Page:Eminent women of the age.djvu/196

174. others of the family. It is well to mention even such slight ties of association as these, for they unconsciously influence one's impressions ; and, after all, it is the personal glimpses which make the best part of biography, great or small, and indeed of all literature. How refreshing it is, amid the chaff of Aulas Gellius, tcr come- upon a. reference 4o Vireil's own copy of the .^neid, which the writer had once seen, ^ quern ipsius Virgilii fuisse credebat ;" and nothing in aU Lord Bacon's works ever stirred me like that one magic sen- tence, ^ When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years." I can say that when I wa^ a chfld, Margaret Fuller was the queen of Cambridge, though trouble^ with a large minority of rather unwilling and insurrectionary subjects.

Her mother I well remember as one of the sweetest and most sympathetic of women ; she was tall and not unattractive in person, refined and gentle, but with a certain physical awkwardness, proceeding in part from extreme nearsightedness. Of the father I have no recollection, save that he was mentioned with a sort of respect, ad being a lawyer and hav- ing been a congressman. But his daughter has described him, in her fragment of autobiography, with her accustomed frankness and precision : —

"My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely endowed with that sagacious energy which the state of New England society for the last half century has been so well fitted to develop. His father was a clergyman, settled as pastor in Princeton, Massachusetts, within the bounds of whose parish farm was Wachusett. His means were small, and the great object of his ambition was to send his sons to college. As a boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing himself for Harvard University, and, when there, of preparing himself for the profession of law. As a lawyer,