Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/112



looking forward to leaving the scene of her school-teaching, Margaret Fuller wrote thus to Mrs. Barlow in a moment of headache and nervous exhaustion: —

&emsp; “I shall go home about Christmas and stay till April, and never set foot out of doors unless to take exercise; and see no human face, divine or otherwise, out of my own family. But I am wearied out and I have gabbled and simpered and given my mind to the public view these two years back, till there seems to be no good left in me.”

She wrote to Mr. Emerson of the remaining months of that winter, “ My sufferings last winter in Groton were almost constant, and I see the journal is very sickly in its tone. I have taken out some leaves. Now I am a perfect Phœnix compared with what I was then, and it all seems past to me.”

During this invalid winter, however, she made a brief visit to Boston, where she had three en-