Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/52

34 young men who were her contemporaries some companions well worth having. She went into society, as has been seen, very early — far too early. The class with which she may be said to have danced through college — to adopt Howells's phrase — was that of 1829, which has been made, by the wit and poetry of Holmes, the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. With Holmes she was not especially intimate, though they had been school-mates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the class — William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke — she formed a life-long friendship, and they became her biographers. Another of these biographers — the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge, her townsman — knew her also at this period, though he had already left college and had previously been absent from Cambridge for some years, at a German gymnasium. Still another associate, also of the class of 1829, was her kinsman, George T. Davis, afterwards well known as a member of Congress from the Greenfield (Mass.) district, — a man of the world and of brilliant gifts.

But after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own sex; and since Margaret Fuller's mother was one of the self-effacing sort, it was fortunate for the young girl that, by a natural reaction, she sought feminine influences outside of her own home. She was one of those maidens who form passionate attachments to older women; and there