"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us. there, down on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's mother," concluded Jane. "And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss Peters-but don't you find it a little warm here? pass me that hair-brush.” Just Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it "I had it made to order; one of the old a gem?” she asked. fashioned sort, you see -two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords, but simple catches at the side. It opens. to just two widths; if I want anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter." She dropped her voice. "Did you ever have a private secretary?» "Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own." "Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever change-no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards. Tutors are bad enough—but thank goodness, my boys are past that age. And men-servants are bad enough—every time I want to stir in my own house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my train; however, people in our position—well, Granger insists, you know." "And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?" She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft. "Asters?" "No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're chrysanthemums-you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass? How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and bachelor's-buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls can run their clothes-lines somewhere else." "It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane. one "I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in the front yard. I hated so to leave it behindof those little yellow brier-roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just — 'yaller.' And it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh, child"— wistfully — "if I could only smell it now!" "Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympatheti cally. "I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper." "The wall-paper?" "Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to match it. At first I just tried on Twentysecond street. Then I went down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville, and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally-" "Well, what- finally?" "Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but — » She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too quaintly ugly for anything?» "It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. it can be! I only wish mine was like it." "It's just as sweet as SARAH MARGARET FULLER (MARCHIONESS OSSOLI) (1810-1850) ARGARET was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her. It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any other." In the coolest way she said to her friends: "I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen. In near eight years' experience I have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great talent at explanation. But in MARGARET FULLER truth I have not much to say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have done in life has been to form my character to a certain consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on talking with people I find I tell them what they did not know, that my confidence at all returns. . . A woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write, and without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in us. Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better, because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel inspired. . . For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle.» All these naïve confessions were made, it must be remembered, either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without fear of misinterpretation. This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged. > "He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical sketch. "Thus I had tasks given me, as many and as various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The conseqence was a premature development of the brain that made me a 'youthful prodigy by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections of all kinds. . . . I was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily. Of the Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the sounds told the same story as the mythology; that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern composure. With these books I passed my days. The great amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling which under other circumstances might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts of others." By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in 1836 she went to Boston to teach languages. "I still,” wrote Emerson (1851), “remember the first half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and a frame that would indicate fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike selfpossession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness,-a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,the nasal tone of her voice, — all repelled; and I said to myself, 'We shall never get far. It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition The men thought she carried too many guns, and to her great scholarship. In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations » in Boston, continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,' and in 1842 of the Correspondence of Fräulein Günerode and Bettine von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling of the spirit in each soul,-an admixture of Platonism, Oriental pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave two years of hard work and self-sacrifice. Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community of Brook Farin, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder, nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even 'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne'sl Zenobia." |