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will lead me sometimes on a narrow plank across deep chasms, if I do not see clear, if I do not balance myself exactly I must then fall and bleed and die.” Aware that pain may result from her effort, she also knows that if she wishes to be true to who she is, she must not be “afraid of it.”13 “From infancy,” writes Fuller, “ I have foreseen that my path [toward truth] must be difficult.” Alluding to Nathan, Fuller vows to avoid “frivolous” infatuations. Claiming never to have “sought love as a passion” or to have clung “to a tie which had ceased to bind the soul,” she concedes she has never loved “in the sense of oneness.” She says she has, however, loved enough “to feel the joys of presence the pangs of absence.” And more than once, she says, “my heart has bled.” As for Mickiewicz , when she was with him, “my heart beat with joy that he . . . felt beauty in me. When I was with him I was happy.” “Still,” says she, “I do not know but I might love . . . better tomorrow.” She tells the Springs that she has never loved anyone as much as she has loved the music of Beethoven, though “at present” she is “indifferent to it,” just as, the other day, she had expressed little interest in seeing the forms that Michelangelo “had traced on the ceiling of the Sistine.” However, she confesses , whenever in the past “I loved either of these great Souls I abandoned myself wholy to it, I did not calculate.” She now vows to do so again, “if I love enough.”14 53SOssoli Enters It was springtime in Rome, where a pagan earthiness exudes from every rock and ruin, and Fuller, in tune, felt her body pulsate and open to the sun, like the orange blossoms whose fragrance lay heavy in the air. On her journey through life she had at last attained “an awesome clarity” about herself, and she was ready now for an adult relationship. She had had enough of airy transcendentalism, of translating every erotic impulse into moral vision. She now wanted for herself something real, reciprocal, and earthy. That Fuller had already found somebody she felt she could “love enough” is suggested by a 23 April 1847 letter she sent the Pennsylvania-born artist Thomas Hicks, who at age twenty-four (thirteen years younger than she) was already an associate member of the American National Academy.1 Fuller had met Hicks through her friend Christopher Cranch, who had brought his family with him to Italy when he left the ministry to join the expatriate artists ’ colony there. Fuller felt drawn to this bearded, melancholic stranger who had entertained her and the Springs in his studio and whose youth and artistic sensibility had awakened in Fuller her feminine need to nurture as well as her masculine urge to dominate. Thinking the physical attraction was mutual, she wrote Hicks to ask him why he does not come to see her: “I want to know and to love you and to have you love me. . . . Very soon I must go from here, do not let me go without giving me some of your life.” She hopes he might be that “congenial” companion for whom she has been searching and regrets she could not meet him Ossoli Enters 313 314 the rising tide of revolution in the “Palazzo Borghese,” where Titian’s great Sacred and Profane Love was exhibited .2 Hicks politely declined her offer of love in early May. But sometime around the first week of April—Holy Week—Fuller had met another man, a handsome Italian either in St. Peter’s Basilica or in the magnificent piazza it faces, the colonnades of which seem like loving arms welcoming wandering pilgrims. Whether she met him on Maundy Thursday after attending vespers at St. Peter’s, which was on 1 April, or on Easter Sunday, which was 4 April, is not cleartoFullerscholars.WhatisclearisthatshehadgonetoStPeter’swiththeSprings and had somehow got separated from them in the church and become confused. At that point, according to Emelyn Story, she was approached by the dark-haired, well-bred Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, who asked in Italian if he might secure a carriage for her. Although not yet conversant in Italian, she understood his courteous gesture. Thus began a friendship that would soon—in the context of pagan Rome where the warm spring wind carried with it the musky odor of urine-stained ruins...

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