Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/264

246 ness of its nurse, whose milk failing, [she] fed it upon wine and bread, and this at the time when Mr. and Mrs. Ossoli were shut up in Rome, during the siege. When, at last, she could leave Rome and go into the country to see him, she found him quite ill, almost, as she feared, beyond recovery, so that she at once took him to Florence, where he has regained his health.

Mr. Ossoli does not speak English, not even a sentence, that I ever heard, so that he has not been known to many Americans, not even to some of William’s friends; but he was often at our house, and we knew him, perhaps, better than any one.’

“You may have seen this before, but not in the same form, and I thought it might be interesting to you to hear from a fresh person so pleasant a statement of Mr. Ossoli’s character, pleasanter than those we have sometimes heard here.

“I shall not give up that day you promised me, but find you soon, and make you fix upon one.

“.&emsp;

It is a curious fact that, throughout this letter, Mrs. Lowell uniformly spells the name of Margaret Fuller’s husband “Ossili,” and it illustrates how vague a knowledge of the whole affair had at first reached America. Through such statements as these it came to be better understood; and the really simple and noble character of Margaret Fuller’s young lover stood out above all distrust. There lie before me two old-fashioned daguerreotypes of him, and a lock of his hair, the charac-