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[94] d [Fuller in Florence in 1850] William Henry Hurlbert I passed about six weeks in the city of Florence, during the months of March and April, 1850. During the whole of that time Madame Ossoli was residing in a house at the corner of the Via della Misericordia and the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. This house is one of those large, well built modern houses that show strangely in the streets of the stately Tuscan city. But if her rooms were less characteristically Italian, they were the more comfortable, and, though small, had a quiet, home-like air. Her windows opened upon a fine view of the beautiful Piazza; for such was their position, that while the card-board façade of the church of Sta. Maria Novella could only be seen at an angle, the exquisite Campanile rose fair and full against the sky. She enjoyed this most graceful tower very much, and, I think, preferred it even to Giotto’s noble work. Its quiet religious grace was grateful to her spirit, which seemed to be yearning for peace from the cares that had so vexed and heated the world about her for a year past. I saw her frequently at these rooms, where, surrounded by her books and papers, she used to devote her mornings to her literary labors. Once or twice I called in the morning, and found her quite immersed in manuscripts and journals. Her evenings were passed usually in the society of her friends, at her own rooms, or at theirs. With the pleasant circle of Americans , then living in Florence, she was on the best terms, and though she seemed always to bring with her her own most intimate society, and never William Henry Hurlbert (1827–1895) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, as “Hurlbut” but changed his name. He graduated from Harvard University in 1847 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1849, after which he spent two years studying in Europe. Hurlbert was variously a newspaper reporter, writer, drama critic, abolitionist, and playwright. One who was at divinity school with him wrote that while in Italy, Hurlbert was not only “blessed by the Pope, but by the society of the Countess Ossoli whom he admires very much” (Higginson, Letters and Journals, 29). Hurlbert’s account was one of the many solicited for Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli by the editors. William Henry Hurlbert [95] to be quite free from the company of busy thoughts, and the cares to which her life had introduced her, she was always cheerful, and her remarkable powers of conversation subserved on all occasions the kindliest, purposes of good-will in social intercourse. The friends with whom she seemed to be on the terms of most sympathy , were an Italian lady, the Marchesa Arconati Visconti,1 —the exquisite sweetness of whose voice interpreted, even to those who knew her only as a transient acquaintance, the harmony of her nature,—and some English residents in Florence, among whom I need only name Mr. and Mrs. Browning, to satisfy the most anxious friends of Madame Ossoli that the last months of her Italian life were cheered by all the light that communion with gifted and noble natures could afford. The Marchesa Arconati used to persuade Madame Ossoli to occasional excursions with her into the environs of Florence, and she passed some days of the beautiful spring weather at the villa of that lady. Her delight in nature seemed to be a source of great comfort and strength to her. I shall not easily forget the account she gave me, on the evening of one delicious Sunday in April, of a walk which she had taken with her husband in the afternoon of that day, to the hill of San Miniato. The amethystine beauty of the Apennines,—the cypress trees that sentinel the way up to the ancient and deserted church,—the church itself, standing high and lonely on its hill, begirt with the vine-clad, crumbling walls of Michel Angelo,—the repose of the dome-crowned city in the vale below,—seemed to have wrought their impression with peculiar force upon her mind that afternoon. On their way home, they had entered the conventual church that stands half way up the hill, just as the vesper service was beginning, and she spoke of the simple spirit of devotion that filled the place, and of the gentle wonder with which, to use her own words, the “peasant women turned their...

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