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[157] d [Epistolary and Other Comments on Fuller in 1856, 1882, and 1884] George William Curtis George William Curtis (1824–1892), travel writer, editor, orator, and journalist , was in his youth on the fringes of Transcendentalism and in his later years a historian and chronicler of it. Curtis spent a little over a year at the Brook Farm community and, when he left, briefly resided in Concord. He published a poem in the Dial, but it was when Emerson was editor. Curtis was associate editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine from 1852 to 1857, editing such authors as Melville and Thoreau. Many of his reminiscences, as well as comments on topics of the day, were contributed to “The Easy Chair” column that he wrote for Harper’s Magazine from 1853 until his death. Curtis is one of the few people who met Fuller both in America and abroad. After seeing Fuller and Ossoli in Palermo in November 1849, Curtis wrote that the latter was a “quiet, modest man,” with no “appearance of smartness,” who probably would never learn English, but “very simple and affectionate and clings to Margaret with quite a touching confidence and affection .” Fuller he found consumed by “a vein of intense enthusiasm threading with fire her talk about Rome, which was fine and wonderful at the same time” (quoted in Letters, 5:288n). Like many young people, Curtis was impressed by Fuller’s learning, believing that she “knew so much more than all the women and most of the men she met,” but, like most of the young men (but not the young women), felt that as a result, Fuller “could not disguise her superiority, from a consciousness already full of self-esteem.” George William Curtis to Daniel Ricketson, 23 April 1856 She was always kind and very full of fun with me,—and when I last saw her in Florence, there was a quiet tenderness in her manner which I recall with great satisfaction. She was very unprepossessing personally. Her hair was scant and sandy. Her skin dry and soft. Her features were large and the eyes not lovely. The expression, owing largely to illness, was a kind of sniffing conceit and scornfulness. She has some affliction of the spine which threw fuller in her own time [158] her head forward in an unfortunate manner. She knew so much more than all the women and most of the men she met that she could not disguise her superiority, from a consciousness already full of self-esteem. Then she had a passionate love of beauty, grace and personal fascination,—and she seemed stung with secret disappointment that she could not make all she had take the place of all she had not. I never knew anyone more truly loyal to loveliness of every kind. She dressed always simply, but dowdily and never handsomely. But here again she recognized and admired in others all kinds of beautiful dressing and ornament. When I saw her after she was married, she was very sweet and gentle, and indeed she is altogether very beautiful in my memory, and I cannot long think of her without tears. No one who knew her well—and her friends were among the noblest and truest of human beings—but had a kind of passionate regard for her. . . . Ossoli I saw a few times. He was a young, modest Italian, and, as he spoke no English, very silent. He was evidently entirely absorbed in her— and it was very touching to mark their mutual tenderness. . . . “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1882 We have recently seen a description of a visit made during the present winter to [the site of Brook Farm], and the visitor remarks, with emotion: “Most interesting of all to us was Margaret Fuller’s cottage, still standing on the crest of a little hill, in the midst of a copse of cedars. It is cruciform in shape, covered with wide wooden clapboards, and is now the dwelling of the superintendent of the estate and his family. Our guide remarked, sotto voce, that Miss Fuller received a thousand dollars for it in the distribution of the property.” But then it was not Margaret Fuller’s cottage, and she was never a Brook Farmer, and if she received any sums of money “in the distribution of the property,” it was a free gift. Neither was Mr. Emerson ever at the farm as a resident or an associate. Concord...

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