Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/181

166 Margaret found no exaggeration in the enthusiasm expressed by poets and artists for the scenery of this lake region. The descriptions of it given by Goethe, Richter, and Taylor had not prepared her for what she saw. Even Turner's pictures had fallen short of the real beauty. At Lugano she met Lady Franklin, the widow of the Arctic explorer. She returned to Milan by the 8th of September, in time for the great feast of the Madonna, and finally left the city " with great regret, and hope to return." In, a letter to her brother Richard she speaks of her Radical friends there as "a circle of aspiring youth, such as I have not known in any other city.” Conspicuous among these was the young Marquis Guerrieri Conzaga, commended to her by “a noble soul, the quietest sensibility, and a brilliant and ardent, though not a great, mind." This gentleman has to-day a recognised position in Italy as a thoroughly enlightened and intelligent Liberal.

Margaret found among the Milaneac, as she must have anticipated, a great hatred of the Austrian rule, aggravated, at the time of her second visit, by acts of foolish and useless repression. On the occasion of the festivals attending the entry of a new archbishop, some youths (among them possibly Margaret's Radical friends) determined to sing the hymn composed at Rome in honour of Pius IX. The consequence of this was a charge of the armed Austrian police upon the defenceless crowd of people present, who, giving way, were stabbed by them in the back. Margaret's grief and indignation at this state of things made her feel keenly the general indifference of her own travelling country-people to the condition and fate of Italy.

"Persons who call themselves Americans—miser-