Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/20

2 already drawn of her character by the authors of the “Memoirs,” and the excellence of Mrs. Howe's more condensed biography, I have sometimes ventured to vary from their estimate, and to rely on my own.

It so happened that Margaret Fuller was associated with me, not closely but definitely, by various personal ties. She was born and bred in the same town, though more than thirteen years older; she was the friend of my older sisters, and I was the playmate of her younger brothers; her only sister was afterwards closely connected with me by marriage, and came for especial reasons, with her children, peculiarly under my charge; and, though this was after Margaret Fuller's death, it yet contributed with all the other circumstances to make the Fuller family seem like kindred of my own. It moreover happened that Margaret Fuller had upon me, through her writings, a more immediate intellectual influence than any one except Emerson, and possibly Parker. All this guarantees that warm feeling of personal interest, without which no memoir can be well written, while there was yet too little of intimacy to give place for the glamour of affection. This biography may therefore serve as an intermediate step between the original “Memoirs”—which gave the estimate offered by personal friendship—and that remoter verdict which will be the judgment of an impartial posterity.

The sources on which I have chiefly relied are