Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/50

32 thought of my finding it in Father’s desk, with all these other little tokens. It was a touching sight. Father, if you hear me, know that your daughter thinks of you with the respect and relenting tenderness you deserve. Time has removed all obstructions to a clear view of what you were. I am glad you were withdrawn from a world which had grown so bitter to you; but I wish we might reach you with our gentle thoughts.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is now a city of 52,000 inhabitants, had, at the time of Margaret Fuller’s birth, but 2,328. When she was twenty years old it had 6,072, divided between three detached villages; and was in many respects a very pleasant place in which to be born and bred. It was, no doubt, in the current phrase of to-day, “provincial;” in other words, it was not one of the two or three great capitals of the civilized world; but there are few places in any country which bring together a larger proportion of cultivated and agreeable families than must then have been found in this quiet academic suburb. One could not quite venture to say of it as Stuart Newton, the painter, said of Boston, during a brilliant London career about that period, “I meet in London occasionally such society as I met in Boston all the time;” but it needs only to mention some of the men who made Cambridge what it was, between 1810 and 1880, to show that my claim for the little town is not too high. Judge