Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/324

 planted the most extensive and important educational and missionary establishment that the Protestants have ever had in British America: and she is now the beloved mother, the revered Directress of the whole. Her many years of labour have only served to add new energies to her nature, new graces to her soul. Nothing discourages, nothing disturbs her. To her God she commits herself and her cares, with the same trust and love a favourite child feels in the arms of its father.  FERGUSON, ELIZABETH GRÆME, of Dr. Thomas Graeme, who emigrated from Scotland to America, was born in Philadelphia, in 1739. She was very carefully educated, and shewed uncommon abilities. While still young, she translated Fenelon's Telemachus into English verse; she also wrote several smaller poems, which, together with her essays and some of her letters, have been published. She married Mr. Hugh Henry Ferguson; but on the breaking out of the Revolution, in 1775, as he adhered to the British government, and she was faithful to her country, they separated, and never lived together again. Mrs. Ferguson died in 1801.  FERNANDEZ, MARIA MADDALENA MORELLI, the admiration of all Italy as an improvisatrice. The talent of improvising in poetry seems to be almost exclusively allotted to the Italians, among whom the structure of their verse, and the conventional, ever-recurring rhymes, render it an easier matter to employ this frame-work to thought, than would be possible under a different system of prosody. If, however, the powers of ordinary improvisatori, for these reasons, are not to be overvalued,—when thought, imagery, feeling, passion, harmony of numbers, flow spontaneously, the admiration and wonder they excite must be unbounded, as these qualities are independent of any rhythm, and would command praise and enthusiasm, even when such effusions were produced upon study, and corrected efforts.

Among the improvisatori whose fame has been more than ephemeral, perhaps the first was Maria Morelli. She was born of noble parents, in the city of Pistoja, in the year 1740. From her earliest years she manifested a quick ear for harmony, and a talent for improvisation. This talent was heightened by an excellent education; her mind was stored with history and science, and her imagination improved by assiduous reading of the best poets. Her parents, proud of her genius, took her to Rome, to exhibit her powers to the academy of "Arcadia." Gifted with personal beauty and grace, she received the highest applause, and was made a member of that society, under the name of Gorilla Olympia, by which she was afterwards universally designated. At Naples she was received with enthusiasm, and there captivated a young Sicilian gentleman, named Fernandez, to whom she was united in marriage. Her fame soon resounded throughout Europe, and she was noticed by the most illustrious persons of the age. The Emperor Joseph the Second visited her at Naples; and Pope Clement the Fourteenth directed to her an honourable brief, by which he permitted her to read forbidden books. She published some poems, an epic poem dedicated to the Empress of Russia, an epistle to Metastasio, and