that, after the education had gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine woman to, is to drown her to save her board. Well, the like or the stronger plight is that of Mr Alcott, the most refined & the most advanced soul we have had in New England, who makes all other souls appear slow & cheap & mechanical; a man of such a courtesy & greatness, that (in conversation) all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp & fighting for victory, & angry — he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse — yet because he cannot earn money by his pen or his talk, or by schoolkeeping or bookkeeping or editing or any kind of meanness — nay, for this very cause, that he is ahead of his contemporaries — is higher than they, & keeps himself out of the shop-condescensions & smug arts which they stoop to, or, unhappily, need not stoop to, but find themselves, as it were, born to — therefore, it is the unanimous opinion of New England judges that this man must die; we shall all hear of his death with pleasure, & feel relieved that his board & clothes also are saved! We do not adjudge him to hemlock, or to garrotting — we are much too hypocritical & cowardly for that; but we not less surely doom him, by refusing to protest against this doom, or combine to save him, & to set him on employments fit for him & salutary to the state, or to the Senate of fine Souls, which is the heart of the state. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 3, Tuesday: Moncure Daniel Conway had kept a letter of introduction to Waldo Emerson from the Reverend John G. Palfrey tucked away in a drawer for several weeks, for he was fearful that the person would not be so impressive as the essays. On this morning, very early, he took the Fitchburg train out past Walden Pond to Concord.

While working up his courage he had breakfast at an inn, and walked over to the Old Manse and meditated for a while the Old North Bridge. Then, having exhausted his possibilities, he walked out the Lexington road to the Emerson home and presented his credentials. “Eloquent, wonderful, grand and simple, his speech flowed constantly, bearing the wealth of ages on it.” Emerson gave his visitor a copy of Margaret Fuller’s WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY bearing her autograph. Then the two of them walked over to visit with Henry Thoreau, who asked him what he was studying at the Harvard Divinity School. When Conway indicated that he was studying “The Scriptures,” Thoreau affected naiveté and inquired “The Hindu, Arabic or Jewish?”113 May 3, 1853. is a date under which I wrote a couplet from Emerson’s “Woodnotes,”—

’Twas one of the charmèd days When the genius of God doth flow.

—for on that day I first met Emerson. Dr. Palfrey, on finding in our conversations that it was Emerson who had touched me in my sleep in Virginia, advised me to visit him. I felt shy about invading the “spot that is sacred to thought and God.” but he urged me to go and gave me a letter to Emerson. I knew too well the importance of a morning to go straight to Emerson’s house, and inquired the way to the Old Manse. It was a fortunate excursion. The man I most wished to meet was Emerson; the man I most wished to see was Hawthorne. He no longer resided at the Old Manse, but as I was gazing from the road down the archway of ash-trees at the house whose “mosses” his genius had made spiritual moss-roses, out stepped the magician himself. It has 113. How different Thoreau’s little jest was from what is known as “the Belfast joke”:

A guy walking through a dark alley in Belfast feels something against his back. “Protestant or Catholic?” he hears. “Actually I’m a Quaker,” the guy blurts out. Pause — then “Protestant Quaker or Catholic Quaker?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI been a conceit of mine that I had never seen a portrait of Hawthorne, but recognized him as one I had seen in dreams he had evoked. At any rate, I knew it was my Prospero. Who else could have those soft-flashing unsearchable eyes, that beauté du diable at middle age? He did not observe me, and as I slowly followed him towards the village, doubts were awakened by the elegance and even smartness of his dress. But I did not reflect that Prospero had left his isle, temporarily buried his book, and was passing from his masque to his masquerade as consul at Liverpool and man of the world. Hawthorne was making calls before his departure for Europe. I felt so timid about calling on Emerson –it appeared such a one-sided affair– that I once turned my steps toward the railway station. But soon after twelve I knocked at Emerson’s door, and sent in Dr. Palfrey’s letter, with a request that I might call on him during the afternoon. The children came to say that their father was out, but would return to dinner at one, and their mother wished me to remain. The three children entertained me pleasantly, mainly in the bower that Alcott had built in the front garden. I was presently sent for. Emerson met me at the front door, welcome beaming in his eyes, and took me into his library. He remembered receiving a letter from me two or three years before. On learning that I was at the Divinity School and had come to Concord simply to see him, he called from his library door, “Queeny!” Mrs. Emerson came, and I was invited to remain some days. I had, however, to return to college that evening, and though I begged that his day should not be long interfered with, he insisted on my passing the afternoon with him. When we were alone, Emerson inquired about the experiences that had led me away from my Methodism, and about my friendships. “The gods,” he said, “generally provide the young thinker with friends.” When I told him how deeply words of his, met by chance in an English magazine, had moved me while I was a law student in Virginia, he said, “When the mind has reached a certain stage it may be sometimes crystallized by a slight touch.” I had so little realized their import, I told him that they only resulted in leading me to leave the law for the Methodist ministry. It had been among the Hicksite Quakers that I found sympathetic friends, after entering on the path of inquiry. He then began to talk about the Quakers and their inner light. He had formed a near friendship with Mary Rotch of New Bedford. “Mary Rotch told us that her little girl one day asked if she might do something. She replied, ‘What does the voice in thee say?’ The child went off, and after a time returned to say ‘Mother, the little voice says, no.’ That,” said Emerson, “starts the tears to one’s eyes.” He especially respected the Quaker faith that every “scripture” must be held subject to the reader’s inner light. “I am accustomed to find errors in writings of the great men, and it is an impertinence to demand that I shall recognize none in some particular volume.” The children presently came in, — Ellen, Edward, and Edith. They were all pretty, and came up to their father with their several reports on the incidents of the morning. Edith had some story to tell of a trouble among one or two rough families in Concord. A man had hinted that a woman next door had stolen something, and she had struck him in the leg with a corkscrew. Emerson summed this up by saying, “He insinuated that she was a rogue, and she insinuated the corkscrew in his leg.” Ellen perceived the joke. and I many times HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI remarked the quickness with which, while not yet out of girlhood, she appreciated every word of her father. The dinner was early; the children were with us, and the talk was the most homelike and merry that I had known for a long time. When the children were gone Mrs. Emerson told me that they had been christened. “Husband was not willing the children should be christened in the formal way, but said he would offer no objection when I could find a minister as pure and good as the children. That was reasonable, and we waited some time; but when William Henry Channing came on a visit to us, we agreed that he was good enough to christen our children.” While Emerson was preparing for the walk, I looked about the library. Over the mantle hung a large copy of Michael Angelo’s “Parcæ;” there were two statuettes of Goethe, of whom also there was an engraved portrait on the wall. Afterwards Emerson showed me a collection of portraits — Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, and Swedenborg. The furniture of the room was rather antique and simple. There were four long shelves completely occupied, he said, by his MSS., of which there must have been enough to furnish a score of printed volumes. Our walk was around Walden Pond, on both sides of which Emerson owned land. Our conversation related to the religious ferment of the time. He said that the Unitarian churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best men in those coming from orthodox churches. That was a symptom. Those from other churches, having gone through experiences and reached personal convictions strong enough to break with their past. would of course have some enthusiasm for their new faith. But the Unitarians might take note of that intimation that individual growth and experience are essential for the religious teacher. I mentioned Theodore Parker. and he said, “It is a comfort to remember that there is one sane voice amid the religious and political affairs of the country.” I said that I could not understand how I could have tolerated those dogmas of inherited depravity, blood atonement. eternal damnation for Adam’s sin, and the rest. He said, “I cannot feel interested in Christianity; it seems deplorable that there should be a tendency to creeds that would take men back to the chimpanzee.” He smiled at the importance ascribed to academic terms. “I have very good grounds for being Unitarian and Trinitarian too: I need not nibble at one loaf forever, but eat it and go on to earn another.” He said that while he could not personally attend any church, he held a pew in the Unitarian church for his wife and children who desired it, and indeed would in any case support the minister, because it is well “to have a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.” As we were walking through the woods he remarked that the voices of some fishermen out on the water, talking about their affairs, were intoned by the distance and the water into music; and that the curves which their oars made, marked under the sunlight in silver, made a succession of beautiful bows. This may have started a train of thought related to the abhorrence I had expressed of the old dogmas, to which I had added something about the Methodist repugnance with which I had witnessed in Maryland some Catholic ceremonies. “Yet,” he said, “they possess beauty in the distance. When one sees them on the stage, –processions of priests in their vestments chanting their hymns at the opera,– HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI they are in their place, and offend no sentiment.” I mentioned a task set me at the Divinity School, to write an essay on Eschatology, and Emerson said, “An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel.” Again presently: “The old artist said, Pingo in eternitatem; this eternitatem for which I paint is not in past or future, but is the height of every living hour.” When we were in a byway among the bushes, Emerson suddenly stopped and exclaimed, “Ah! there is one of the gods of the wood!” I looked and saw nothing; then turned to him and followed his glance. but still beheld nothing unusual. He was looking along the path before us through a thicket. “Where?” I asked. “Did you see it?” he said, now moving on. “No, I saw nothing — what was it? “No matter,” said he gently. I repeated my question, but he still said smilingly, “Never mind, if you did not see it.” I was a little piqued, but said no more, and very soon was listening to talk that made my Eschatology seem ridiculous. Perhaps the sylvan god I had missed was a pretty snake, a squirrel or other little note in the symphony of nature. My instruction in the supremacy of the present hour began not so much in Emerson’s words as in himself. Standing beside the ruin of the shanty Thoreau built with his own hands. and lived in for a year at a cost of twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents, Emerson appeared an incarnation of the wondrous day he was giving me. My enthusiasm for Margaret Fuller Ossoli, excited by her “Memoirs,” led Emerson in parting to give me a copy of her WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, — an English edition she had sent him from London, with her initials in it. At my request he added his own name and the date. That evening I sat in my room in Divinity Hall (No. 34) as one enriched, and wrote: “May 3. The most memorable day of my life: spent with Ralph Waldo Emerson!” Two days later I attended a great dinner given in Boston to Senator Hale of New Hampshire. I went over with Dr. Palfrey, who was chairman. Emerson was there, but when Palfrey called for a speech from him he had departed. What was my chagrin, on my return to the Divinity School, to find that Emerson had been there to call upon me! Being homeless in the North, my summer vacation (1853) was passed at Concord. The Emersons found for me a very pleasant abode at “Hillside,” on Ponkatasset [Ponkawtasset] Hill, about a mile out of the village, where Ellery Channing once lived, and where he wrote his poem on New England. Two sisters, the Misses Hunt, educated ladies, received me into this pleasant cottage, where I was the only boarder. These ladies were cousins of Miss Martha Hunt, whose suicide in Concord River and the recovery of her body are described in Hawthorne’s BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. They were troubled because G. W. Curtis, in his HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS, had suggested that Martha’s suicide was due to the contrast between her transcendental ideals and the coarseness of her home. They described the family of their cousin as educated people. One of these sisters walked with me to the river and pointed out all the places connected with the tragedy, and some years later another cousin drowned herself there. Emerson introduced me to his friends. First of all he took me to Henry Thoreau, who lived in the village with his parents and his sister. The kindly and silent pencil-maker, his father, John Thoreau, was French in appearance, and Henry resembled him physically; but neither parent impressed me as possessing mental qualities that could account for such a rare spirit as Henry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI He was thirty-six when I met him. He received me pleasantly, and asked what we were studying at Cambridge. I answered, “The Scriptures.” “Which?” he asked. Emerson said, “You will find our Thoreau a sad pagan.” Thoreau had long been a reverent reader of Oriental scriptures, and showed me his bibles, translated from various languages into French and English. He invited me to come next day for a walk, but in the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a coloured fugitive from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive, who recognized me as one be had seen. He was alarmed, but his fears passed into delight when after talking with him about our county I certified his genuineness. I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. That whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and probably there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got off to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau. He was a unique man every way. He was short of stature, well built; every movement was full of courage and repose; his eyes were very large, and bright, as if caught from the sky. “His nose is like the prow of a ship,” said Emerson one day. He had the look of the huntsman of Emerson’s quatrain: —

He took the colour of his vest From rabbit’s coat and grouse’s breast; For as the wild kinds lurk and hide, So walks the huntsman unespied.

The cruellest weapons, however, which this huntsman took with him were lenses and an old book in which to press plants. He was not talkative, but his occasional monologues were extraordinary. I remember being surprised at every step with revelations of laws and significant attributes in common things — as a relation between different kinds of grass and the geological characters beneath them, the variety and grouping of pine-needles and the effect of these differences on the sounds they yield when struck by the wind, and the varieties of taste represented by grasses and common herbs when applied to the tongue. He offered me a peculiar grass to chew for an instant, laying, “It is a little sharp, but an experience.” Deep in the woods his face shone with a new light. He had a mental calendar of the flora of the neighbourhood, and would go some distance around to visit some floral friend. We were too early for the hibiscus, a rare flower in New England, which I desired to see. He pointed out the spot near the river where alone it could be found, and said it would open about the following Monday and not stay long. I went on Tuesday or Wednesday, but was too late — the petals were scattered on the ground. Thoreau ate no meat; he told me his only reason was a feeling of the filthiness of f1esh-eating. A bear huntsman he thought was entitled to his steak. He had never attempted to make any general principle on the subject, and later in life ate meat in order not to cause inconvenience to the family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI On our first walk I told him the delight with which I read his book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” He said that the whole edition remained on the shelf of his publisher, who wished to get rid of them. If he could not succeed in giving them away they would probably be sold as old paper. I got from him valuable hints about reading. He had studied carefully the old English Chronicles, and Chaucer, Froissart, Spenser, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He recognized kindred spirits in George Herbert, Cowley, and Quarles, considering the latter a poet but not an artist. He explored the old books of voyages -Drake, Purchas, and others, who assisted him in his circumnavigation of Concord. The Oriental books were his daily bread; the Greeks (especially Æschylus, whose “Prometheus” and “The Seven against Thebes” he translated finely) were his luxuries. He was an exact Greek scholar. Of modems he praised Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, to a less extent, Carlyle and Goethe. He admired Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” though he thought the author bigoted, but in the “Seven Lamps of Architecture” he found with the good stuff “too much about art for me and the Hottentots. Our house is yet a hut.” He enjoyed William Gilpin’s “Hints on Landscape Gardening: Tour of the River Wye.” He had read with care the works of Franklin. He had as a touchstone for authors their degree of ability to deal with supersensual facts and feelings with scientific precision. What he admired in Emerson was that he discerned the phenomena of thought and functions of every idea as if they were antennæ or stamina. It was a quiet joke in Concord that Thoreau resembled Emerson in expression, and in tones of voice. He had grown up from boyhood under Emerson’s influence, had listened to his lectures and his conversations, and little by little had grown this resemblance. It was the more interesting because so superficial and unconscious. Thoreau was an imitator of no mortal; but Emerson had long been a part of the very atmosphere of Concord, and it was as if this element had deposited on Thoreau a mystical moss. During that halcyon summer I read the Oriental books in Emerson’s library, for he not only advised me in my studies but insisted on lending me books. To my hesitation about taking even to Ponkatasset the precious volumes, he said, “What are they for?” In my dainty little room whose window opened on a beautiful landscape with the Musketaquit wandering through it to the Merrimack, or perhaps seated in the vine-covered veranda, I read Wilkins’s “Bhagavat Geeta,” which thenceforth became part of my canon. Close indeed to my heart came the narrative of the charioteer (the god Krishna in disguise) driving Arjoona to the field, where the youth sees that his struggle is to be with his parents, teachers, early companions. Emerson also introduced me to the Persian “Desatir.” In lending me this he said that he regarded the ancient Persian scriptures as more intellectual than the sacred writings of other races. I found delight in these litanies uttered in the beginning of our era, amid whose exaltations there was always the happy beam of reason. “Thy knowledge is a ray of he knowledge of God.” “0 my Prophet ever near me, I have given thee an exalted angel named Intelligence.” “How can we know a prophet? By his giving you information regarding your own heart.” Emerson also in that summer introduced me to Saadi of Schiraz, who has been to me as an intimate friend through life’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI pilgrimage. For the “Rose Garden” (Gulistan) I had been prepared by my garden in Frederick Circuit, my “Seclusaval:” Saadi was its interpreter, and restored it to me. For I could not enter deeply into wild nature, but dearly loved a garden. One day when I was walking with Emerson in his garden, he stopped near a favourite plum and said, “This is when ripe a fruit of paradise.” He then discovered one that was ripe and managed to pluck it for me. How simply was this man fulfilling all my youthful dreams I He personally loved Saadi, and later edited the “Gulistan.” One day he told me he bad found somewhere a story about him. Saadi was travelling on foot towards Damascus, alone and weary. Presently he overtook a boy travelling the same way, and asked him to point out the road. The boy offered to guide him some distance, and in the course of conversation Saadi spoke of having come from Persia and from Schiraz. “Schiraz!” exclaimed the boy, “then perhaps you can tell me something of Sheik 8aadi of Sohiraz.” The traveller said, “I am Saadi.” Instantly the boy knelt and with tears kissed the hem of his skirt, and after that could not be parted from Saadi, but guided and served him during his stay in Damascus. (And lo, here I am with my grey hairs seeing my own Saadi as he told me the little tale that filled my eyes, all unconscious that my soul was that of the Damascus boy and was kissing the hem of his garment!) I made the acquaintance of several elderly persons in Concord who told me incidents related by their grandparents concerning the Concord fight of April 19, 1775, but I was too much interested in the heroes of 1858 to care much for those of the old Revolution. One day Emerson pointed out to me across the street the venerable Bon. Samuel Hoar and his daughter Elizabeth, and told me the story of their visit to Charleston, S.C. (1844), the eminent lawyer being commissioned by his State to plead for the release of Massachusetts seamen seized from ships and imprisoned there because of their colour. Amid threats of violence the lawyer and his daughter were driven out of Charleston unheard. I had not known this, and thenceforth bowed low whenever I passed the old lawyer. Without any historic halo the Hon. Samuel Hoar would have arrested the attention of a stranger, not only by his very tall thin form and the small face — blond and beardless — that looked as if come out of Bellini’s canvas, but also by his dreamy look and movement. He was seventy- five, but no indications of age explained that absorbed look. Probably it was this as well as the face that suggested to Emerson a resemblance to Dante. U He is a saint,” said Emerson as the old gentleman passed one day; “he no longer dwells with us· down on earth.n There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the old man and his Bon Judge Rockwood: Hoar, — and I should think also Senator Hoar, so far as appearance went, for the latter I knew only by seeing him occasionally. The “Jedge,” as Lowell calls him in “The Biglow Papers,” made an admirable attorney-general of the United States, but his force was almost formidable in little Concord. One felt in meeting him that the glasses on those bright eyes were microscopic, and that he was under impending cross-examination. He was rationalistic and a “free-soiler,” though his antislavery record did not satisfy abolitionists.114 The judge was unconscious of the 114. A severe criticism on Judge Hoar by Wendell Phillips was resented even by Emerson. The judge was asked by Sanborn, I believe, whether he was going to the funeral of Wendell Phillips, and replied, “No, but I approve of it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI satirical accent in his humour. He was personally devoted to Emerson, who, however, rather dreaded him, as he told me half- bumourous, on account of his tendencies to argumentative and remorselessly logical talk. The judge, however, was very amiable in his family and especially with his sister Elizabeth. This lady, who resembled the father more than her brothers did, was most lovely and intellectual. The death of Emerson’s brilliant brother Charles, to whom Miss Elizabeth was betrothed, was the pathetic legend of Concord, and the reverential affection of Emerson for her represented a sentiment of the community. But the lady, in a sense widowed, was interested and active in all the culture and affairs of Concord; her sorrows had turned to sunshine for those around her. Mrs. Ripley, the widow of the Rev. Samuel Ripley, a kinsman of Emerson, occupied the famous “Old Manse.” An admirable sketch of her life was written by Elizabeth Hoar. She had a wide reputation for learning. I had heard at Cambridge that when students were rusticated they used to board at Concord in order to be coached by her. She was a fine botanist. A legend ran that Professor Gray called on her and found her instructing a student in differential calculus, correcting the Greek translation of another, and at the same time shelling peas, and rocking her grandchild’s cradle with her foot. But never was lady more simple and unostentatious. In her sixty-third year she was handsome, and her intelligent interest extended from her fruit- trees and poultry to the profoundest problems of her time. Thus the Old Manse had for me precious “mosses” which Hawthorne had not gathered. Her daughters Phœbe and Sophia (afterwards wife of Professor Thayer of Cambridge) always met me with a friendliness gratefully remembered. No doubt they and other ladies in Concord bore in mind that I was far away from my relatives. I found in Mrs. Ripley an intelligent sympathizer with my advancing religions ideas. She was a Theist through recognition of a supreme Reason intimated in the facts of individual reason. She said, “I cannot believe in miracles, because I believe in God.” The subject of spirit manifestations was considered by her worthy of study only as a contemporary illustration of the fallaciousness of human testimony wherever emotions or passions are involved. “People believe what they’ve a mind to,” she said. The well-informed rationalism of Mrs. Ripley, and of her nearest friend Elizabeth Hoar, led me to suppose that the ideas of Emerson were universal in Concord. In this, however, I presently discovered my mistake. One day when I was with Emerson and his wife he referred to Goethe, and I perceived that the great German was a sort of bogy to her. She quoted verbatim two sentences from a letter written to her by her husband before their marriage in which he expressed misgivings about Goethe, beneath whose fine utterances be had found “no faith.” Emerson was silent, and his wife went on in a way almost pathetic to describe her need of faith. When after the talk at dinner I was walking with Emerson, he said that Goethe had written some things — “Elective Affinities,” for instance — which could be really read only by minds which had undergone individual training. He was the only great writer who had tamed upon the moral conventions and demanded by what right they claimed to control his life. But people with eyes could not omit Goethe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Mr. William Emerson, an eminent lawyer of New York, occasionally visited his younger brother in Concord. I remember him as an interesting gentleman, and was surprised to find any lawyer with his unworldly and even poetic look. In a letter from Germany of William Emerson shown me by his son, Dr. Emerson of New York, he speaks of his acquaintance with Goethe. William was studying divinity, but found that he had not even Socinian faith enough to preach, and was in distress about the disappointment to his parents. Goethe advised him not to disappoint them, but go on with his ministry. I think the Goethean cult at Cambridge and Concord had cooled. And by the way there was a droll relic of it in the Emerson household; one of the children — Edith I think — had the fancy to name her handsome cat “Goethe.” Emerson affected to take it seriously, and once when the cat was in the library and scratched itself, he opened the door and politely said, “Goethe, you must retire; I don’t like your manners.” I managed to make friends with the Concord children. Never had a small town a more charming circle of lovely children. The children of Emerson, of Judge Rockwood Hoar, of the Loring and Barrett families, mostly girls between ten and twelve years, were all pretty and intelligent, and as it was vacation time they were prepared for walks, picnics, boating, etc. Other of their elders beside myself found delight in the society of these young people, especially Thoreau. He used to take us out on the river in his boat, and by his scientific talk guide us into the water-lilies’ fairyland. He showed us his miracle of putting his hand into the water and bringing up a fish.115 I remember Ellen Emerson asking her father, “Whom shall we invite to the picnic?” — his answer being, “All children from six years to sixty.” Then there were huckleberrying parties. These were under the guidance of Thoreau, because he alone knew the precise locality of every variety of the berry. I recall an occasion when little Edward Emerson, carrying a basket of fine huckleberries, had a fall and spilt them all. Great was his distress, and our offers of berries could not console him for the loss of those gathered by himself. But Thoreau came, put his arm around the troubled child, and explained to him that if the crop of huckleberries was to continue it was necessary that some should be scattered. Nature had provided that little boys should now and then stumble and sow the berries. We shall have a grand lot of bushes and berries in this spot, and we shall owe them to you. Edward began to smile. Not far from “Hillside” resided a lonely old man, with whom I exchanged greetings. Bereft of wife and children, he found consolation in “spiritualism.” The Hunt ladies thought that he was suffering his cottage and garden to fan gradually into ruin because of his absorption in another world, and giving his money to a medium for bringing him communications from his wife and children. He was eager to convince me, and said that if I would visit Mrs. Freeman in Boston, and did not find something worth examining in this matter, he would not go there again. Whereupon I went off to Boston and Mrs. Freeman. Ushered into the mysterious presence, I found a substantial dark-eyed sibyl seated on a little throne. I was placed in a chair opposite by her husband, who, having made passes between 115. The bream. This fish has the peculiarity of defending its spawn. Thoreau would find some spot where he could see the spawn, then place his hand beneath it. The bream placed itself over its spawn, and his fingers closed around it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI us, left the room. Her eyes were closed, and she drew long breaths. Presently she cried, “Where shall I go with you: to the spirit world or to some place on earth?” I said, “Tell me about my home,” for I knew that no one in Boston could know anything of my home in Falmouth or my personal affairs. This woman then went on to describe in a vague way my father’s house, a description that would apply to many brick houses, She then mentioned several persons in the house and incidents I was sure were not true. I was 80 disgusted at the whole affair that I cut short the interview, and went back triumphantly to my old friend at Concord. The old man went to see the medium, and she said that she found me so sceptical that the rapport was imperfect. The old man, however, fulfilled his contract. Mrs. Freeman had said, “I see a lady who is a good deal worried about somebody named John.” The selection of a name so common rather amused me; but I afterwards had to show my neighbour a letter from my mother saying that she was troubled by the betrothal of a relative named John.116 From Agassiz I derived great benefit. When he rose before us in his class, a rosy flush on his face indicated his delight in communicating his knowledge. His shapely form, eager movements (“his body thought”), large soft eyes, easy unconscious gestures, and sonorous English, with just enough foreign accent to add piquancy, together made Agassiz the perfect lecturer. He was skillful too as a draughtsman, and often while speaking made a few marks on the blackboard which conveyed a complete impression of the thing elucidated. In the warmer months Agassiz used to take his class out into the country, there being no difficulty of finding in the neighbourhood places of scientific interest. Several times we visited Nahant, and I can never forget the charm of our sitting there OD the rocks while Agassiz pointed out on them the autographs of the glaciers recording their ancient itinerary. Or, standing on the top of some boulder, he would trace with his finger in the rocks far out in the sea the ancient outlines of the land; or with some small fossil in his hand, or peculiar shell, he would track the progress of organic development. On one ramble at Nahant Agassiz devoted himself to the sea- serpent, which had twice been reported as seen off that coast. One of our class had unintentionally suggested the subject by mentioning the recent apparition, and smiling at it as a sailor’s yarn. But Agassiz in his always good-natured way said that although there were no doubt exaggerations, it was not quite safe to ridicule the story. He then proceeded to give a summary of all the narratives about the alleged monster, with references to time and place that amazed us, as the subject was of casual suggestion. He described huge snakelike saurians of which some may have been amphibious or aquatic, and whose extinction might not be complete. One day in his lecture-room Agassiz displayed some new fossils, mainly of saurians, which had just been added to his collection. They gave him a text for a general review of the morphological chain of reptilian life. As he proceeded, darting off at times to his blackboard, and comparing the extinct form with 116. In later life Madame Renan, after the decease of her husband, told me that some intelligent ladies of their acquaintance once came to him with marvellous narratives of some incidents in séances in Paris. When he intimated incredulity one of the ladies said, “But your friend Madame B. told me that she saw it herself.” “Ah,” said Renan, “so few people know how to see!” Nearly these same words were said to me by Mrs. Sarah Ripley of the Old Manse in Concord. Emerson had little patience with “spiritualism,” which he called “the rat-hole revelation.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI contemporary fauna, he became more and more animated, his face reddening with excitement, until at last he said: “Gentlemen, I ask you to forgive me if to-day I end my lecture at this point, although the hour is not out. I assure you that while I have been describing these extinct creatures they have taken on a sort of life; they have been crawling and darting about me, I have heard their screaming and hissing, and am really exhausted. I regret it, gentlemen, but I trust that you will excuse me.” Our admiration for the great teacher was such as to break through all rules, and we gave him a hearty cheer. He bowed low to us and quickly disappeared. The determined repudiation by Agassiz of the discovery of Darwin caused something like dismay in scientific circles throughout Europe as well as in America. Concerning this I have some memories that may interest men of science. When I belonged to the class of Agassiz (1853-54), he repeatedly referred to the hypothesis of continuous development of species in a way which has suggested to me a possibility that he may have had some private information of what was to come from Charles Darwin. In his Introduction (1869) Darwin speaks of having submitted a sketch of his work to Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, — “the latter having seen my sketch of 1844.” Either of these, or Darwin himself, might have consulted Agassiz. Most of us knew about such a theory only through the popular “Vestiges of Creation,” to which he paid little attention. He seemed to have been excit.ed by some German, — perhaps Schopenhauer, in whose works the idea of self-evolution in organic nature is potential, — of whom he spoke with a flush of anger when adding, “He says himself that he is an atheist.” At any rate, during 1854 especially his mind was much occupied with the subject. I also remember well that during this time he often dwelt upon what he called the “ideal connection” between the different forms of life, describing with drawings the embryonic changes; in that progress no unbridged chasm after the dawn of organic life. At the end of every week a portion of the afternoon was given for our putting questions to Agassiz, the occasion often giving rise to earnest discussion. These repeatedly raised the theory of development in “The Vestiges of Creation.” Agassiz frequently referred to the spiritual evolution with which Emerson was particularly associated. But just after Darwin’s discovery had appeared, I happened to be dining at the Saturday Club in Boston, when something like an encounter between these two friends occurred. Agassiz was seated at the head of the table, Emerson being on his right. It was near the end of the dinner, and around the long table those present were paired off in conversation; but being next to Emerson I could enjoy the conversation he held with Agassiz. After a time the professor made some little fling at the new theory. Emerson said smilingly that on reading it he had at once expressed satisfaction at confirmation of what he (Agassiz) had long been telling us. All of those beautiful harmonies of form with form throughout nature which he had so finely divined were now proved to be genuine relationship. “Yes,” said Agassiz eagerly, “ideal relationship, connected thoughts of a Being acting with an intelligent purpose.” Emerson, to whom the visible universe was all a manifestation of things ideal, said that the physical selection appeared to him a counterpart of the ideal development. Whereupon Agassiz exclaimed, “There I cannot agree with you,” and changed the HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI subject. There was at Concord a course of lectures every year, one of which was given by Agassiz. His coming was an important event. He was always a guest of the Emer80ns, where the literary people of the village were able to meet him. On one such occasion I remember listening to a curious conversation between Agassiz and A. Bronson Alcott, — who lived and moved in a waking dream. After delighting Agassiz by repudiating the theory of the development of man from animals, he filled the professor with dismay by equally decrying the notion that God could ever have created ferocious and poisonous beasts. When Agassiz asked who could have created them, Alcott said they were the various forms of human sin. Man was the first being created. And the horrible creatures were originated by his lusts and animalisms. When Agassiz, bewildered, urged that geology proved that the animals existed before man, Alcott suggested that man might have originated them before his appearance in his present form. Agassiz having given a signal of distress, Emerson came to the rescue with some reconciling discourse on the development of life and thought, with which the professor had to be content, although there was a soupçon of Evolutionism in every word our host uttered. There was a good deal of suspicion in America that the refusal of Agassiz to accept Darwin’s discovery was due to the influence of religious leaders in Boston, and particularly to that of his father-in-law, Thomas Cary, who had so freely devoted his wealth to the professor’s researches. Some long intimacy with those families convinced me that there was no such influence exerted by the excellent Mr. Cary, but that it was the old Swiss pastor, his father, surviving in him. He had, indeed, departed far from the paternal creed; he repudiated all miracles at a time when Mr. Cary and other Unitarians upheld them tenaciously. He threw a bomb into the missionary camp by his assertion of racial diversity of origin. His utterances against Darwinism were evidently deistic, and had nothing whatever to do with any personal interest, except that he had a horror of being called an atheist. I say “deistic,” for “theistic” denotes a more spiritual conception of deity than I can associate with Agassiz. He had adopted Humboldt’s “Cosmos” idea, attached a dynamic deity to it, but did not appear to have any mystical or even reverential sentiment about nature, and pointed out humourously what he called nature’s “jokes.” I was sometimes invited to his house. He had by his first wife two beautiful daughters and the son (Alexander), now eminent. His wife (née Cary) and her sisters were ladies of finest culture and ability. Agassiz was a perfect character in his home life, and neighbourly also. Occasionally he would get together the young girls of Cambridge and guide them among the fossils, telling them the wonders of the primeval world. Longfellow told me that Agassiz was entreating him to write a poem on the primeval world. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1854

August 13, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newburyport.117

NEWBURYPORT, Aug 13, 1854.

Dear Sir: Let me thank you heartily for your paper on the present condition of Massachusetts, read at Framingham and printed in The Liberator. As a literary statement of the truth, which every day is making more manifest, it surpasses everything else (so I think), which the terrible week in Boston has called out. I need hardly add my thanks for “Walden,” which I have been awaiting for so many years. Through Mr. Field's kindness, I have read a great deal of it in sheets:— I have just secured two copies, one for myself, and one for a young girl here, who seems to me to have the most remarkable literary talent since Margaret Fuller, —and to whom your first book has been among the scriptures, ever since I gave her that.

FRAMINGHAM MA TIMELINE OF WALDEN

117. No MS — printed copy from Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s RECOLLECTIONS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1855

Within a few years of becoming a feminist Caroline H. Dall was co-editing the Una, the first periodical devoted to woman’s rights, with Paulina Wright Davis. (Only Margaret Fuller’s death had prevented Davis from seeking to make Fuller the president of the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Worcester in 1850.) FEMINISM

October: The North American Review, Volume 81, Issue 169, reviewed William Howitt’s LAND, LABOUR, AND GOLD; OR TWO YEARS IN VICTORIA WITH VISITS TO SYDNEY AND VAN DIEMAN’S LAND (Boston: Ticknor & Fields): We are sorry that we have not room for an extended analysis of this book, undoubtedly the most trustworthy sketch of Australian life that has yet appeared. One of the author’s leading purposes is to exhibit the needs of the Australian colonies, the inefficiency of their present political administration, and the expediency of granting them constitutions, nuder which they may administer their own affairs, conduct the plans of internal improvement essential to the development of their resources, and hold under due restraint as heterogeneous a population as that of Noah’s Ark. The work is in the form of letters, and evidently is a republication of letters actually written; for its only fault is the very repetitiousness and redundancy which would result from one’s forgetting in a subsequent what he had written in a previous epistle. With this exception, the author fully sustains, and sometimes perhaps exceeds, his previous reputation as a descriptive writer. The North American Review also reviewed in this issue a new edition of Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, AND KINDRED PAPERS RELATING TO THE SPHERE, CONDITION, AND DUTIES OF WOMAN, issued as Part I of an extended volume AT HOME AND ABROAD, OR THINGS AND THOUGHTS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE as edited by her little brother the Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller, with an introduction by Horace Greeley (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co.): No true word on the themes treated of in this volume can fail to awaken a deep interest. It comes to every home with its voice of counsel, perhaps of warning. The treatise which occupies the first half of the volume whose title is given above, was published by Margaret Fuller, shortly before her departure for Europe, and at that time was widely read and much valued by thoughtful persons, many of whom did not agree with its solution of one of the great problems of the age, but sympathized with its noble and pure spirit, and admired its unmistakable genius. The first edition, we learn, was soon exhausted, but the author’s absence from the country prevented another edition at that time, and her tragical death by shipwreck, which is so well remembered by the public, still further postponed its republication. We are now indebted to her brother, Rev. Arthur B. Fuller, for a new edition, carefully prepared, and enriched by papers, previously unpublished, on the same general theme. Every page is loaded, we had almost said overloaded, with thought, and the subject is one which the writer had so near her heart that it commanded her best powers and warmest sympathies, and cannot fail to instruct and interest the reader, even when HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI there is not perfect agreement with the views advanced. There was much in the social position of Margaret Fuller to qualify her to speak wisely on this subject. Her Memoirs show her to have been surrounded by a very large circle of female friends, married and unmarried, with whom she occupied the most confidential relations. She had, too, a quick sympathy and a generous heart, which made her feel as her own the experience of others. The general aim of the book is to elevate the standard of female excellence and usefulness, and to point out the means by which these may be promoted and their obstacles removed. While the writer clearly distinguishes the diversity of the sphere and characteristics of woman from those of the other sex, she would open for her every mode of activity for which she finds herself adapted, widening much her present range of avocations. The gross and selfish sentiment, seldom avowed in theory, but too often exhibited in practice, that woman is made solely for the advantage and service of man, is indignantly and justly rebuked, and woman is exhorted to live first for God, ever remembering herself to be an immortal spirit, travelling with man on the same pilgrimage to eternity, and preparing for that state where “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels.” The marriage relation, like every other, is one of those positions which, to be filled worthily, requires one to be ever noble and holy, and should never be lightly viewed; but its duties are not all that requires the earnest activity of woman, nor can even these be fulfilled without culture of both mind and heart. Viewing marriage and the relation of mother growing out of it as of the most sacred consequence, the writer impresses us with the importance of preparing for and fulfilling these relations with the most elevated motives. And here she finds enough to reprehend in the general customs of society. Parents are too apt to shape the whole education of the daughter so as to make her attractive to the other sex, and this by the conferment of showy and superficial accomplishments, as if it were the last of all misfortunes for a female to fail of being married, and as if her fate after that event were of comparative insignificance. Wherever society is unjust to woman, the author is eloquent in her indignation. She severely deals with that social unfairness, which makes of woman, as soon as she falls, a hopeless outcast beyond the pale of sympathy or reformation, while the serpent who has been her ruin is hospitably received and permitted the opportunity to do more of the work of destruction, and even to make his boast of the evil he has done. At the same time, she attributes this state of things to the want of a proper public opinion among women, who ought to make the seducer aware that he has fallen with his victim, and to exclude him, no less than her, from respectability. The views of the writer are illustrated by many shining examples, from both ancient and modern times, of true women. The author, while acknowledging the sphere of woman not to be identical with that of man, does not yield to the common notion, that woman is without equal intellect, or that it is improper to cultivate it. She holds that woman has a mind as noble as that of man, and is entitled to every fair opportunity to store it with useful knowledge, and to develop it in a legitimate exercise of its powers. In short, woman is, in her view, a soul HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI preparing for eternity, and while on earth her position should be so noble, and the employment of all her powers so definite and earnest, as to call forth what is highest in her nature, and to fit her for a sphere yet wider and nobler in eternity. The “Kindred Papers,” which the Editor has judiciously selected, and which occupy some two hundred pages of this interesting volume, afford not merely a varied and enlarged expression of intellectual endowment and culture, but –exhibiting as they do the author herself as a daughter and sister, then as a wife and mother, and in all other relations as a faithful and true woman– furnish a valuable illustration of her principles, and give additional interest to what she has written. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1856

March 1, Saturday: In Boston and in London, Margaret Fuller’s little brother the Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller prepared a new edition of AT HOME AND ABROAD, OR THINGS AND THOUGHTS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE (which had already appeared in the previous year).

March 1, 1856: It is remarkable that though I have not been able to find any open place in the river almost all winter, except under the further stone bridge and at Loring’s Brook, -this winter so remarkable for ice and snow,- Coombs should (as he says) have killed two sheldrakes at the falls by the factory, a place which I had forgotten, some four or six weeks ago. Singular that this hardy bird should have found this small opening, which I had for gotten, while the ice everywhere else was from one to two feet thick, and the snow sixteen inches on a level. If there is a crack amid the rocks of some waterfall, this bright diver is sure to know it. Ask the sheldrake whether the rivers are completely sealed up. ESEEK COOMBS HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 22, Sunday: H. Rider Haggard was born.

Friend Daniel Ricketson spent the forenoon in Henry Thoreau’s room copying titles of books, etc. The Reverend Convers Francis was preaching in Concord that morning, and his prooftext was Colossians 1:27 and

his topic “Christ in Us the Hope of Glory.” The thermometer reaching 95 at 3PM. At 4PM Ricketson and Thoreau went over to the Emerson home for tea by prior invitation, stopping by on the way to call on Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks. Then he, Thoreau, and Emerson went with the Emerson children to Walden Pond.

Thoreau walked back from the pond with Ellen Emerson and Edith Emerson while Ricketson, Waldo Emerson, and 12-year-old Edward Waldo Emerson “bathed” and discussed the birds and flowers that they had met on the way. Upon return to the Emersons, Ricketson had a chance to meet Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley with Miss Ripley, Mrs. Marsten Goodwin, and the Reverend Francis. They visited until 9, and Ricketson was in bed back at the Thoreaus’ at 10. He had found the day very satisfactory and mused to his journal about Concord’s opportunity of becoming the famous-author tourist trap it is today: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

My ideas of Mr. Emerson, with whom I had my second interview last night, are that he is a kind, gentle-natured man, even loving, but not what is usually termed warm-hearted. His mind does not strike me as being so great and strong as good in quality; it appears to me also limited as to its power. I should think he could rarely surprise one with any outburst of inspiration — his genius, for what he undoubtedly has, is sui generis. He is thoughtful, original, and only Emerson, and the founder of his race. It does not appear to me that he is even indebted to Carlyle, although the latter has recognized him as a kindred spirit. Emerson’s strength appears to me to lie in his honesty with himself; by his honesty he has produced a genuine article in the way of thought. He is an intelligent philosopher, a recipient of the divine cordial in doses rather homœopathic, but effectual specifics for those seeking a purer and better draught than what the schools afford. He is a blessing to the age. I am much interested in Concord, and should prefer it for a residence to almost any other place. The scenery is very picturesque in and about the village, and all appears quiet and peaceful, none of the stir and bustle of New Bedford. The Concord, or Musketaquid or grass-grown river, as my friend H.D.T. has learned its meaning from the Indians, runs along the edge of the village, which is chiefly on one street, although there are several others. It is a fine stream, and remarkable for its gentle current. With Thoreau I rowed up the river several miles, and had many pleasant views from different points. Walden Pond, by the shore where Thoreau built him a little house and there lived two years, is a small but delightful little lake, surrounded by woods. It is very deep and clear, a kind of well of nature. Concord has been for a long time the home or place of temporary abode for many of our most intellectual men and women, — commencing, so far as I am informed, with Dr. Ripley, then Emerson, Margaret Fuller for a short time as a visitor, Hawthorne, G.W. Curtis, H.D. Thoreau, the true Concord aborigine, William E. Channing, 2d, poet, Hon. Samuel Hoar, and his son, ex-Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. It is also the home of Mrs. Brooks, a true and stirring abolitionist. Concord has a large number of fine old houses, and the old parsonage, once the home of Dr. Ripley and near the battle-ground, is one of the finest old homes in this county. WALDO EMERSON NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS ELLERY CHANNING SAMUEL HOAR EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR EZRA RIPLEY MARGARET FULLER THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1857

May 26, Tuesday: Thomas Cholmondeley, in London, was writing to Henry Thoreau to let him know that he had received, and had read in their entirety, the copies that had been posted to him of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Waldo Emerson’s POEMS, Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s book on the Southern states.

May 26. 1857 London. My dear Thoreau I have received your four books & what is more I have read them. Olmstead was the only entire stranger. His book I think might have been shortened–& if he had indeed written only one word instead of ten – I should have liked it better. It is a horrid vice this wordiness– Emerson is beautiful & glorious.– Of all his poems the “Rhodora” is my favorite. I repeat it to myself over & over again. I am also delighted with “Guy” “Uriel” & “Beauty” Of your own book I will say nothing but I will ask you a question, which perhaps may be a very ignorant one. I have observed a few lines about Now there is something here unlike anything else in these pages. Are they absolutely your own; or whose? And afterward you shall hear what I think of them. Walt Whitmans poems have only been heard of in England to be laughed at & voted offensive– Here are “Leaves” indeed which I can no more understand than the book of Enoch or the inedited Poems of Daniel! I cannot believe that such a man lives unless I actually touch him. He is further ahead of me in yonder west than Buddha is behind me in the Orient. I find reality & beauty mixed with not a little violence & coarseness, both of which are to me effeminate. I am amused at his views of sexual energy – which however are absurdly false. I believe that rudeness & excitement in the act of generation are injurious to the issue. The man appears to me not to know how to behave himself. I find the gentleman altogether left out of the book! Altogether these leaves completely puzzle me. Is there actually such a man as Whitman? Has anyone seen or handled him? His is a tongue “not understanded” of the English people. It is the first book I have ever seen which I should call “a new book” & thus I would sum up the impression it makes upon me. While I am writing, Prince Albert & Duke Constantine are reviewing the guards in a corner of St James Park. I hear the music. About two hours ago I took a turn round the Park before breakfast & saw the troops formed. The varieties of colour gleamed fully out from their uniforms– They looked like an Army of soldier butterflies just dropped from the lovely green trees under which they marched. Never saw the trees look so green before as they do this spring– Some of the oaks incredibly so– I stood before some the other day in Richmond & was obliged to pinch myself & ask “is this oak tree really growing on the earth they call so bad & wicked an earth; & itself so undeniably & astonishingly fresh & fair”.? It did not look like magic. It was magic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI I have had a thousand strange experiences lately – most of them delicious & some almost awful. I seem to do so much in my life when I am doing nothing at all. I seem to be hiving up strength all the while as a sleeping man does; who sleeps & dreams & strengthens himself unconsciously; only sometimes half-awakes with a sense of cool refreshment. Sometimes it is wonderful to me that I say so little & somehow cannot speak even to my friends! Why all the time I was at Concord I never could tell you much of all I have seen & done!– I never could somehow tell you anything! How ungrateful to my guardian genius to think any of it trivial or superfluous! But it always seemed already-told & long ago said – what is past & what is to come seems as it were all shut up in some very simple but very dear notes of music which I never can repeat. Tonight I intend to hear Mr. Dow the american lecture in Exeter hall– I believe it is tonight. But I go forearmed against him – being convinced in my mind that a good man is all the better for a bottle of Port under his belt every day of his life. . . . I heard Spurgeon the Preacher the other day. He said some very good things: among others “If I can make the bells ring in one heart I shall be content.” Two young men not behaving themselves, he called them as sternly to order as if they were serving under him– Talking of Jerusalem he said that “every good man had a mansion of his own there & a crown that would fit no other head save his”. That I felt was true. It is the voice of Spurgeon that draws more than his matter. His organ is very fine – but I fear he is hurting it by preaching to too large & frequent congregations. I found this out – because he is falling into two voices the usual clerical infirmity.

. . . The bells – church bells are ringing somewhere for the queens birthday they tell me– I have not a court-guide at hand to see if this is so. . . . London is cram-full. Not a bed! Not a corner! After all the finest sight is to see such numbers of beautiful girls riding about & riding well. There are certainly no women in the world like ours. The men are far, far inferior to them. I am still searching after an abode & really my adventures have been most amusing. One Sussex farmer had a very good little cottage close to Battle – but he kept a “few horses & a score or two of Pigs” under the very windows. I remarked that his stables were very filthy. The man stared hard at me – as an english farmer only can stare: ie, as a man stares who is trying to catch a thought which is always running away from him. At last he said striking his stick on the ground– “But that is why I keep the Pigs– I want their dung for my hop-grounds” We could not arrange it after that! I received a very kind note today from Concord informing me that there was a farm to be sold on the Hill just over your river & nearly opposite your house. But it is out of the question buying land by deputy! I have however almost decided to settle finally in America– There are many reasons for it. I think of running over in the trial-trip of the Great Eastern which will be at the close of the year. She is either to be the greatest success – or else to sink altogether HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI without more ado! She is to be something decided. I was all over her the other day. The immense creature musical with the incessant tinkling of hammers is as yet unconscious of life.– By measurement she is larger than the Ark. From the promenade of her decks you see the town & trade of London; the river –(the sacred river)–; Greenwich with its park & palace; the vast town of Southwark & the continuation of it at Deptford; the Sydenham palace & the Surrey hills. Altogether a noble Poem. . . . Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks – they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue. Farewell Thoreau. Success & the bounty of the gods attend you yrs ever Thos Cholley. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Cholmondeley wrote Thoreau about losing his teeth, speculating that this was due to warm drinks: “Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks — they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue.”

The Dred Scotts became free at last. See, life isn’t always totally vicious, especially when your case has gotten lots of media attention. What happened was that the surgeon/owner, John Emerson, had died while the Dred Scott lawsuit had been dragging through the courts, and Emerson’s widow had remarried, and her new husband was more easily embarrassed than her old. So Dred Scott was able to go to work as a hotel porter in St. Louis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Friend Daniel Ricketson leaving Concord, to his journal:

Left Concord at 7 1/ A.M. Had a long conversation with ELLEN EMERSON 2 Miss Ellen Emerson, eldest daughter of R.W. Emerson, LOUIS AGASSIZ who attends the school of Professor Agassiz at Cambridge. She is a very sensible, open-hearted, intelligent young lady, but quite peculiar and original in her ideas upon many subjects; modest of her own qualities, but evidently a strongly marked person, one that will grow in strength and finally make a noble woman. I was on the whole quite interested and pleased with her. DR. WALTER CHANNING In Boston called about noon at Dr. Walter Channing’s, in Bowdoin St.; there saw besides the doctor the two ELLERY CHANNING eldest children of my friend Wm. Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller C. and Caroline Sturgis C., daughters RGARET FULLER CHANNING worthy of a poet and of whom any father might be proud: ROLINE STURGIS CHANNING sweet sensitive girls, Margaret not 13 and Caroline about 10. How tenderly I regarded them, deprived of their lovely mother and so neglected by their talented and wayward father! Dined with Arthur B. Fuller, the MADAM OSSOLI brother, and Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the revered and lamented Margaret and Ellen — Madam Ossoli and Mrs. ELLEN FULLER CHANNING William E. Channing. After a long and instructive as well as interesting conversation, the latter part with Mrs. Fuller, I left, deeply impressed with their genuine goodness and beauty of character, about 5 P.M. In the dining-room were three engravings (saved from the wreck) of Madam Ossoli’s, to wit: “Tasso’s Oak,” “Pine in the Colonna Gardens, Rome,” Michael Angelo’s “Cypresses, Rome;” also a scene in Rome, with her residence there. In Mr. Fuller’s own room upstairs were several line engravings from paintings by Zampieri. In the front parlor was a raised plaster head of Margaret, and the engraving underneath the same, placed in the memoirs of her by her brother, very much like the original daguerreotype of Miss Ellen Channing with a child in her arms — a sweet motherly face, truly lovely; also a fine portrait of the deceased wife of Mr. Fuller, a sweet open face. In the dining-room was a portrait of the Hon. Timothy Fuller, the father of Margaret — reddish hair, blue eyes, and rather mild countenance — the portrait resembling in style that of Fisher Ames. Mr. F. presented me with several manuscript pieces of Margaret’s, and Mrs. Fuller with a volume of poems by J.W. Randall, a friend of hers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI At a later point he added the following observation to his journal, about this meal with the Fullers:

The short stay at my friend Arthur B. Fuller’s, where I only dined, was very agreeable from the cordiality of Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the celebrated M.F. Ossoli. I was introduced to Richard H. Fuller, Esq., of the legal profession, but also a farmer, or rather the owner of a farm at Wayland, some twenty miles north of Boston. He as well as the rest of the family are very devout and intelligent people.

May 26. Pink azalea in garden. Mountain-ash a day; also horse-chestnut the same. Beach plum well out, several days at least. Wood pewee, and Minott heard a loon go laughing over this morning. The vireo days have fairly begun. They are now heard amid the elm-tops. Thin coats and straw hats are worn. I have noticed that notional nervous invalids, who report to the community the exact condition of their heads and stomachs every morning, as if they alone were blessed or cursed with these parts; who are old betties and quiddles, if men; who can’t eat their breakfasts when they are ready, but play with their spoons, and hanker after an ice-cream at irregular hours; who go more than half-way to meet any invalidity, and go to bed to be sick on the slightest occasion, in the middle of the brightest forenoon,—improve the least opportunity to be sick;—I observe that such are self-indulgent persons, without any regular and absorbing employment. They are nice, discriminating, experienced in all that relates to bodily sensations. They come to you stroking their wens, manipulating their ulcers, and expect you to do the same for them. Their religion and humanity stick. They spend the day manipulating their bodies and doing no work; can never get their nails clean. Some of the earliest willows about warm edges of woods are gone to seed and downy. P. M.—To Saw Mill Brook. It is very hazy after a sultry morning, but the wind is getting east and cool. The oaks are in the gray, or a little more, and the silvery leafets of the deciduous trees invest the woods like a permanent mist. At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air. I see the common small reddish butterflies. Very interesting now are the red tents of expanding oak leaves, as you go through sprout-lands,—the crimson velvet of the black oak and the more pinkish white oak. The salmon and pinkish-red canopies or umbrellas of the white oak are particularly interesting. The very sudden expansion of the great hickory buds, umbrella-wise. Now, at last, all leaves dare unfold, and twigs begin to shoot. As I am going down the footpath from Britton’s camp to the spring, I start a pair of nighthawks (they had the white on the wing) from amid the dry leaves at the base of a bush, a bunch of sprouts, and away they flitted in zigzag noiseless flight a few rods through the sprout-land, dexterously avoiding the twigs, uttering a faint hollow what, as if made by merely closing the bill, and one alighted flat on a stump. On those carpinus trees which have fertile flowers, the sterile are effete and drop off. The red choke-berry not in bloom, while the black is, for a day or more at least. Roadside near Britton’s camp, see a grosbeak, apparently female of the rose-breasted, quite tame, as usual, brown above, with black head and a white streak over the eye, a less distinct one beneath it, two faint bars on wings, dirty-white bill, white breast, dark spotted or streaked, and from time [to time] utters a very sharp chirp of alarm or interrogation as it peers through the twigs at me. A lady’s-slipper. At Cliffs, no doubt, before. At Abel Brooks’s (or Black Snake, or Red Cherry, or Rye) Hollow, hear the wood thrush. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

In Thrush Alley, see one of those large ant-hills, recently begun, the grass and moss partly covered with sand over a circle two feet in diameter, with holes two to five inches apart, and the dry sand is dark-spotted with the fresh damp sand about each hole. My mother was telling to-night of the sounds which she used to hear summer nights when she was young and lived on the Virginia Road,—the lowing of cows, or cackling of geese, or the beating of a drum [this is a reference to the drumming of the male Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the woods] as far off as Hildreth’s, but above all Joe Merriam whistling to his team, for he was an admirable whistler. Says she used to get up at midnight and go and sit on the door-step when all in the house were asleep, and she could hear nothing in the world but the ticking of the clock in the house behind her. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1859

December 14, Wednesday: Democratic Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia became the chair of the senatorial investigatory Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry that he had sponsored, which was charged to look into the circumstances surrounding the raid made by the guerrillas of John Brown on the federal arsenal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi became its principal investigator.

A 3d Democrat, Indiana’s Senator Graham N. Fitch, would ensure that the Democrats always had the majority on this committee. Two Republicans were added, Wisconsin’s Senator James R. Doolittle and Vermont’s Senator Jacob Collamer, so that the committee would have a dominated minority. The committee would summon, in all, 32 witnesses in this investigation of the Secret “Six” conspiracy.

At the Concord Lyceum, Caroline H. Dall spoke on the topic “Lives of Noted Women,” focusing attention on woman’s claim to education as illustrated in the cases of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Margaret Fuller. Both Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson attended:118 Wednesday — Concord. Mass. Dec. 14. 1859. I took the Omnibus a little before 7 AM. & rode to the Fitchburg depot. At the Concord depot Mr Brown & his wife119 & Mr Surette120 met me. Mrs Brown kindly carried me to Mrs Alcott’s where I passed a pleasant morning, talking to her and the girls,121 and deciding which lecture I would read. After a vegetable dinner, I went back to Mrs Brown’s in her sleigh. The sewing circle took tea there, and having done the agreeable as well as I could, I dressed and was taken down to the Town Hall where I was to speak. A heavy snow storm had increased since morning to a drifting gale. The driving cold was so painful on my cheeks, that I was faint & dizzy with the reaction. Mr Brown, said, You need not expect anybody tonight — but there were about four hundred persons. Mr Reynolds122 who introduced me, Mr Alcott, Thoreau Frank Sanborn,123 Mrs Emerson & others, paid me compliments with that dignified reserve that such persons do. But Edith Emerson124 said a few words to Mrs Brown, worth them all. “I cannot often keep awake,” she said, “during the best lectures, but I heard every word of this, she was so earnest.”

118. Bronson Alcott would jot in his diary “Hear Mrs. Dall’s lecture. She gave us accounts of the principal incidents in the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Lady Morgan, Mrs. Jameson, Margaret Fuller & others. It was a well considered performance, and gave pleasure to our people generally.” 119. Simon Brown and Ann Brown, friends of Caroline H. Dall’s from her year in Washington and Georgetown. 120. Concord merchant and member of Corinthian Lodge of Masons of Concord, Louis A. Surette (1819-1897). 121. Abigail May Alcott, the future “Marmee” of Little Women, and her surviving three daughters, Anna Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Abby May Alcott. 122. Grindall Reynolds (1822-1894) was minister to the Unitarian Church in Concord, 1858-1894 (pastor emeritus after 1881) and secretary of the American Unitarian Association, 1881-1894. 123. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. 124. Edith Emerson (1841-1929) married in 1865 William H. Forbes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI December 14. At 2 P. M. begins to snow again. I walk to Walden. Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face, almost as much so as sand. It is cold also. It is drifting but not accumulating fast. I can see the woods about a quarter of a mile distant through it. That of the 11th was a still storm, of large flakes falling gently in the quiet air, like so many white feathers descending in different directions when seen against a wood- side,–the regular snow-storm such as is painted. A myriad falling flakes weaving a coarse garment by which the eye is amused. The snow was a little moist and the weather rather mild. Also I remember the perfectly crystalline or star snows, when each flake is a perfect six (?)-rayed wheel. This must be the chef-d’oeuvre of the Genius of the storm. Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot. This, I think, belongs to cold weather. Probably never have much of it. Also there is sleet, which is half snow, half rain. The Juncus tenuis, with its conspicuous acheniums, is very noticeable now, rising above the snow in the wood- paths, commonly aslant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1861

GÜNDERODE, by Mrs. M. Wesselhoeft, in two parts paged continuously (Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham). Fictitious correspondence interspersed with poems and dialogues of Caroline von Günderode. English translation of this 1840 German book by Bettina Brentano von Arnim had been begun by Margaret Fuller in 1842, but then for some reason that project had gotten suspended.

GÜNDERODE

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

the Marchesa d’Ossoli “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI May 15, Wednesday: Crossing the river to Niagara Falls125 on the John Augustus Roebling span suspended from wire cables cost Henry Thoreau and Horace Mann, Jr. $1.50 each.

“No one is afraid to cross.”

There is not a record that either Thoreau or Mann were in fear during their crossing.126 Their tickets to 125. In considering Thoreau’s visit to Niagara Falls, you really should go back and review the treatment of the falls given by Margaret Fuller in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843 (Boston MA: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844, Chapter I). She wrote several things which Thoreau must certainly have remembered, such as “It seems strange that men could fight in such a place.” The book begins with some utterly conventional remarks about the falls such as that it is a spectacle “great enough to fill the whole life, and supersede thought,” from which however we are immediately distanced by remarks such as that although Fuller has only been at the falls for eight days, once she had witnessed a fellow visitor appropriate them by spitting into them, she found that she was “quite willing to go away.” When she first saw the falls, her take was that it was just like its pictures. Referring to the first viewers of the falls who were not only white but also male, such as Father Hennepin (she was, after all, an inhabitant of the 19th Century, and a beneficiary of white civilization), she wrote “Happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could come unawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely their own.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Goat Island cost an additional $0.25 each.

May 15: To Niagara Falls. Afternoon to Goat Island. Sight of the Rapids from the Bridge like the sea off Cape Cod – most imposing sight as yet. The great apparent height of the waves tumbling over the immense ledges – at a distance; while the water view is broad and boundless in that direction, as if you were looking out to sea, you are so low. Yet the distances are very deceptive; the most distant billow was scarcely more than a quarter of a mile off, though it appeared two miles or more. Many ducks [Oldsquaw Clangula hyemalis] were constantly floating a little way down from the Rapids, -then flying back and alighting again.

An editorial in the St. Paul, Minnesota Pioneer and Democrat elaborated on the needs of war and managed to stop a bit short of urging Minnesota’s farmers to immediately get their wives pregnant:

To Farmers. — Now is the time for the farmers to make money. The country is at war. A half million of men instead of being producers will become consumers. Flour, beef, pork, beans — the substantials — will be wanted in large quantity. Europe is convulsed, and the indications are that there will be a general outbreak across the water; if so, America must supply the armies of France, Italy and England with food. Let the farmers prepare for a great demand; let every cultivator put in an extra acre of corn or wheat, and carry his tilth to the best possible perfection; let every calf be saved from the butcher’s hand, for there will be a great demand for beef. Farmers, every where, now is your time!

In a letter to his mother, Mann said “We arrived at the Suspension Bridge last night at about half past eight, and stopped over night at the New York Central House.… a room at the American House … for one dollar a day.… I have seen the falls though I have not been to look at them yet, and I hear them roaring now all the time.”

126. We may speculate that John Augustus Roebling’s claim “No one is afraid to cross” had been made because, five years earlier, 200 people had fallen to their deaths when a suspension bridge collapsed in France. However, when he passed over this bridge, Mark Twain commented “You drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomfiting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI June 12, Wednesday: Horace Mann, Jr. reported to his mother that their plans were to leave Lake Calhoun on June 15 for St. Anthony and then St. Paul on June 16 “and I think we may go up the St. Peters, or Minnesota, river to the lower Sioux agency where the indians are going to be paid off on the 18th and subsequent days of this month.” That day’s St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat newspaper puffed:

We would inform strangers who may be amongst us that this excursion will give them a better opportunity of seeing wild, frontier life, and the sports of the red men than they could otherwise have. There will doubtless be a large attendance from this city.

In considering what Henry Thoreau intended to get out of this excursion to witness the payment, we may consider what Margaret Fuller had gotten out of having witnessed a payment at Mackinaw Island. Henry was certainly familiar with what Margaret had written: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Late at night we reached this island of Mackinaw, so famous for its beauty.... It was the last week in August, at which time a large representation form the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes are here to receive their annual payments from the American government. ...they come hither by thousands and those thousands in families, secure of accommodation on the beach and food from the lake, to make a long holiday out of the occasion. There were near two thousand encamped on the island already, and more arriving every day. As our boat came in, the captain had some rockets let off. This greatly excited the Indians, and their yells and wild cries resounded along the shore. Except for the momentary flash of the rockets, it was perfectly dark... With the first rosy streak, I was out among my Indian neighbors whose lodges honeycombed the beautiful beach, that curved away in long, fair outline on either side the house. They were already on the alert, the children creeping out from beneath the blanket door of the lodge, the women pounding corn in their rude mortars, the young men playing on their pipes.... The first afternoon I was there, looking down from a near height, I felt that I never wished to see a more fascinating picture. It was an hour of the deepest serenity; bright blue and gold, with rich shadows. Every moment the sunlight fell more mellow. The Indians were grouped and scattered among the lodges; the women preparing food, in the kettle or frying-pan, over the many small fires; the children, half naked, wild as little goblins, were playing both in and out of the water. Here and there lounged a young girl, with a baby at her back, whose bright eyes glanced, as if born into a world of courage and of joy, instead of ignominious servitude and slow decay. Some girls were cutting wood, a little way from me, talking and laughing, in the low musical tone, so charming in the Indian women. Many bark canoes were upturned upon the beach, and, by that light, of almost the same amber as the lodges; others coming in, their square sails set, and with almost arrowy speed, though heavily laden with dusky forms, and all the apparatus of their household. Here and there a sailboat glided by, with a different but scarce less pleasing motion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI We can now compare this St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat newspaper puff with a more truthful account published by a witness to an earlier year’s “Payment,” a Mr. Phillips of the Shakopee Independent:127

A terrific hail-storm visited this place [the Lower Sioux Agency] a few days before our arrival, which destroyed about two hundred acres of corn, planted by the Sioux; thus cutting off, in a great measure, their means of support. The inhabitants averred that hail fell as large as eggs; and, although several days had elapsed since the storm, we saw indentations in the earth which led us to believe that the report was correct.... The Indian is slowly beginning to realize the fact, that it is far better to turn his attention to the cultivation of the earth than to rely upon the uncertainties of the chase for a subsistence; and, although it is hard for them to overcome their prejudices, and their natural antipathy to imitation of the whites, there is a decided progressive spirit perceptible, which argues well for a better state of things than have heretofore existed among them.... A convocation of the principal chiefs of the bands in attendance was held at the office of the agent.... They represented themselves as being in an extreme destitute condition; but their demands for provisions and pay met with a firm and decided refusal from the agent.... We looked in vain for that proud, haughty bearing that we had been led to suppose existed among them in their councils. Their spirits seem to be crushed, and there is a tame submissiveness manifest, which but ill accords with the wild, untamable spirit with which writers have invested them.... Heartily sick and tired of the misery and degradation that we saw existing among them, we gladly, next morning, took our way homeward....

[June] 12th A.m. around L[ake] Harriet. Sp[ecimen]. Heuchers hispida [rough heuchera]. My tallest is all hispid or hirsute (& slightly glandular above) & is 2 feet high. The calix is very one-sided, bell-shaped. Parry says [it is] a common plant, characteristic of dry rolling prairies. R[anunculus] flammula [creeping spearwort], which var{iety]? F[ragaria] vesca 127. Parker’s MINNESOTA HANDBOOK, page 49. Note the bias: after describing the terrible uncertainty of subsistence agriculture in these latitudes, which if anything should lead into a critique of the motives and reliability of the white advisers who were pushing and shoving the native Americans in this direction, this unsympathetic white observer merely reaffirms his condemnation of the hunting and gathering life upon which it was supposed to improve. He wastes not one word of criticism on the men who were hearing and scorning these pleas for understanding, focusing instead on how pitiful it makes us feel to be forced to listen to such pleas. Ronald Reagan should have been there to give these shiftless people a good lecture, and tell again his favorite story of the welfare queen arriving at the payment office in her Cadillac! HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI [strawberry] with fruit raised in high pits on surface. (Symphocarpus racemosus [snowy-berry] (?) just beginning, stamens &c. not now protruded. Is it same with the large plants?) Is the prairie one S[ymphoricarpus] occidentalis [wolf-berry] — saw these, a dense dry raceme. Chic[k]ade[e], pho[e]be note. P.m. to prairie pond. Nighthawk, 2 eggs far advanced, in prairie. Sturnella J.J. AUDUBON neglecta, Audubon’s western lark [Western Meadowlark Sturnella neglecta]. Note very peculiar. Heard at the same time with the common meadow lark. Much louder, a toodle-em note. A shrike (?), young bird with a broad head. Light gray with black wings, tail black with side feathers & tips more or less white. Note unlovely, rasping. Lathyrus venosus [veiny vetchling], a little late. Blue, purple & white. Asclepias Nuttalliana [milkweed] (?) on prairie about pond. Ground plum (Astragalus) full grow[n] & red on one side, on the gravelly sides of prairie hollows. Parry says it “is frequently used to allay the thirst of the traveller on the great western plains.” A great many striped (?) snakes esp[ecially] about ponds [and] pools on the prairie.

Undated Mann letter: “In the afternoon we went over the St. Paul Bridge over the Mississippi128 and took a walk of several miles and found a few new plants. The bridge is a very long one and descending the whole way from St. Paul to the other bank, for it commences on a bluff of sandstone at St. Paul about 100 ft high and goes down to almost the level of the river on the other side. As I said, the city of St. Paul is built right along on the edge of a steep sandstone bluff, the sandstone being very soft and crumbling, so that the bank swallows dig holes in it and build nests and lay eggs in them. In some parts of the bank the sandstone is all speckled with little holes and I should think that there were hundreds of them, every one or nearly every one inhabited and the young swallows would come to the mouth of the hole to be fed.”

[Between St. Anthony (Minneapolis) and St. Paul] The little brake grew in clefts of the sandstone; and there were many bank swallows’ nests in and under the pillared and turreted (coped?) sandstone, so hard that you could not make the hole with your hand —or would not.

June 30, Sunday evening: An unanticipated comet of enormous size suddenly appeared on the horizon, over the United States and Europe. Calculations indicate that on this night the earth probably was passing directly through the gas and dust of this comet’s tail. On this night, actually, the celestial observer E.J. Lowe jotted into his meteor log that the sky had been of a yellowish tinge before sunset, with the sun seeming somehow dimmed and the general levels of illumination less than usual. Also, John Russell Hind reported a certain peculiar phosphorescence in the appearance of the sky, something which may or may not have been entirely attributable to the aurora of the Northern Lights. From the observatory of Athens we have this report from the astronomer Schmidt: SKY EVENT The twilight behind Mt. Parnassus had not yet faded away when I was informed, and I can truthfully say no other surprise could have made so deep an impression. The night before had been absolutely clear and I had not seen a trace of a comet. Now the sky was filled by this majestic figure, spreading the tail from horizon to beyond Polaris, and even across Lyra. It was, to use the language of the past, a comet of truly fearful appearance. At 9 o’clock the head of the comet, looking as large as the moon, was next to Mt. Parnassus. The head and the very wide lower part of the tail appeared like a distant fire, and the tail seemed like windblown smoke illuminated by the fire. After the head had disappeared below the horizon and it had grown dark, one could see that the tail extended to the Milky Way in the constellation Aquila. At 11PM I went to the observatory to watch [for] the reappearance of the head in the northeast.... At midnight and for some time after the tail stood nearly vertically above the northern horizon, its most brilliant portion and the nucleus hidden, the tail reached 30 degrees of arc beyond the zenith 128.This bridge was opened in 1858, after the suspension bridge at St. Anthony, and joined St. Paul to the abandoned site of the village of Taoyateduta “Our Red Nation,” which had been named Kaposia “Not Encumbered by Much Baggage,” and which had by this point become “South St. Paul.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI [indicating that the total length of this comet’s tail above and below the zenith would measure more than 120 degrees]. At 4:27AM the head of the comet became visible again, following reappearance of the brightest parts of the tail which produced weak but noticeable shadows. Neither the Great Comet of March 1843 nor Donati’s comet of October 1858 had been so bright.... I watched the rising of the comet’s head with the naked eye; it was an incredible phenomenon that cannot be compared to anything else. The great mass of light hung like a dull smoky fire over the dark outline of the mountains. As it grew lighter the tail disappeared, I could only see about 4 degrees of arc of the tail at 5:30AM. But at 6:08AM when Capella was the only still visible star the nucleus was still clearly luminous. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The 4th great new comet of the 19th Century, I Thatcher, had been first detected from Australia. Of course, since the only way to notify Europe of the detection of this comet was by ship and so, by the time this news arrived in the Northern hemisphere, it had already come been sighted also by Europeans and Americans. This comet appeared inordinately large because it was passing close by our planet and as of this date was brushing across us its complicated tail of changing construction.129 This comet, together with the double comet I Liais of 1860, would contribute to our Andromedid meteor showers.130

As of this date or slightly later, from New Bedford, Henry Thoreau’s “Friend Ricketson,” Friend Daniel Ricketson, was writing to inform him that he had been “converted” to a strong belief in the truth of Christianity. 129. Venus, at its closest point to the Earth, is about 23,000,000 miles away, and this comet was passing within 11,000,000 miles. By way of strong comparison, the comet Lexell had in July 1770 passed within 1,401,200 miles. Of course, nothing happened of any great moment in either case, as the tail of a comet is quite insubstantial even by way of contrast with a meteor shower, but this would give rise to stories (sponsored it would appear by adherents of the “God’s This Weird Dude” school of theology) connecting the event to the bloodshed of our Civil War. 130. “COMET TEBBUTT, (C/1861 N1=1861 II). A naked-eye object from discovery until mid-Aug., T=1861 June 12. Extraordinary display created by comet's close encounter with Earth. Spotted in the Southern Hemisphere on May 13th at 4th magnitude. Moved north very slowly across Eridanus. On June 8th, of 2nd magnitude. At mid month, 1st magnitude. Tail already 40 degrees long. Thereafter, motion increased dramatically. On June 24th, when near Rigel, zero magnitude. In conjunction with the Sun on June 29th. Earth passed through the comet's tail! In the Northern Hemisphere, appeared suddenly in Auriga at dawn - immense, brilliant object. Descriptions suggest the head was at least -1 or -2 magnitude. Tail seen to stretch from Auriga to Ophiuchus - 120 degrees! Comet became circumpolar on July 1st. The next night the head was zero magnitude, tail 97 degrees long. On July 8th, when near the Big Dipper, 1st magnitude with a tail up to 60 degrees long. Thereafter rapidly declined. Of 2nd to 3rd magnitude at mid month, 4th at the end. Lost to the unaided eye in mid August.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The Shanty, 30th June 1861 Friend Thoreau, I have been desirous of hearing from you for a long time, and particularly in regard to your health, which from your letter of 22d March I was sorry to hear was not as good as usual; but as you speak of your complaint as that of “a severe cold,” I hope by this time you have bid farewell to it and are once more tramping about the woods and fields of old Concord and boating on your favorite stream. We had our full share of the snowstorm of which you gave so glowing an account inclusive of your domestic water sentinel (a short way of saying pump!) with its “ghost” of snow. I have kept my usual record of the return of the birds, and am happy to inform you that the Quail has several times of late saluted me with his sweet whistle or call for “Bob White” as the country boys hereabouts translate him. We have had a peculiar singing pewee with an additional stave to his little song very peculiar & rather comical in its way. I am glad to hear of the success of Friend Alcott, as Superintendent of your village schools– Concord may well be proud to have such a Captain– Please remember me affectionately to him & his family & thank him for me for a copy of his School Report which I duly recd and read with attention, noting Miss A’s happy travesty of the old Scotch border song. I was sorry to find you “aberat” and hope that some less cause than illness prevented you. Concord cant spare any of her ballast. My dear friend, Since I saw you, & considerably since I wrote you last have I met with some fresh and very unexpected experiences, which have resulted in a change of my religious views. Long, long have I striven to become a good man, rather, to obtain that peace of mind which I conclude to be the evidence of a soul in a state of acceptance with its Creator, but in vain have been my efforts and my researches in the wisdom of the schools of ancient and modern philosophy, the (I fear) delusive and bewitching scepticism of so many noble minds. I am now quite inclined to believe in what are termed the dogmas of Christianity – at least in a part of them & have ceased to rebel against the rest. From my repeated failures in the path of virtue & godliness I am at last convinced of the necessity of regeneration i.e. a new heart – and what may surprise you still more, I am led to believe in the existence of an Evil Spirit, the great adversary of the Soul, whose malign influence has so often destroyed my fond- est hopes of peace. I seize upon the truth of the Gospel as recorded in the Old and New Testaments as a shipwrecked sailor to the hand stretched forth to rescue him from the whelming waves. The spiritual wants of man herein recorded and corroborated by his inward light seem to be so aptly fitted that nothing less than a Divine master could have given them to us. What is human life without the faith and hope thus inspired within the soul! – the faith of so many of the great and good, the saints and Martyrs of the Church of Christ. Oh! dear HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI T. we need it all. “I am not mad most noble Festus” but am willing to be accounted a fool for the sake of the great Head of the Church. I know that you are too good and too pure a man to smile at my new born Zeal or rather newly awakened for I once before long ago was similarly led. Do nt think that I am about to forsake my kind Concord friends, the purest, wisest and best of philosophers, dear noble souls – no – My heart yearns for your spiritual recognition of the revealed word, wherein ye may see that “ye must be born again”. What ever takes from our faith and hopes in the future life, robs us of the only possessions that render our earthly existence endurable. Let us devoutly pray to God for light, for light & strength. We must feel contrite – be ready to smite our breast and cry “God be merciful to me a sinner”. O! there must be a listening ear to the fervent peti- tion of the troubled soul– Our Heavenly Father will hear us — He will answer too our prayers. I humbly trust that He has mine. As I said before I have no rebellion in my heart now– I gladly accept whatever provision God has made for our future happiness, & endeavor to repose with faith upon the arm of Divine Wisdom– Wel- come Christ the Saviour of our souls if God so wills, Mystery though it be – purest of the pure, simplest & wisest of all teachers, who died for his faithfulness – the great exemplar & guide of man through the thorny road of earthly life, whose life blood sealed the great testimony of truth he wrought out for us – typical of regeneration He died for us all– How grateful we should feel towards him, the great Head of the Church. Monday Mrng. July 1. Thus far I wrote last evening & now take my pen to draw my letter to a close. We are just commencing mowing & the scythes are already busy in the hands of my hired men – the most graceful of the farmer’s graceful labor – all of which is the living poetry of rural life. Do let me hear from you soon? And remember me kindly to Chan- ning for whom I shall ever feel an affectionate interest, and to dear father Alcott, and to that complex gentleman, scholar, philosopher & Christian, Radulphus Primus! My wife has had a long illness, but is now recovering. My valued Uncle, James Thornton died 27 April last in his 64th year, of which please inform Channing, who knew him. With kind regards to your mother & sister, I remain truly & affectionately Your friend, Danl Ricketson “Te teneam monius deficiente manu.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI What he meant by that he would feel sufficiently confident to confide to his journal in his extreme old age, in May 1885 just after he had read of and had evidently been perplexed by the supernaturalist beliefs that had passed for religion in the mind of Victor Hugo:

I believe in the gentle doctrines of the early Friends — particularly that of “the indwelling light,” as the first great teacher and guide, it being … the true interpreter of the Sacred Volume whose pages bear record of this divine manifestation to mankind from the earliest ages.... At the hour of death I hope for grace from on high, to resign myself with childlike confidence into the hands of our Heavenly Father, the great and good Creator, whose protecting care over me in my past youth, manhood, and old age, I have so often witnessed.... As a birthright member of the Society of Friends, I would express my continued faith in its Christian doctrines, so simple and true, so human and charitable when rightly observed, feeling that in the future they will be seen to be the truest interpretation of the Christian truth. So, asking God’s blessing upon those who may be called upon to suffer for its principles I would close.

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Thoreau jotted down that he and Horace Mann, Jr. had reached the “Mackinaw House” on Mackinac Island. By 1838 this island, which had started out as the Michilimackinac “Green Turtle” burying ground, had already become firmly established as a summer health resort, catering in particular to those suffering from seasonal allergies such as hay fever. In fact some sufferers had to be turned away in earlier years for lack of accommodations. By 1861 there had been a building boom –although the Grand Hotel and the Michigan State Park were still a number of years in the future– and Thoreau and Mann were able to choose among several hotels and boarding houses. It was unseasonably cold and Thoreau was so ill at this point that he spent most HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI of his time sitting by the fire with Mann bringing botanical collections in to him. Be it noted that Margaret Fuller and William Cullen Bryant had been on Mackinac Island and young Mann had himself been there before as a boy of 13 with his father.

We may recollect a letter written by Horace Mann, Sr. on Mackinac Island in 1857: “I never breathed such air before, and this must be some that was clear out of Eden, and did not get cursed. I slept every night under sheet, blanket, and coverlet, and no day is too warm for smart walking and vigorous bowling. The children are crazy HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI 131 with animal spirits.”

Therefore, it is clear, Thoreau did not return to Concord via the Great Lakes by accident, nor stop off at Mackinac Island by happenstance. ASTRONOMY

131. See pages 157-163 of J.A. Van Fleet, OLD AND NEW MACKINAC (Ann Arbor, 1870). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Michilimackinac “Green Turtle” Island on Lake Michigan

July: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine contained an article on Margaret Fuller, marchesa d’Ossoli. THE ENTIRE MAGAZINE THIS PARTICULAR ARTICLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1866

George William Curtis was actively involved in the elections of this year and was chosen as delegate-at-large to the Convention for revising the New York State Constitution.

Thomas Hicks painted his “Authors of the United States” as a name-dropping set piece to show off various of the portraits of prominent personages he had painted at his studio in New-York. We have no idea as to the present whereabouts of the original of this, but an engraving of it was made by A.H. Ritchie. We note that the statues on the upper balcony are of course of founding literary giants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. Henry Thoreau is of course as always not noticeably absent, since he would HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI not emerge into his present renown until well into the 20th Century.

The personages depicted are 1=Washington Irving 2=William Cullen Bryant 3=James Fenimore Cooper 4=Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5=Miss Sedgwick 6=Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney 7=Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth 8=Mitchell 9=Nathaniel Parker Willis 10=Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11=Kennedy 12=Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie 13=Alice Carey 14=Prentice 15=G.W. Kendall 16=Morris 17=Edgar Allan Poe 18=Frederick Goddard Tuckerman 19=Nathaniel Hawthorne 20=Simms 21=P. Pendelton Cooke 22=Hoffman 23=William H. Prescott 24=George Bancroft 25=Parke Godwin 26=John Lothrop Motley 27=Reverend Henry Ward Beecher 28=George William Curtis 29=Ralph Waldo Emerson 30=Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 31=Margaret Fuller, marchesa d’Ossoli 32=Reverend William Ellery Channing 33=Harriet Beecher Stowe 34=Mrs. Kirkland 35=Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 36=James Russell Lowell 37=Boker 38=Bayard Taylor 39=Saxe 40=Stoddard 41=Mrs. Amelia Welby 42=Gallagher 43=Cozzens 44=Halleck. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1868

Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote essays on Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child for EMINENT WOMEN.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a founding member of the first women’s club in New-York.

FEMINISM

November: Robert Louis Stevenson completed his manuscript “On Falling in Love” that would be published in 1877, and “The Devil on Cramond Sands.” “Some Portraits by Raeburn” was declined by Cornhill Magazine.

Styling himself “once a pure Transcendentalist,” Octavius Brooks Frothingham offered a treatise on TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND: A HISTORY (New-York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons) within the pages of which various historical persons stood as tropes more or less in the same manner in which, in Æsop’s animal fables, various species stand as tropes (in this treatise, gratefully, Henry Thoreau figured merely as a contributor to The Dial, else who knows how he might have figured!):

Personage Trope Species Trope

W. Emerson The Seer Lion Courage

B. Alcott The Mystic Ant Industry

M. Fuller The Critic Grasshopper Sloth

T. Parker The Preacher Fox Slyness

G. Ripley Man of Letters &c. &c.

This author’s take on what Transcendentalism had amounted to was that it had been a reinvigoration of the tradition of Cambridge Platonism.

The idea that America had undergone a phenomenon akin to the European Renaissance, a literary renaissance in New England in the first half of the 19th Century, surfaced at this point for the first time. It was hypothesized in an review by the Reverend Samuel Osgood. This category arose in opposition to the valorization of the Transcendentalist writers as a category, and one of the functions of the projected categorization was the devalorization and virtual exclusion from the forming canon of the writings of women such as Margaret Fuller, of persons of color such as Frederick Douglass, and of persons of lower origin such as Thoreau.

Frothingham had the following to offer about George Bancroft: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI The Philosophical Miscellanies of Cousin were much noticed by the press, George Bancroft in especial sparing no pains to commend them and the views they presented. The spiritual philosophy had no more fervent or eloquent champion than he. No reader of his “History of the United States,” has forgotten the noble tribute paid to it under the name of Quakerism, or the striking parallel between the two systems represented in the history by John Locke and William Penn, both of whom framed constitutions for the new world. For keenness of apprehension and fullness of statement the passages deserve to be quoted here. They occur in the XVI. chapter of the History. “The elements of humanity are always the same, the inner light dawns upon every nation, and is the same in every age; and the French revolution was a result of the same principles as those of George Fox, gaining dominion over the mind of Europe. They are expressed in the burning and often profound eloquence of Rousseau; they reappear in the masculine philosophy of Kant. The professor of Königsberg, like Fox and Barclay and Penn, derived philosophy from the voice in the soul; like them, he made the oracle within the categorical rule of practical morality, the motive to disinterested virtue; like them, he esteemed the Inner Light, which discerns universal and necessary truths, an element of humanity; and therefore his philosophy claims for humanity the right of ever renewed progress and reform. If the Quakers disguised their doctrine under the form of theology, Kant concealed it for a season under the jargon of a nervous but unusual diction. But Schiller has reproduced the great idea in beautiful verse; Chateaubriand avowed himself its advocate; Coleridge has repeated the doctrine in misty language; it beams through the poetry of Lamartine and Wordsworth; while in the country of beautiful prose, the eloquent Cousin, listening to the same eternal voice which connects humanity with universal reason, has gained a wide fame for the ‘divine principle,’ and in explaining the harmony between that light and the light of Christianity, has often unconsciously borrowed the language, and employed the arguments of Barclay and Penn.”

A few pages he attempts to characterize the essential difference between this Transcendentalism and the philosophy of Locke: “Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom, both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate on which time and chance might scrawl their experience. To Penn the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly formed, that when once HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions; to Penn, it is the image of God and his oracle in the soul.... In studying the understanding Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures.... The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure, and things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to ‘inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums or nuts.’ Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast; good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood; and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, ‘it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in.’ Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for His own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do; and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory.” The justice of the comparison, in the first part of the above extract, of Quakerism with Transcendentalism, may be disputed. Some may be of opinion that inasmuch as Quakerism traces the source of the Inner Light to the supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while Transcendentalism regards it as a natural endowment of the human mind, the two are fundamentally opposed while superficially in agreement. However this may be, the practical issues of the two coincide, and the truth of the contrast presented between the philosophies, designated by the name of Locke on the one side, and of Penn on the other, will not be disputed. Mr. Bancroft’s statement, though dazzling, is exact. It was made in 1837. The third edition from which the above citation was made, was published in 1838, the year of Mr. Emerson’s address to the Divinity students at Cambridge.

Octavius Brooks Frothingham. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. NY: HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI Putnam’s: [A]s high priests of the Genteel Tradition, the scholars who gave shape to Transcendentalism as an academic field were products of values and assumptions akin to those against which Transcendentalism reacted in the first place, however much these values may have assumed an aspect derived from Transcendentalism to preserve them in a new age. As a result, generations of scholars have both scorned and domesticated Transcendentalist writing, turning it to their own purposes. Transcendentalism has been not so much a subject of study as a placeholder for the ideologies and professional motives of its commentators. In effect, the criticism of Transcendentalism, and of American literature, has been entrusted to the Unitarians. The result is as predictable as if the history of the American Indians had been written exclusively by the cowboys, as until recently, it had.... The first major landmark of Transcendentalist criticism is O.B. Frothingham’s TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. Frothingham has a privileged place in the discourse about Transcendentalism. The son of N.L. Frothingham, whose prominence as a minister to Boston’s First Church put him at the center of Unitarian society, Frothingham knew the religious and social controversies of the 1840s firsthand. So, in addition to being the first “scholarly” study, TRANSCENDENTALISM IN N EW E NGLAND might also be described as the last account by a “contemporary.” [...It] allows modern scholars to claim a direct connection through Frothingham with their subject, much as Christ’s elevation of Peter allows the church to claim a direct historical connection with God. —Carafiol, Peter C. THE AMERICAN IDEAL: LITERARY HISTORY AS A WORLDLY ACTIVITY. NY: Oxford UP, 1991, pages 43- 44, 46-47. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1884

Julian Hawthorne’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE. This is the book in which Julian alleged that as of December 1852 “Thoreau’s hut was still standing on a level, pine-circled spot, near the margin” (actually, Thoreau’s shanty had been for some period of years on the opposite side of town from Walden Pond — and this provides you a clue as to how seriously you ought to receive anything this lad has to offer).

An etching purporting to represent Sophia Peabody Hawthorne at the age of 36 was prepared by S.A. Schoff, evidently on the basis of a Daguerreotype, to be presented opposite page 242 in Volume 1 of the above. The text description to accompany this illustration was given as “Sophia contemplates the viewer with her large, placid eyes. She is quite plain even in this portrait. Her nose and philtrum are a little too large and she looks as if she might need glasses. Her hair and dress are not at all fashionable; she wears no jewellery (is that a locket or a high collar?). Even though she is a dentist’s daughter, we cannot see her teeth. She will be the perfect wife for Nathaniel.”

James D. Hurd became a partner in Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, in Houghton, Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, made Margaret into an honorary guy.

When presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland was attacked for immorality, the Reverend Higginson sprang to his defense.

Bronson Alcott’s Autobiography. (Many papers relating to the Temple School are here, lists of pupils, letters from patrons, Margaret Fuller, Hiram Fuller, and Waldo Emerson.)

Bronson Alcott’s Correspondence, IV. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI (Letters from parents and records of financial details, including the sale of Alcott’s books, are included in this volume.)

Index, 1800-1850. A biographical outline of this period of Bronson Alcott’s life.

Bronson Alcott’s Journals, IX (1836). (This volume is full of optimism, books being edited, conversations with Sunday School Teachers, need for a separate building, leisure to write, a press at command.)

Bronson Alcott’s Journals, X (1837).The road down — attacks on books, mob threatened, sale of furniture, temporary closing of school. All are borne with dignity but with inward wound.

Bronson Alcott’s Journals, XI (1838).While waiting, ways of escape are meditated — traveling missionary of culture, writing books, moving to Concord. Record of early conversations in Lexington and Hingham.

Bronson Alcott’s Journals, XII (1839).In this volume, most of the references to education were on pages which have been cut out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1885

February 8, Sunday: In a winter storm, the 3-masted schooner Louis V. Place was wrecked at position #16 below, very near where Margaret Fuller had met her fate some decades before. Its crew of 8, unable due to the extreme cold to grasp the rescue lines from lifesavers, climbed as far up into the vessel’s rigging as they could get. By the point at which the storm would abate a couple of days later, only two of them would remain alive in the rigging — one of whom would succumb at the hospital. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1888

January: Under the rubric “Cabot’s Life of Emerson” Quarterly Review presented a review of James Elliot Cabot’s A MEMOIR OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON (Boston and New-York: Houghton Mifflin, 1887). Emerson had been “a source of living energy in wide fields of thought; but while Curtis, Clough, Margaret Fuller, Higginson, Lowell, Sterling, Theodore Parker, Thoreau, Winthrop, and Whitman acknowledged their debt to Emerson, none of them became his imitators.”

W.H.H. provided The Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers with a review of H.G.O. Blake’s WINTER: “Thoreau is winning since his death the recognition that was denied him while he was yet alive. His fame has been of slow growth, but for that very reason it will be the more likely to endure. No other American writer has ever described Nature so delightfully as he describes it. His best life was out of doors, and nothing about him escaped his observation. These extracts from his journal are full of interest, and their keen philosophy and charming descriptions will delight every cultivated reader.”

Robert Louis Stevenson’s MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN (Jenkin had lived 1833-1885). He cared not where it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery –in the child’s toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the properties of energy or mass– certain that whatever he touched, it was a part of life — and however he touched it, there would flow for his happy constitution interest and delight. “All fables have their morals,” says Thoreau, “but the innocent enjoy the story.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

Julian Hawthorne’s review of H.G.O. Blake’s WINTER excerpts from Henry Thoreau’s journal appeared in Bookmart. At the time the trade winds were blowing in favor of derogation of Thoreau anyway, and so Julian’s article of course –Julian being the sort of fulsome scumbag that he was– drove this derogation in the direction of new excesses of eloquence. Julian was of course not the sort of scholar who would have been aware that Stevenson had abandoned his derogation of Thoreau, and would not have cared that Stevenson had become apologetic and regretful. Thoreau offended so thoroughly both in his deportment and in his writings, that Julian could even bracket her with that useless, unvalued, exceptionally ugly, self-conceited and disagreeable woman, found to be an object of disgust by his father Nathaniel, Margaret Fuller!

H.G.O. BLAKE’S “WINTER” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI March: Robert Louis Stevenson and William Ernest Henley quarreled about Frances (Fanny) Matilda Vandegrift (or Van de Grift) Stevenson’s short story “The Nixie.” Henley accuses Fanny of plagiarizing the story from Katharine de Mattos (Stevenson’s cousin and Bob Stevenson’s sister). The husband took the wife’s side — and his friendship with Henley would never fully recover.

“Books of the Month” in The Atlantic Monthly provided a review of WINTER: “This volume ... will have a strong interest for lovers of a writer who is winning a place in men’s regard as well as holding his place in literature. It seems to us that a softer manner pervades this book, and that one might almost take it as expressing riper thought; but that, of course, can be only fancy, since the plan of editing precludes such a notion. If the interest in Thoreau increases, his admirers and students will begin to wish that they had his writings before them more distinctly in chronological order. Mr. Blake’s careful dating, however, of these volumes of extracts will put the reader in possession of the means of such a survey.”

Julian Hawthorne’s review of Blake’s WINTER excerpts from Henry Thoreau’s journal, that had appeared in the January issue of Bookmart, resurfaced in this month’s issue of American Magazine. H.G.O. BLAKE’S “WINTER” The appearance of another posthumous Thoreau volume (“Winter”: Houghton & Co.) recalls another case of a misrepresented American. But, as Mr. McMaster has distorted the great Franklin by laying disproportionate emphasis on his vices and deficiencies, so the friends of Thoreau have distorted him by interpreting his limitations and defects as virtues and gifts, and magnifying them until their poor possessor becomes unintelligible. Thoreau was neither a child nor man; he had the narrowness but not the ingenuousness of the former, and the vanity and self-consciousness of the latter, without the redeeming tolerance and common-sense. He had a good though ultra-bilious physical organization; his nature was bitter, selfish, jealous and morbid. His human affections were scarcely more than rudimentary; his intellect was sharp and analytical, but small in scope and resource; he shunned society because he lacked the faculty of making himself decently agreeable; and yet no man ever hankered more insatiably after social notice and approbation. No prudent well-wisher of this forlorn and pathetic personage would have permitted the greater part of the contents of this volume to appear in print. Almost every page is defaced with his vapid and morbid sentimentality. He tries to make himself believe that he is a philosopher, a moralist, a grand, misapprehended soul; he writes interminably in the Emersonian dialect, but thereby only renders his unlikeness to that generous and joyful sage more excruciating. It is evident that he seldom succeeded in deceiving even himself in regard to the emptiness of his pretentions. Thoreau was the most dismal fraud of the New England transcendental group. He observed natural phenomena well, and described them with laborious minuteness; but he has added no fact of importance to natural science. Of the books that he published the best thing that can be said is, that they are better than the journals published after his death. Such being the man, it would be interesting to ask how he acquired so much notoriety and mistaken adulation. He and Margaret Fuller may be bracketed together in this connection: neither of them was of any actual use or value in the world; and yet a number of amiable and near-sighted people, upon the theory that whoever is exceptionally ugly, self-conceited and disagreeable must possess a superior nature, have made golden HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI calves of these poor mortals, and fallen down and worshiped them in the wilderness. A future generation will correctly appraise the calves; but the worshipers will puzzle them. AMERICAN MAGAZINE HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1891

August 22, Saturday: Walter Lewin offered, in The Academy, an “Obituary. James Russell Lowell,” He wrote in regard to Lowell’s “excess of ‘self-consciousness,’ that sometimes barred him for forming an impersonal and impartial estimate,” He offered that Lowell’s “estimate of Thoreau is as perverse as Margaret Fuller’s estimate of himself. When his selfconsciousness was excited, his criticism was hopeless.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1902

March: Professor William James’s THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL RELIGION DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH IN 1901-1902.

“...a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep.” — Professor William James

“I accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad! she’d better!” At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission, — as Carlyle would have us — “Gad! we’d better!” — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s edition of Henry Thoreau’s article “The Service,” that had been rejected in 1840 by Margaret Fuller for THE DIAL: “THE SERVICE” IN 1902 HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1905

Margaret Fuller had evidently rejected Henry Thoreau’s 1843 lecture “Sir Walter Raleigh” in essay form for THE DIAL. It remained a fair copy with pencil revisions until the publication in this year of SIR WALTER RALEIGH: LATELY DISCOVERED AMONG HIS UNPUBLISHED JOURNALS AND MANUSCRIPTS as edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn by the Bibliophile Society in Boston in 489 copies “for members only.” SIR WALTER RALEIGH

Its editors had access to three drafts: Thoreau’s preliminary notes, a heavily corrected 2d draft he produced from these preliminary notes which comprised the working manuscript he used to produce the fair copy, and the fair copy itself. (This 2d draft was acquired as part of the Bixby collection by the Huntington Library, but then they sold it at auction in 1916, perhaps by mistake. That draft is now in the hands of an anonymous private collector who, wouldn’t you know, refuses to let anyone see it.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1928

R. Buckminster Fuller wrote to his mother about his discovery, during his youth, of his Great Aunt Margaret Fuller’s thought and its parallels to his own: “I have been reading much by Margaret Fuller lately. I was astonished to find that some things I have been writing myself are about identical to things I find in her writings. I am terribly interested and am astounded fully that I should have grown to this age and never have read anything of her or grandfather Fuller’s.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1961

Edith Curtis reported in A SEASON IN UTOPIA — THE STORY OF BROOK FARM that one building and some foundations and cellar hole were visible, but that was about all. Joel Myerson has confirmed this information: “The last remaining building at Brook Farm –the “Margaret Fuller” cottage– burned down some years back. The land is now publicly owned and is being preserved. I don’t believe there are any markers. For the last couple of years Harvard University’s anthropology department has been running courses out there and they’ve done a good deal of excavating. The most knowledgeable person on what’s going on is Sterling Delano at Villanova, who’s writing a history of the community.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1963

Professor Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller (1905-1963) suggested, in MARGARET FULLER, AMERICAN ROMANTIC: A SELECTION FROM HER WRITINGS AND CORRESPONDENCE (Anchor), that Margaret’s not having attempted to swim ashore through the breaking waves might be considered as suicide. (Was he or was he not aware that her spine was twisted?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1972

August: According to Joseph Jay Deiss’s “Humanity, Said Edgar Allan Poe, is Divided Into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller,”132 the primary responsibility for the memory hole down which Fuller has disappeared “lies with her intimate friend Ralph Waldo Emerson,” who, under the guise of loving kindness, defeminized, distorted, and diminished the image of her that has come down to us. ...Emerson dominated a triumvirate, with William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, to edit her so-called MEMOIRS. His tricky techniques –whether deliberate or unconscious– converted her from a warm, rich, loving personality into a snobbish, egotistical, passionless old maid. ... He did not hesitate ... to include remarks that he attributed to Margaret, attested to by no one but himself, which helped establish the false image of her overweening egotism, her “rather mountainous ME,” as he described it. One such has passed into the history books: “She said to her friends, ‘I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’” In the copy of the MEMOIRS owned originally by Margaret’s first love, George T. Davis, pencilled beside this quotation of Emerson’s is the phrase “Sublime bosh!” Another example of his doctoring: Emerson stated in the MEMOIRS that Margaret’s famous passage describing Mazzini was written to him — “You say, do I not wish Italy had a great man. Mazzini is a great man: in mind a great poetic statesman, in heart a lover, in action decisive and full of resources as Caesar. Dearly I love Mazzini, who also loves me.” This paragraph in fact was not addressed to Emerson at all, but to Caroline Sturgis. Emerson deleted it from Caroline’s letter and attached it to one addressed to him. Emerson went further with his literary license. He revised Margaret’s sentences and substituted words, modifying her lava- hot style into a semblance of his own stiff, pontifical language. He changed places and dates. He shifted copy from one source to another. He blue-pencilled, deleted, scissored whole sections of letters and journals. Sometimes letters were copied and originals discarded. Scores of pages of secret diaries were ripped away. In the end some vital part of Margaret had been amputated, and Emerson rested content with the portrait he and his fellow editors had created. In essence, despite their stated kindness, they distrusted her because she was a woman intellectual who dared acknowledge her sexuality.

132. American Heritage Volume XXIII Number 5 (August 1972):42-47. For amplification, peruse his THE ROMAN YEARS OF MARGARET FULLER (Crowell, 1969). HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1983

July 1, Friday: R. Buckminster Fuller died in Los Angeles at the age of 87 (Bucky’s book GRUNCH OF GIANTS, published in this year by St. Martin’s Press, was dedicated in part to the memory of one of his great aunts, Margaret Fuller): I dedicate this book to three women: one of the nineteenth and two of the twentieth centuries. First, to my great aunt, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, who with Ralph Waldo Emerson co-edited the Transcendentalist magazine, the Dial, and was the first to publish Thoreau — and herself authored WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. I am sure Margaret would and probably does join in my enthusiastic support and co-dedication of this book to Marilyn Ferguson, author of THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY, and to Barbara Marx Hubbard, founder of the Committee for the Future, for their effective inspiration to the young world to do its own thinking and to act in accordance therewith. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI

1991

Lucy Maddox’s REMOVALS: NINETEENTH C ENTURY A MERICAN L ITERATURE AND THE P OLITICS OF I NDIAN AFFAIRS (Oxford UP). Lucy Maddox’s REMOVALS: NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF I NDIAN A FFAIRS analyzed Margaret Fuller’s representation of Native Americans in SUMMER ON THE LAKES IN 1843, pointing out that her images of Native Americans amount to little better than stock materials drawn from other American and British travel texts. Contemporary texts resembling hers are Eliza Steele’s SUMMER JOURNEY IN THE WEST, Harriet Martineau’s RETROSPECT OF WESTERN TRAVEL, and Frances Trollope’s DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS. Can an interest in picturesque tourism coexist with truly sympathetic portraits of marginalized others? Picturesque travel, as much as it is about beautiful vistas and framing, is centrally concerned with representation. These representations may be codes, but authors such as Fuller play with them. Since Fuller considered that she was representing Native Americans both sympathetically and realistically, this points to a problem inherent in the genre of travel writing: Travel writing tends to write lived experience into aesthetic experience. Fuller parodied the conventions of British travel literature in structuring her picturesque sketchbook. According to Christina Zwarg’s FEMINIST CONVERSATIONS: FULLER, EMERSON, AND THE PLAY OF READING, Fuller’s radicalism is linked to her aesthetics. She struggled with aesthetics and representation because the idea of America was still being contested. Several controversial British travel texts were published during the 1830s and 1840s: Charles Dickens’s AMERICAN NOTES and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT were published a year before. HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: February 19, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.