Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/49

Rh ing child.” I knew her intimately, her husband being my near relative, and our households being for various reasons closely brought together; and have always considered her one of the most admirable women I have ever had the good fortune to meet. She not only had an active and cultivated mind, and a strength of character that surmounted some of life’s severest trials, but she was as singularly gifted in the sphere of home and social life as was her sister in that of literature. She instantly drew to her all strangers by her face, while her elder sister had no such advantage; and though it is certain that no shade of jealousy ever came between these high-minded persons, it was not in human nature that Margaret Fuller should not have felt her own conscious want of attractions to be enhanced by the contrast.

As a tribute to this fair sister, and also to the deep feeling which Margaret Fuller at last learned to cherish toward her father, I copy the following reminiscence from a diary kept by her many years later: —

“I remembered our walking in the garden avenue, between the tall white lilies and Ellen’s apple-tree; she was a lovely child then, and happy, but my heart ached, and I lived in just the way I do now. Father said, seeing me at a distance, ‘Incedo regina,’ etc. Poor Juno! Father admired me, and, though he caused me so much suffering, had a true sense at times of what is tragic for me. The other day, when C—— was cutting a lock of my hair for one who so little knows how to value it, I