Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/110

92 much repressed. To common observers I seem well placed here, but I know that it is not so, and that I have had more than average difficulties to encounter, some of them insurmountable. But from these difficulties I have learned so much that I cannot but suppose my experience is to be of further use.

“I do not wish to teach again at all. If I consult my own wishes I shall employ the remainder of my life in quite a different manner. But I foresee circumstances that may make it wrong for me to obey my wishes.

“Mother has sold her place at Groton, and as she is to leave it in April, I shall go home and stay three months at least. I dream of Elysian peace, of quiet growth, and other benefits no doubt well-known to your imagination. Then I hope to prevail on her to board with Ellen and me, and send the boys to school for some months. But after that we must find a sure foothold on the earth somewhere and plan anew a home.

“But this leaves me nearly a year for my own inventions. If at the end of that time it should seem necessary for the good of all concerned that I should teach again, I wish to do it, and by the success I have already attained, and by the confidence I now feel in my powers, both of arrangement of a whole and action on parts, feel myself justified in thinking I may do it to much greater pecuniary advantage and with much more extensive good results to others than I have yet done.”

A plan suggested by Cincinnati friends for a school in that city came to nothing, and she left Providence for Boston in December, 1838. This was the end of her school-teaching, though she continued to take occasional private pupils in lan-