Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/17

2 This biography, so rich in its suggestions and so valuable in its details, is already set in a past light by the progress of men and of things. Its theme has lost none of its interest. Nay, it is through the growing interest felt in Margaret and her work that a demand seems to have arisen for a later word about her, which cannot hope to be better or wiser than the words already made public, but which may borrow from them the inspiration for a new study and presentment.

According to the authorities already established, Sarah Margaret Puller, the child of Timothy and Margaret Crane Fuller, was born at Cambridgeport, near Boston, on the 23rd of May 1810. She has herself given some account of her early life in an auto-biographical sketch which forms the prelude to the work already published. Her father, she says, "was a lawyer and a politician, the son of a country clergyman, Harvard-bred both as to his college and his professional studies. She remembers him chiefly as absorbed in the business and interest of his profession, intent upon compassing the support of his family, and achieving such distinction as might prove compatible with that object. Her mother she describes as "one of those fair, flower-like natures, which sometimes spring up even beside the most dusty highways of life, —bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds" And in the arduous labour of her father^s life, his love for this sweet mother "was the green spot on which he stood apart from the common-places of a mere bread-winning, bread- bestowing existence."

The case between Margaret and her father is the first to be disposed of in our cosisideration of her life and character. In the document just quoted from