Daughters of the Puritans Part 6

"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 sh.o.r.e.

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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 a.s.sa.s.sinate Mr. Lincoln. Acting upon this information, Gen. Butler's Ma.s.sachusetts 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 ent.i.tled "Diseases of the Mind," said of her: "Her frequent visits to our inst.i.tutions of the insane now, and her searching criticisms, const.i.tute 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 pa.s.sed to her rest and her reward one of the most remarkable women of her generation.

V

SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s 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, n.o.ble, 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 doc.u.ments 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 s.e.x; 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 a.s.sume that she was not a wholly balanced character,--that she must have been a great and n.o.ble 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 Ma.s.sachusetts State Convention which adopted the Federal Const.i.tution.

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 a.s.sured."

He graduated at Harvard, second in his cla.s.s, in 1801, lived in Cambridge, and represented the Middles.e.x 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 un.o.btrusive 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 subst.i.tuting 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 const.i.tution," 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 const.i.tution"

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 pa.s.sed 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, spa.r.s.ely 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 ent.i.tled "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 pa.s.sion 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, pa.s.sionate, ambitious child he remembered and loved."

Though a precocious girl and in a way fascinating, there is evidence that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the habit of considering her mother as a negligible quant.i.ty. Cambridge ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826, "one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind," says Col. Higginson, "that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days of the Lechmeres and Va.s.sals." Margaret ought to have been dressed by an artist, but apparently, a girl of sixteen, she was left to her own devices. She appeared, we are told, with a low-necked dress badly cut, tightly laced, her arms held back as if pinioned, her hair curled all over her head, and she danced quadrilles very badly. This escapade was not allowed to repeat itself. Certain kind and motherly Cambridge ladies took the neglected child in hand, tamed her rude strength, and subdued her manners. Col. Higginson mentions half a dozen of these excellent ladies, among them his mother, at whose feet "this studious, self-conscious, overgrown girl" would sit, "covering her hands with kisses and treasuring every word."

Chief among Margaret's motherly friends was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, wife of a Harvard professor, an auth.o.r.ess of merit, "of uncommon character and cultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no children of her own," became a kind of foster-mother to Margaret. She had Margaret "constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser, instructed her dressmaker, and took her to make calls and on journeys." Margaret was an apt pupil, and the good training of these many Cambridge mothers was apparent when, ten years later, Mr. Emerson made her acquaintance. "She was then, as always," he says, "carefully and becomingly dressed, and of lady-like self-possession."

The seven years in Cambridge, from Margaret's fifteenth to her twenty-third year, though uneventful, were, considering merely the pleasure of existence, the most delightful of her life. She was a school-girl as much or as little as she cared to be; her health, when not overtaxed, was perfect; her family though not rich, were in easy circ.u.mstances; her father was distinguished, having just retired from Congress after eight years of creditable service; and, partly perhaps from her father's distinction, she had access to the best social circles of Cambridge. "In our evening reunions," says Dr. Hedge, "she was always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew around her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction of the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a prominent object." Her conversational talent "continued to develop itself in these years, and was certainly" he thinks, "her most decided gift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearing her converse.... For some reason or other, she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips." Emerson, in perfect agreement with this estimate says, "Her pen was a non-conductor." The reader will not think this true in her letters, where often the words seem to palpitate. Doubtless the world had no business to see her love letters, but one will find there a woman who, if she could speak as she writes, must have poured herself out in tidal waves.

Dr. Hedge was struck by two traits of Margaret's character, repeatedly mentioned by others, but to which it is worth while to have his testimony. The first was a pa.s.sionate love for the beautiful: "I have never known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from beautiful forms"; the second was "her intellectual sincerity. Her judgment took no bribes from her s.e.x or her sphere, nor from custom, nor tradition, nor caprice."

Margaret was nineteen years old when Dr. James Freeman Clarke, then a young man in college, made her acquaintance. "We both lived in Cambridge," he says, "and from that time until she went to reside in Groton in 1833, I saw her or heard from her almost every day. There was a family connection between us, and we called each other cousins."

Possessing in a greater degree than any person he ever knew, the power of magnetizing others, she had drawn about her a circle of girl friends whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent.

They came from Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, and met now at one house and now at another of these pleasant towns. Dr. Hedge also knows of this charming circle, and says, "she loved to draw these fair girls to herself, and make them her guests, and was never so happy as when surrounded in company, by such a bevy."