Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare02fullrich).pdf/286

278 Had I never connected myself with any one, my path was clear; now it is all hid; but, in that case, my development must have been partial. As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life. Still, I do not find it burdensome. The friction that I have seen mar so much the domestic happiness of others does not occur with us, or, at least, has not occurred. Then, there is the pleasure of always being at hand to help one another,

Still, the great novelty, the immense gain, to me, is my relation with my child. I thought the mother’s heart lived in me before, but it did not; — I knew nothing about it. Yet, before his birth, I dreaded it. I thought I should not survive; but if I did, and my child did, was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world? I could not, at that time, get any other view. When he was born, that deep melancholy changed at once into rapture; but it did not last long. Then came the prudential motherhood. I grew a coward, a caretaker, not only for the morrow, but, impiously faithless, for twenty or thirty years ahead. It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves. I imagined everything; — he was to be in danger of every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the infants of Lombardy; — the house would be burned over his head; but, if he escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers? Then his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough, &c. &c.

During the siege of Rome, I could not see my little boy. What I endured at that time, in various ways,