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[163] d From “Margaret Fuller Ossoli” (1861) Henry Giles Henry Giles (1809–1882), clergyman, lecturer, and magazine contributor, was born in Ireland. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, he became a Unitarian, later emigrating to America in 1840. He published Human Life in Shakespeare (1868). Giles’s recollection of Fuller is during the 1842 visit of Charles Dickens to America, when he was wined and dined in Boston. Even though Giles was “young and strange in Boston society, and knew nothing of its celebrities ,” he found Fuller friendly to him, commenting that she “did not so much converse as ‘think aloud.’” In closing our brief narrative of these impressive events [of her life], we have only one remark to make on the pathetic consistency of fate which belonged to all that concerned this very extraordinary woman. The word “fragmentary” seems best to characterize all that related to her. Her early education was severe yet not harmonious. Her self-culture was earnest and deep, yet it does not appear to have been systematic or continuous. She had constant interruptions in all her pursuits and purposes; she was taxed and over-taxed with responsibility and toil. She had no time to mature, compact, or concentrate her powers. She had to think from hand to mouth and from day to day. Accordingly, her compositions are but broken and detached efforts. It is really painful to read her modest but longing desires for an income of six hundred dollars a year, that she might remain in Italy in order to perfect herself in the study of its art and literature, and to know that her wishes could not be gratified. The pain is increased when we consider that persons of both sexes, incomparably her inferiors, could gather as many thousands easily as the hundreds which she vainly coveted. Had she lived and taken to the rostrum as women are now doing—as they have a full right to do if so they choose—she might have had dollars to her heart’s content, for Margaret was a born orator; and there is no Lyceum talker, big or little, male or female, white, black, or brown that she would not, with the genius of her surprising eloquence, have shot beyond as a rifle does a fuller in her own time [164] pop-gun. Her time was frittered, and worst of all, it was not, even as to money, profitably frittered. And her great heart, too, battling long amidst conflicting aspirations, was at last silenced, when it had found its highest action and its noblest rest. She coveted love with immeasurable desire; she met with love, she gave it the magnitude of her own massive and impassioned character; and before satiety, or deception, or the loss of glorious illusions came to disappoint her, she died and disappeared—died and disappeared amidst the roaring breakers and the tossing pieces of the sea-tour ship. The tragedy had an appropriate catastrophe. . . . The first time the writer ever met Margaret is connected in his mind with memorable associations. It was nearly twenty years ago. Charles Dickens was on a visit to America. We were invited to a large party in Boston, of which he was the foremost guest—“the mould of form, the glass of fashion, and the observed of all observers.” We had a word, or, it may be, a few words with the genial hero of the evening, and then we were introduced to Miss Fuller. She sat dreamily and quietly in a corner, with head half bent and drooping eyes. We took a chair near her. She simply permitted it. We said a few ordinary words. She quietly replied. Her mood was cool; her tones were low; her phrases were formal; and, to say the least, her influence on us was not exciting or encouraging. And yet it was, in some unexplainable way, attractive. At that time we were young and strange in Boston society, and knew nothing of its celebrities. We were, therefore, entirely ignorant of Miss Fuller’s local and literary distinction. But we were not long ignorant that we were in the presence of one whose “mind her kingdom was.” From word to word she grew warmer and warmer, until her whole spirit seemed to burn and to shine. Still her manner was quiet, her voice subdued. She did not so much converse as “think aloud.” It was more monologue than dialogue—for we were all but silent. “Things old and new” were...

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