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Fuller as a Schoolgirl in 1819–1820
- University of Iowa Press
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[1] d [Fuller as a Schoolgirl in 1819–1820] Oliver Wendell Holmes Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) was, like many of Fuller’s childhood friends, from a wealthy Boston Brahmin family. Although he practiced medicine (and wrote the groundbreaking The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever [1843]), he is better known today as a poet (“The Chambered Nautilus”) and novelist (The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table [1858] and other books in the “Breakfast-Table” series). Here, Holmes places himself in a long line of Fuller’s friends and acquaintances whose first impressions of her were as someone who delighted in showing off her intellectual gifts. He also comments upon her “long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements,” a physical characteristic of hers that others also noticed. Later, Fuller would report that she was “gratified to perceive” that she was “superior” to Holmes in her “training in precision of thought and clearness of utterance” (Capper, Private Years, 193–94). Sitting on the girls’ benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age. She came with the reputation of being “smart,” as we should have called it, clever as we say nowadays. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one among us who, like Jean Paul, like the Duke, like Bettina, has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as Margaret. Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader of what she used to call “naw-vels.” I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. fuller in her own time [2] A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian [that is, snake] who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas [“from top to bottom”], some would say euphuistic , but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect. Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first words. “It is a trite remark,” she began. I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority? I doubt if I ever did; yet O, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders with her—she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke! . . . From [Oliver Wendell Holmes], “Cinders from Ashes,” Atlantic Monthly 23 (January 1869): 115–23. ...