Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/298

280 him in life. Among the papers in the trunk was found one memorial which lies before me now, faded and wave-stained. It is a memorandum that was written long before by Margaret Ossoli, during one of her Italian intervals of separation from her child, and folded round a lock of her husband’s hair. The paper is as follows: —

&emsp; “I saw this morning a beautiful child beginning to walk. He had only eight months, yet is large, fair, rosy, has sixteen teeth. His mother has begun to give him food and wants to wet-nurse another child. Lives 55 via St. Basileo. He had already plenty of hair.

“How will Angelino seem when I go to him?”

Little could she have foreseen under what circumstances of deeper tragedy this mother’s reverie would be read by strangers. As we read it, the final question expands to a vaster significance than it first had; and represents the eternal unanswered longing of the human heart.