Page:Female Prose Writers of America.djvu/271

 (MARCHIONESS OF OSSOLI.)

was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 23, 1810. She was the daughter of the Hon. Timothy Fuller, a lawyer of Boston, but nearly all his life a resident of Cambridge, and a Representative of the Middlesex 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.

Margaret 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. 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 afterwards 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 that city.

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 Criticisms on current Literature and Art, a position which she filled with eminent ability for nearly two years. Her reviews of Longfellow’s Poems, Wesley’s Memoirs, Poe’s Poems, Bailey’s “Festus,” Douglas’s Life, &c., may be mentioned with special emphasis. She had previously found “fit audience, though few,” for a series of remarkable papers on “The Great Musicians,” “Lord Herbert of Cherbury,” “Woman,” &c., in “The Dial,” of which she was at first co-editor