Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/64

Rh most remarkable, and her taste is as fine as her prudence. I think her the most brilliant talker of her day."

Margaret now passed through twenty-five weeks of incessant labour, suffering the while from her head, which she calls "a bad head," but which we should consider a most abused one. Her retrospect of this period of toil is interesting, and with its severity she remembers also its value to her. Meeting with many disappointments at the outset, and feeling painfully the new circumstances which obliged her to make merchandise of her gifts and acquirements, she yet says that she rejoices over it all, "and would not have undertaken an iota less." Besides fulfilling her intention of self-support, she feels that she has gained in the power of attention, in self-command, and in the knowledge of methods of instruction, without in the least losing sight of the aims which had made hitherto the happiness and enthusiasm of her life.

Here is, in brief, the tale of her winter's work.

To one class she gave elementary instruction in German, and that so efficiently that her pupils were able to read the language with ease at the end of three months. With another class she read, in twenty-four weeks, Schiller's Don Carlos, Artists, and Song of the Bell; Goethe's Herrman und Dorothea, Götz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, first part of Faust, and Clavigo; Lessing's Nathan der Weise, Minna, and Emilia Galotti; parts of Tieck's Phantasus, and nearly all of the first volume of Richter's Titan.

With the Italian class she read parts of Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Alfieri, and the whole hundred cantos of Dante's Divina Commedia. Besides these