The Romance of Old New England RooftreesCrawford, Mary Caroline
History
The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees
Crawford, Mary Caroline
Historic buildings -- New England; New England -- Biography
The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard
College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry
of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of
one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she
appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.
"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her
head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white
muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal
so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."
With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had
been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the
class--William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke--she formed a
lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.
Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that
which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had
quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form passionate
attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the
college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.
"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography
of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious,
over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with
kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times
with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own
duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and
sometimes inconvenient adorer."
The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid
heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and this it is which
seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable--her
romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in
truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as
he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the
woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh
sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fashion in
which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of
educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides
selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson
would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who
was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation classes on
West Street, Boston, and labours on the _Dial_, a transcendental paper
in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not space to speak
here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that
performed on the _Tribune_, in the days of Horace Greeley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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