upon some three years of my life with a part of the self-approval you
must feel. I ask no higher fortune. No one need say to you, Go on! for
you have heard a higher than any human voice, and you will follow
whithersoever it calleth." Indeed, she already had much of her future
work prepared. While waiting for the Legislature in New Jersey to take
up her bill, she had canvassed Pennsylvania and had the happiness to
see a bill pass the Legislature of that State founding the Dixmont
Hospital, her second child, soon after the birth of her first. The
Dixmont Hospital is the only one of her many children that she would
allow to be even indirectly named for her. Meanwhile, she had
canvassed Kentucky, had been before the Legislature in Tennessee, and,
seven days after the passage of her bill in New Jersey, she writes
from a steamer near Charleston, S. C., as follows: "I designed using
the spring and summer chiefly in examining the jails and poorhouses of
Indiana and Illinois. Having successfully completed my mission in
Kentucky, I learned that traveling in those States would be
difficult, if not impossible, for some weeks to come, on account of
mud and rains. This decided me to examine the prisons and hospitals of
New Orleans, and, returning, to see the state prisons of Louisiana at
Baton Rouge, of Mississippi at Jackson, of Arkansas at Little Rock, of
Missouri at Jefferson City, and of Illinois at Alton.... I have seen
incomparably more to approve than to censure in New Orleans. I took
the resolution, being so far away, of seeing the state institutions of
Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Though this has proved
excessively fatiguing, I rejoice that I have carried out my purpose."
Between June 1843 and August 1847, she states in a letter that she
traveled 32,470 miles, her conveyance being by steamboat when
possible; otherwise by stage-coach. It is suggestive of the wrecks and
delays she had experienced with the shattered coaches and mud roads of
the south and west that, as we are told, she "made a practice of
carrying with her an outfit of hammer, wrench, nails, screws, a coil
of rope, and straps of stout leather, which under many a mishap
sufficed to put things to rights and enable her to pursue her
journey." "I have encountered nothing so dangerous as river fords,"
she writes. "I crossed the Yadkin when it was three-quarters of a mile
wide, rough bottom, often in places rapid currents; the water always
up to the carriage bed, and sometimes flowing in. The horses rested
twice on sand-bars. A few miles beyond the river having just crossed a
deep branch two hundred yards wide, the axletree broke, and away
rolled one of the back wheels."
When she said that river fords were her greatest danger, she must have
forgotten an encounter with a highwayman. She was making a stage
journey in Michigan, and noticed with some consternation that the
driver carried a brace of pistols. To her inquiries he explained that
there had been robberies on the road. "Give me the pistols," she said;
"I will take care of them." More in awe of her than of robbers, the
driver reluctantly obeyed. Passing through a dismal forest the
expected happened. A man seized the horses and demanded her purse. She
made him a little speech, asked if he was not ashamed, told him her
business, and concluded, "If you have been unfortunate, are in
distress and in want of money, I will give you some." Meanwhile the
robber had turned "deathly pale," and when she had finished,
exclaimed, "My God, that voice." He had once heard her address the
prisoners in the Philadelphia penitentiary. He begged her to pass, and
declined to take the money she offered. She insisted, lest he might be
again tempted before he found employment. People obeyed when she
insisted, and he took her gift and disappeared.
Think of the hotel accommodations,--the tables and beds,--she must
have encountered in these wild journeys. This is the woman who, a few
years ago, seemed to be dying with hemorrhages of the lungs. Did she
have no more of them? Oh, yes; we are assured that "again and again
she was attacked with hemorrhages and again and again prostrated by
malarial fever." A physician said, "Her system became actually
saturated with malaria." Invalid as she almost always was, she had
left her foot-prints in most of the states of the Union and had
carried the war into the British Provinces, where she had been the
means of establishing three insane hospitals: one in Toronto, one in
Halifax, one at St. John, Newfoundland, besides providing a fleet of
life-boats at Sable Island, known as "The Graveyard of Ships," off the
coast of Nova Scotia.
In the United States, during these twelve years, she "promoted and
secured," to use her own phrase, the enlargement of three asylums: at
Worcester, Mass., at Providence, R. I., and at Utica, N. Y., and the
establishment of thirteen, one in each of the following states: New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and
Maryland, with the Hospital for Insane Soldiers and Sailors, at
Washington, D. C.
In 1850, Miss Dix proposed a larger scheme of philanthropy than was
ever before projected by any mortal. What is more, but for one man,
she would have carried it out. She petitioned Congress to appropriate
12,000,000 acres of public lands for the benefit of the indigent
insane, deaf and dumb, and blind. A bill to that effect was
introduced, watched by her through two sessions, and finally passed by
both Houses. She was inundated with congratulations from far and near;
but the bill was vetoed on constitutional grounds by President Pierce.
The day for giving away the public lands in sheets had not come.
The blow seems to have been more than Miss Dix could endure. She went
abroad for change and rest. What rest meant to her, she expresses in
a letter to a friend at home:
"Rest is not quitting the active career:
Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere."
These lines, borrowed from John S. Dwight have been, not unnaturally,
attributed to her. She wrote many things perhaps quite as poetical.
Not much of the verse, which came from her prolific pen, was
considered even by herself to deserve publication, but verse-writing
is said to had been the never-failing diversion of her leisure hours.
Mrs. Caroline A. Kennard credits her with the following lines which,
though very simple, are quite as good as much that has been
immortalized in our hymn books:
"In the tender, peaceful moonlight,
I am from the world apart,
While a flood of golden glory
Fills alike my room and heart.
As I gaze upon the radiance
Shining on me from afar,
I can almost see beyond it,--
Almost see 'the gates ajar.'
Tender thoughts arise within me
Of the friends who've gone before,
Absent long but not forgotten,
Resting on the other shore.
And my soul is filled with longing
That when done with earth and sin,
I may find the gates wide open
There for me to enter in."
Apparently, she wrote her poetry for herself, as an unskilled musician
might play for his own amusement.
The rest which Miss Dix allowed herself between September 1854 and
September 1856, was to visit the chief hospitals and prisons in
Europe. Edinburgh, the Channel Islands, Paris, Rome, Naples,
Constantinople, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Amsterdam, Brussels, and again Paris and London: these places mark the
course of her two years' pilgrimage among the prisons and hospitals of
Europe. She found much to admire in this journey, but sometimes abuses
to correct. We must content ourselves with an incident from Edinburgh,
perfectly in character. She found in that city private insane
hospitals, if they could be dignified by the name, under such
conditions of mismanagement as shocked even her experienced nerves.
Having reported the facts to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh to no
purpose, she was advised to lay the matter before the Home Secretary
in London. The Provost knew of this intention and resolved to
forestall her by taking the train for London the next morning; so
little did he know Miss Dix. She boarded the night train, and was on
the spot before him, had her interview, secured the appointment of a
royal commission and, ultimately the correction of the abuses of which
she had complained.
During the four years that intervened between her return and the
outbreak of the Civil War, she seems to have travelled over most of
her old ground in this country, and to have extended her journeys into
the new states and territories. At the approach of hostilities, it
fell to Miss Dix to give the President of the Philadelphia and
Baltimore Railroad the first information of a plot to capture the city
of Washington and to assassinate Mr. Lincoln. Acting upon this
information, Gen. Butler's Massachusetts troops were sent by boat
instead of rail, and Mr. Lincoln was "secretly smuggled through to
Washington."
By natural selection, Miss Dix was appointed Superintendent of Women
Nurses in the federal service, by order of the Secretary of War. In
this capacity she served through the four years' struggle. In a letter
dated December 7, 1864, she writes: "I take no hour's leisure. I think
that since the war, I have taken no day's furlough." Her great
services were officially recognized by Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of
War.
Having served the country as faithfully as any soldier, during its
hour of need, she returned to her former work of promoting and
securing the erection of hospitals and of visiting those before
established. In 1877, when Miss Dix was seventy-five, Dr. Charles F.
Folsom, of Boston, in a book entitled "Diseases of the Mind," said of
her: "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, and
her searching criticisms, constitute of themselves a better lunacy
commission than would be likely to be appointed in many of our
states."
She was at that date, however, near the end of her active labors. In
1881, at the age of seventy-nine, she retired to the hospital she had
been the means of building in Trenton, N. J., and there she remained,
tenderly, even reverently cared for, until her death in 1887. So
passed to her rest and her reward one of the most remarkable women of
her generation.
V
SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI
[Illustration: SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI]
At Cambridge, it is still possible to pick up interesting
reminiscences of Longfellow and Lowell from old neighbors or townsmen,
proud even to have seen these celebrities as familiar objects upon the
street. "And Margaret Fuller," you suggest, further to tap the memory
of your venerable friend. He smiles gently and says, Margaret Fuller
was before his time; he remembers the table-talk of his youth. He
remembers, when she was a girl at dancing-school, Papanti stopped his
class and said, "Mees Fuller, Mees Fuller, you sal not be so
magnee-fee-cent"; he remembers that, being asked if she thought
herself better than any one else, she calmly said, "Yes, I do"; and he
remembers that Miss Fuller having announced that she accepted the
universe, a wit remarked that the universe ought to be greatly obliged
to her.
Margaret Fuller was born in 1810, a year later than Longfellow, but
while Longfellow lived until 1882, Margaret was lost at sea thirty
years before, in 1850. The last four years of her life were spent in
Italy, so that American memories of Margaret must needs go back to
1846. Practically it is traditions of her that remain, and not
memories. As she survives in tradition, she seems to have been a
person of inordinate vanity, who gave lectures in drawing-rooms and
called them "conversations," uttered a commonplace with the authority
of an oracle, and sentimentalized over art, poetry, or religion, while
she seemed to herself, and apparently to others, to be talking
philosophy. She took herself in all seriousness as a genius, ran a
dazzling career of a dozen years or so in Cambridge and Boston, and
then her light seems to have gone out. She came to the surface, with
other newness, in the Transcendental era; she was the priestess of its
mysteries; when that movement ebbed away, her day was over. This is
the impression one would gather, if he had only current oral
traditions of Margaret Fuller.
If with this impression, wishing to get a first-hand knowledge of his
subject, a student were to read the "Works of Margaret Fuller":--"Life
Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth
Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"--he would be prepared to find
eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances,
attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however,
find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply
a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English
style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in the
simplest manner and generally an idea which approves itself to the
common-sense of the reader. There is no brilliancy, no ornament,
little imagination, and not a least glimmer of wit. The absence of wit
is remarkable, since in conversation, wit was a quality for which
Margaret was both admired and feared. But as a writer, Margaret was a
little prosaic,--even her poetry inclined to be prosaic,--but she is
earnest, noble, temperate, and reasonable. The reader will be
convinced that there was more in the woman than popular tradition
recognizes.
One is confirmed in the conviction that the legend does her less than
justice when he knows the names and the quality of her friends. No
woman ever had better or more loyal friends than Margaret Fuller.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing
were among them and compiled her "Memoirs," evidently as a labor of
love. George William Curtis knew her personally, and called her "a
scholar, a critic, a thinker, a queen of conversation, above all, a
person of delicate insight and sympathy, of the most feminine
refinement of feeling and of dauntless courage." Col. Higginson, a
fellow-townsman, who from youth to manhood, knew Margaret personally,
whose sisters were her intimates, whose family, as he tells us, was
"afterwards closely connected" with hers by marriage, and who has
studied all the documents and written her biography, says she was a
"person whose career is more interesting, as it seems to me, than that
of any other American of her sex; a woman whose aims were high and
whose services great; one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activity
was incessant, whose life, varied, and whose death, dramatic."
There still remains the current legend, and a legend, presumably, has
some foundation. If we attempt to unite the Margaret Fuller of common
tradition with Margaret Fuller as estimated by her friends, we shall
assume that she was not a wholly balanced character,--that she must
have been a great and noble woman to have had such friends, but that
there may have been in her some element of foolishness which her
friends excused and at which the public smiled.
Margaret was the fifth in descent from Lieut. Thomas Fuller, who came
from England in 1638, and who celebrated the event in a poem of which
the first stanza is as follows:
"In thirty-eight I set my foot
On this New England shore;
My thoughts were then to stay one year,
And then remain no more."
The poetry is on a level with other colonial poetry of the period.
Timothy Fuller, the grandfather of Margaret, graduated at Harvard
College in 1760, became a clergyman, and was a delegate to the
Massachusetts State Convention which adopted the Federal Constitution.
He had five sons, all of whom became lawyers. "They were in general,"
says Col. Higginson, "men of great energy, pushing, successful, of
immense and varied information, of great self-esteem, and without a
particle of tact." The evidence is that Margaret reproduced, in a
somewhat exaggerated form, all these Fuller characteristics, good and
bad. The saying is quoted from Horace Mann that if Margaret
was unpopular, "it was because she probably inherited the
disagreeableness of forty Fullers."
Timothy Fuller, Margaret's father, was the oldest of these brothers
and, Col. Higginson says, "the most successful and the most assured."
He graduated at Harvard, second in his class, in 1801, lived in
Cambridge, and represented the Middlesex district in Congress from
1817 to 1825. He was a "Jeffersonian Democrat" and a personal friend
and political supporter of John Quincy Adams. He married Margaret, the
daughter of Major Peter Crane. Mrs. Fuller was as gentle and
unobtrusive as her stalwart husband was forceful and uncompliant. She
effaced herself even in her own home, was seen and not heard, though
apparently not very conspicuously seen. She had eight children, of
whom Margaret was the first, and when this busy mother escaped from
the care of the household, it was to take refuge in her flower garden.
A "fair blossom of the white amaranth," Margaret calls this mother.
The child's nature took something from both of her parents, and was
both strong and tender.
Her father assumed the entire charge of Margaret's education, setting
her studying Latin at the age of six, not an unusual feat in that day
for a boy, but hitherto unheard of for a girl. Her lessons were
recited at night, after Mr. Fuller returned from his office in Boston,
often at a late hour. "High-pressure," says Col. Higginson, "is bad
enough for an imaginative and excitable child, but high-pressure by
candle-light is ruinous; yet that was the life she lived." The effect
of these night lessons was to leave the child's brain both tired and
excited and in no condition to sleep. It was considered singular that
she was never ready for bed. She was hustled off to toss on her
pillow, to see horrid visions, to have nightmare, and sometimes to
walk in her sleep. Terrible morning headaches followed, and Margaret
was considered a delicate child. One would like to know what Latin at
six would have done for her, without those recitations by
candle-light.
Mr. Fuller did not consider it important that a child should have
juvenile books and Margaret's light reading consisted of Shakspere,
Cervantes, and Moliere. She gives an interesting account of her
discovery of Shakspere at the age of eight. Foraging for entertainment
on a dismal winter Sunday afternoon, she took down a volume of
Shakspere and was soon lost in the adventures and misadventures of
Romeo and Juliet. Two hours passed, when the child's exceeding quiet
attracted attention. "That is no book for Sunday," said her father,
"put it away." Margaret obeyed, but soon took the book again to follow
the fortunes of her lovers further. This was a fatal indiscretion; the
forbidden volume was again taken from her and she was sent to bed as a
punishment for disobedience.
Meanwhile, the daily lessons to her father or to a private tutor went
on; Virgil, Horace and Ovid were read in due course, and the study of
Greek was begun. Margaret never forgave her father for robbing her of
a proper childhood and substituting a premature scholastic education.
"I certainly do not wish," she says, "that instead of these masters, I
had read baby books, written down to children, but I do wish that I
had read no books at all till later,--that I had lived with toys and
played in the open air."
Her early and solitary development entailed disadvantages which only a
very thoughtful parent could have foreseen. When, later, Margaret was
sent to school, she had no companions in study, being in advance of
the girls of her age, with whom she played, and too young for the
older set with whom she was called to recite. "Not only," she says, "I
was not their schoolmate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given
a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a
hauteur which turned all hearts away."
The effects of her training upon her health, Margaret appears to have
exaggerated. She thought it had "checked her growth, wasted her
constitution," and would bring her to a "premature grave." While her
lessons to her father by candle-light continued, there were
sleeplessness, bad dreams, and morning headaches, but after this had
gone on one year, Mr. Fuller was elected to Congress, spent most of
his time in Washington, and a private tutor gave the lessons,
presumably at seasonable hours. No one with a "broken constitution"
could have performed her later literary labors, and she was not
threatened with a "premature grave" when Dr. Frederick Henry Hedge
made her acquaintance in Cambridge society. "Margaret," he says, "was
then about thirteen,--a child in years, but so precocious in her
mental and physical development, that she passed for eighteen or
twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society as a
full-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she was
then, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of a
blooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with a
tendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, and
which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to
suppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future
suffering." She had, he says, "no pretensions to beauty then, or at
any time," yet she "was not plain," a reproach from which she was
saved "by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her
sparkling, dancing, busy eyes," and by a "graceful and peculiar
carriage of her head and neck." He adds that "in conversation she had
already, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and made
much the same impression in society that she did in after years," but
that she had an excessive "tendency to sarcasm" which frightened shy
young people and made her notoriously unpopular with the ladies.
At this period Margaret attended a seminary for young ladies in
Boston. Cambridge was then, according to Col. Higginson, a vast,
sparsely settled village, containing between two and three thousand
inhabitants. In the Boston school, Dr. Hedge says, "the inexperienced
country girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing misses
of the city," and Margaret paid them off by "indiscriminate sarcasms."
Margaret's next two years were spent at a boarding school in Groton.
Her adventures in this school are supposed to be narrated in her
dramatic story entitled "Mariana," in the volume called "Summer on the
Lakes." Mariana at first carried all before her "by her love of wild
dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and wit," but abusing
her privileges, she is overthrown by her rebellious subjects, brought
to great humiliation, and receives some needed moral instructions.
At fifteen, Margaret returned to Cambridge and resumed her private
studies, except that, for a Greek recitation, she attended an academy
in which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was then fitting for college. Her
day at this period, as she gives it, was occupied thus: she rose
before five, walked an hour, and practiced at the piano till seven:
breakfasted and read French till eight; read Brown's philosophy, two
or three lectures, till half past nine; went to school and studied
Greek till twelve; recited, went home, and practiced till two; dined;
lounged half an hour, read two hours in Italian, walked or rode, and
spent her evenings leisurely with music or friends. Plainly she ought
to have been one of the learned women of her generation.
A school composition of Margaret impressed her fellow pupil, Dr.
Holmes, as he relates, with a kind of awe. It began loftily with the
words, "It is a trite remark," a phrase which seemed to the boy very
masterful. The girls envied her a certain queenliness of manner. "We
thought," says one of them, "that if we could only come into school in
that way, we could know as much Greek as she did." She was accustomed
to fill the hood of her cloak with books, swing them over her
shoulder, and march away. "We wished," says this lady, "that our
mothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our books
in the same way."
It is known that Margaret had several love affairs and, in a later
letter, she refers to one which belongs to this period, and which
appears to have been the first of the series. She meets her old adorer
again at the age of thirty and writes to a friend who knew of the
youthful episode. He had the same powerful eye, calm wisdom, refined
observation and "the imposing _maniere d'etre_ which anywhere would
give him influence among men"; but in herself, she says, "There is
scarcely a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he
remembered and loved."