Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/41

Rh respects! It is not mother’s fault that she was ignorant of every physical law, young, untaught country girl as she was; but I can’t help mourning, sometimes, that my bodily life should have been so destroyed by the ignorance of both my parents.”

At thirteen, Margaret Fuller was so precocious in mind and appearance as to take her place in society with much older girls; she went to parties of young people, and gave such entertainments for herself. Having been a pupil at the school, then celebrated, of Dr. Park, in Boston, she once attempted to mingle her two sets of friends — Boston and Cambridge — at a party given in her own house. The attempt was disastrous; she had little natural tact, and her endeavors to pay, as was proper, the chief attention to the stranger guests brought upon her the general indignation of her little world in Cambridge. Partly in consequence of this untoward state of things, and in order to change the scene, she was sent as a pupil to the school of the Misses Prescott, in Groton. There she had a curious episode of personal experience, recorded in her “Summer on the Lakes” as having occurred to a certain fabled “Mariana;” and she received from her teachers a guidance so kind and tender as to make her grateful for it during all her life. She returned from this school in the spring of 1825, being then just fifteen.

At this time she lived, as always, a busy life, — rose before five in summer, walked an hour, prac-