head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white
muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal
so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."
With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had
been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the
class--William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke--she formed a
lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.
Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that
which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had
quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form passionate
attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the
college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.
"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography
of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious,
over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with
kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times
with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own
duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and
sometimes inconvenient adorer."
The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid
heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and this it is which
seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable--her
romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in
truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as
he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the
woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh
sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fashion in
which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of
educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides
selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson
would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who
was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation classes on
West Street, Boston, and labours on the _Dial_, a transcendental paper
in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not space to speak
here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that
performed on the _Tribune_, in the days of Horace Greeley.
Greeley brought Boston's high priestess to New York for the purpose of
putting the literary criticism of the _Tribune_ on a higher plane than
any American newspaper then occupied, as well as that she might discuss
in a large and stimulating way all philanthropic questions. That she
rose to the former opportunity her enemies would be the first to grant,
but only those who, like Margaret herself, believe in the sisterhood of
women could freely endorse her attitude on philanthropic subjects.
Surely, though, it could not have been a hard woman of whom Horace
Greeley wrote: "If she had been born to large fortune, a house of
refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue
would have been one of her most cherished and first realised
conceptions. She once attended, with other noble women, a gathering of
outcasts of their sex, and, being asked how they appeared to her,
replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and
misfortune.'"
While labouring for the _Tribune_, Margaret Fuller was all the time
saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been
her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she
sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was
secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these
experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse
into her private journal in which she had many years before recorded
her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.
"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see
some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and
shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere
disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me
has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must
paralyse me...."
The circumstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met
are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in
1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming
separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she
examined the church by a young man of gentlemanly address, who,
perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services
as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.
Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he,
accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before
she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an
apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young
patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was
thoroughly in sympathy.
When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret
refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman
for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story,
who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and
unhappy. He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless,
desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love, and she
married him."
Then followed the wife's service in the hospitals while Ossoli was in
the army outside the city. After the birth of their child, Angelo, the
happy little family went to Florence.
The letters which passed between the young nobleman and the wife he
adored are still extant, having been with the body of her beautiful baby
the only things of Margaret Fuller's saved from the fatal wreck in which
she and her two loved ones were lost. One of these letters will be
enough to show the tenderness of the man:
"Rome, 21 October, 1848.
"MIA CARA:--I learn by yours of the 20th that you have received the ten
scudi, and it makes me more tranquil. I feel also Mogliani's indolence
in not coming to inoculate our child; but, my love, I pray you not to
disturb yourself so much, and not to be sad, hoping that our dear love
will be guarded by God, and will be free from all misfortunes. He will
keep the child for us and give us the means to sustain him."
* * * * *
In answer to this letter, or one like it, we find the woman whom
Hawthorne had deemed hard and cold writing:
"Saturday Evening,
28 October, 1848.
"... It rains very hard every day, but to-day I have been more quiet,
and our darling has been so good, I have taken so much pleasure in being
with him. When he smiles in his sleep, how it makes my heart beat! He
has grown fat and very fair, and begins to play and spring. You will
have much pleasure in seeing him again. He sends you many kisses. He
bends his head toward me when he asks a kiss."
* * * * *
Both Madame Ossoli and her husband were very fearful as they embarked on
the fated ship which was to take them to America. He had been cautioned
by one who had told his fortune when a boy to beware of the sea, and his
wife had long cherished a superstition that the year 1850 would be a
marked epoch in her life. It is remarkable that in writing to a friend
of her fear Madame Ossoli said: "I pray that if we are lost it may be
brief anguish, and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together."
They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, on the _Elizabeth_, a new
merchant vessel, which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune soon began. The
captain sickened and died of malignant smallpox, and after his burial
at sea and a week's detention at Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the
dread disease and was restored with difficulty. Yet a worse fate was to
follow.
At noon of July 18, while they were off the coast of New Jersey, there
was a gale, followed by a hurricane, which dashed the ship on that Fire
Island Beach which has engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret Fuller
and her husband were drowned with their child. The bodies of the parents
were never recovered, but that of little Angelo was buried in a seaman's
chest among the sandhills, from which it was later disinterred and
brought to our own Mount Auburn by the relatives who had never seen the
baby in life.
And there to-day in a little green grave rests the child of this great
woman's great love.
THE OLD MANSE AND SOME OF ITS MOSSES
"The Old Manse," writes Hawthorne, in his charming introduction to the
quaint stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse", "had never been profaned by
a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it
as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other
priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its
chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It is awful to
reflect how many sermons must have been written here!... Here it was,
too, that Emerson wrote 'Nature;' for he was then an inhabitant of
the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and
moon-rise from the summit of our eastern hill."
[Illustration: OLD MANSE, CONCORD, MASS.]
Emerson's residence in the Old Manse is to be accounted for by the fact
that his grandfather was its first inhabitant. And it was while living
there with his mother and kindred, before his second marriage in 1835,
that he produced "Nature."
It is to the parson, the Reverend William Emerson, that we owe one of
the most valuable Revolutionary documents that have come down to us.
Soon after the young minister came to the old Manse (which was then the
New Manse), he had occasion to make in his almanac this stirring entry:
"This morning, between one and two o'clock, we were alarmed by the
ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to the
number of eight hundred, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and
barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge, near
to Inman's farm, and were at Lexington meeting-house half an hour before
sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and (as we afterward
heard) had killed several. This intelligence was brought us first by
Doctor Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent
before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from
giving us timely information. He, by the help of a very fleet horse,
crossing several walks and fences, arrived at Concord, at the time above
mentioned; when several posts were immediately dispatched that,
returning, confirmed the account of the regulars' arrival at Lexington
and that they were on their way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our
minute-men belonging to this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several
others that were in readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm
company was preparing to receive them in the town. Captain Minot, who
commanded them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above
the meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had our
men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent out to
meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon us, and that
we must retreat, as their number was more than treble ours. We then
retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and took a new post back
of the town upon an eminence, where we formed into two battalions, and
waited the arrival of the enemy.
"Scarcely had we formed before we saw the British troops at the
distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing toward us
with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a stand,
notwithstanding the superiority of their numbers, but others, more
prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be equal to
the enemy's by recruits from the neighbouring towns, that were
continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we retreated over
the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set fire to several
carriages for the artillery, destroyed sixty barrels flour, rifled
several houses, took possession of the town-house, destroyed five
hundred pounds of balls, set a guard of one hundred men at the North
Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Colonel Barrett, where they
were in the expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But
these were happily secured just before their arrival, by transportation
into the woods and other by-places.
"In the meantime the guard sent by the enemy to secure the pass at the
North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who had
retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with special
orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were
so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three
several and separate discharges of their pieces before it was returned
by our commanding officer; the firing then became general for several
minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of
the enemy wounded. (It may here be observed, by the way, that we were
the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the king's troops,
as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not
that they had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people,
and killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops soon
quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder
and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet
them.
"For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches,
discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,--sometimes
advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at length
they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In the
meantime, a party of our men (one hundred and fifty), took the back way
through the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed
themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences, and
buildings, ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat."[12]
Here ends the important chronicle, the best first-hand account we have
of the battle of Concord. But for this alone the first resident of the
Old Manse deserves our memory and thanks.
Mr. Emerson was succeeded at the Manse by a certain Doctor Ripley, a
venerable scholar who left behind him a reputation for learning and
sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long
the most learned woman in the little Concord circle which Hawthorne soon
after his marriage came to join.
Few New England villages have retained so much of the charm and
peacefulness of country life as has Concord, and few dwellings in
Concord have to-day so nearly the aspect they presented fifty years ago
as does the Manse, where Hawthorne passed three of the happiest years of
his life.
In the "American Note-Book," there is a charming description of the
pleasure the romancer and his young wife experienced in renovating and
refurnishing the old parsonage which, at the time of their going into
it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been
shiveringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph
of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to
heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes
rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
entry--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright
moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.
"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the
twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown
sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to
brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.
"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to
be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking,
ironing,--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour--although
no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning.
Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial
band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work
without wages."
The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given
over to the Hawthorne pots and pans--in which the great Hawthorne
himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his
wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes
fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"--the ghosts
came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh passed pleasant hours
in the little parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret
Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the
Concord circle.
Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the
village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and
once when his wife was absent he resolved to pass the whole term of her
visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With
Thoreau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and
ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear
to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are
delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours
they spent together boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Thoreau
was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and
which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use
of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.
Of the beauties of the Concord River Hawthorne has written a few
sentences that will live while the silver stream continues to flow: "It
comes creeping softly through the mid-most privacy and deepest heart of
a wood which whispers it to be quiet, while the stream whispers back
again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one
another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of
the sky and the clustering foliage...."
Concerning the visitors attracted to Concord by the great original
thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with
less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village
infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved
mortals, most of whom look upon themselves to be important agents of the
world's destiny, yet are simply bores of a very intense character." A
bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of
flesh and blood," people, he humourously comments, who had lighted on a
new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the
finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its
quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy
intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if
there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of
metaphysical intercourse with the great philosopher.
It was while on the way home from his friend Emerson's one day that
Hawthorne had that encounter with Margaret Fuller about which it is so
pleasant to read because it serves to take away the taste of other less
complimentary allusions to this lady to be found in Hawthorne's works:
"After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering
Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends
along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole
afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with
some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She
said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance
to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow,
when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of
them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed
near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me
standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the
afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we
talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods,
and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the
experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the
character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the
sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and
about other matters of high and low philosophy."
Nothing that Hawthorne has ever written of Concord is more to be
cherished to-day than this description of a happy afternoon passed by
him in Sleepy Hollow talking with Margaret Fuller of "matters of high
and low philosophy." For there are few parts of Concord to which
visitors go more religiously than to the still old cemetery, where on
the hill by Ridge Path Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, with the
grave of Thoreau just behind him, and the grave of Emerson, his
philosopher-friend, on the opposite side of the way. A great pine stands
at the head of Hawthorne's last resting-place, and a huge unhewn block
of pink marble is his formal monument.
Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it stands, be the romancer's most
intimate relic, for it was here that he lived as a happy bridegroom, and
here that his first child was born. And from this ancient dwelling it
was that he drew the inspiration for what is perhaps the most curious
book of tales in all American literature, a book of which another
American master of prose[13] has said, "Hawthorne here did for our past
what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country; another Wizard
of the North, he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty
materials of history, and summoned the great dead again to live and move
among us."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: "Historic Towns of New England." G. P. Putnam's Sons.]
[Footnote 13: Henry James.]
SALEM'S CHINESE GOD
Of the romantic figures which grace the history of New England in the
nineteenth century, none is to be compared in dash and in all those
other qualities that captivate the imagination with the figure of
Frederick Townsend Ward, the Salem boy who won a generalship in the
Chinese military service, suppressed the Tai-Ping rebellion, organised
the "Ever-Victorious Army"--for whose exploits "Chinese" Gordon always
gets credit in history--and died fighting at Ning Po for a nation of
which he had become one, a fair daughter of which he had married, and by
which he is to-day worshipped as a god. Very far certainly did this
soldier of fortune wander in the thirty short years of his life from the
peaceful red-brick Townsend mansion (now, alas! a steam bread bakery),
at the corner of Derby and Carleton Streets, Salem, in which, in 1831,
he was born.
This house was built by Ward's grandfather, Townsend, and during
Frederick's boyhood was a charming place of the comfortable colonial
sort, to which was joined a big, rambling, old-fashioned garden, and
from the upper windows of which there was to be had a fascinating view
of the broad-stretching sea. To the sea it was, therefore, that the lad
naturally turned when, after ending his education at the Salem High
School, he was unable to gain admission to the military academy at West
Point and follow the soldier career in which it had always been his
ambition to shine. He shipped before the mast on an American vessel
sailing from New York. Apparently even the hardships of such a common
sailor's lot could not dampen his ardour for adventure, for he made a
number of voyages.
[Illustration: TOWNSEND HOUSE, SALEM, MASS.]
At the outbreak of the Crimean war young Ward was in France, and,
thinking that his long-looked for opportunity had come, he entered the
French army for service against the Russians. Enlisting as a private, he
soon, through the influence of friends, rose to be a lieutenant; but,
becoming embroiled in a quarrel with his superior officer, he resigned
his commission and returned to New York, without having seen service
either in Russia or Turkey.