Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. 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. In the coolest way she said to her friends, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”... I have heard that from the beginning of her life, she idealized herself as a sovereign. She told ---- she early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, and that for years she dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her parents’ child, but an European princess confided to their care. She remembered that when a little girl, she was walking one day under the apple trees with such an air and step that her father pointed her out to her sister, saying, “_Incedit regina_.” [Sidenote: A “mountainous me.”] It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, “He appreciates _me_.” There was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which as yet had found no right channels. R. W. EMERSON: ‘Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Humor.] Those who think of this accomplished woman as a mere _bas bleu_, a pedant, a solemn Minerva, should have heard the peals of laughter which her profuse and racy humor drew from old and young. The Easy Chair remembers stepping into Noah Gerrish’s West Roxbury omnibus one afternoon in Cornhill, in Boston, to drive out the nine miles to Brook Farm. The only other passenger was Miss Fuller, then freshly returned from her “summer on the lakes,” and never was a long, jolting journey more lightened and shortened than by her witty and vivid sketches of life and character. Her quick and shrewd observation is shown in the book, but the book has none of the comedy of the _croquis_ of persons which her sparkling humor threw off, and which she too enjoyed with the utmost hilarity, joining heartily in the laughter, which was only increased by her sympathy with the amusement of her auditor. GEO. WM. CURTIS, ‘Easy Chair,’ _Harper’s Magazine_, March, 1882. * * * * * [Sidenote: Ill health.] [Sidenote: Alleged second sight.]