Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/36

18 picture of primitive piety as she sat, holding the ‘Saints' Rest’ in her hand, with her bowed, trembling figure and her emphatic nods, and her bright, sweet blue eyes. They were bright to the last, though she was ninety. I went to see her just before I came back here. It is a great loss to mother, who felt a large place warmed in her heart by the fond and grateful love of this aged parent.”

Margaret Fuller’s mother was married May 28, 1809; and came to dwell, with her husband, in Cambridge. She had in youth great personal beauty, the inheritance of which has conspicuously come down, here and there, to her descendants. This consisted especially in a peculiar richness of complexion, which time had spared even to the period when I knew her. She was tall, slender, dignified in bearing, but awkward rather than graceful in movement, and with a peculiar sweetness of expression in her face. Her manner is excellently described in a phrase applied by Bettina Brentano to her friend Günderode: “She was timid-friendly.” During her husband’s public life she was much in Washington society; but withdrew, as years went on, into a sort of double domesticity, dividing her life between her children and her flowers. Of each she had a large family, and, when she removed from one residence to another, the garden was transplanted like the nursery. She had eight different homes during her married life; but there were families and gen-