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[187] d [A Brother’s Memories of Fuller] (1936) Richard Frederick Fuller . . . in the study of history she would dwell upon what was excellent in distinguished characters, and try to incite us to emulation. I was deliberate in my judgment and not impressible. I remember discouraging her after one of her historical talks in which she urged us to be ambitious of attaining what was really valuable in life by remarking that I would never be ambitious. Caesar was ambitious, and I knew it was not right. She despaired at that time of enlightening my slow as well as obstinate understanding and left me to my obscure fate! Herself of great quickness and astonishing rapidity in the acquisition of knowledge, dullness on the part of her pupils wounded her sensibilities more, I really believe, than acts of unkindness could have done. I put her to the torture, but she controlled her nerves, and thus she really gained as well as imparted, for she received from us a discipline to her patience in return for the learning which she could only slowly impart. Arthur, though quick, was at this period of his life very active in the region of fancy, and air castles were more attractive to him than the solid structures of history, mathematics, etymology and grammar could be. So on the Richard Frederick Fuller (1821–1869), Fuller’s younger brother, was schooled in Concord for entry to Harvard College. With Margaret’s encouragement, Richard approached Emerson for advice on how to prepare for school, and the older man took him under his wing. Richard stayed in Concord for five months, studying fourteen hours a day, except on those occasions when he walked with Henry David Thoreau or recited the classics under Elizabeth Hoar’s instruction. The tutoring in Concord helped. Richard was admitted to Harvard College by President Josiah Quincy, and he was fifth in his class when he graduated in 1844. Later, he was a Boston lawyer who dabbled in verse and published a life of his brother, Arthur Buckminster Fuller, who died in the Civil War. Margaret once told Richard that he had “talent, nobleness, a good person, good health, good position, [and] good education” (1 January 1848, Letters, 5:39). No other member of the Fuller family left such extensive recollections of Margaret as did Richard. fuller in her own time [188] whole we were by no means superior scholars, and being the first Margaret taught she measured us principally by her own achievements. She could not conceal from us, even if she tried, that our progress was unpromising and unsatisfactory. She openly reproached me with mediocrity of understanding ; and she found this, like a goad with a sluggish animal, more effectual than the inducements of ambition that she had held before me to lure me on. This “mediocrity” always troubled me, and I could not forget it till, years afterward, I induced her to reconsider and mitigate the sentence. When we recited we had certain nervous ways of twitching about which annoyed her inexpressibly. I laughingly remember a habit of incessant movement of the hands, as if catching at succor, in our recitations when we were drowning in the deep places of Virgil. It was absolutely impossible for us to think of our hands and keep them still while agonized with classical difficulties and trembling in dread of the doom of a bad recitation. Sometimes our bright answers in geography or history made her laugh outright. She preferred to laugh rather than weep, which was her only alternative. Some of these responses she recorded at the end of the geography textbook. . . . During my last two years in college Margaret rented a house on Ellery street, Dana Hill, Cambridge, and Mother also made the house bright with her presence. Margaret’s society was very valuable—or rather, it was invaluable—to me. Independently of the family tie which she never disregarded , the kindest friendship subsisted between us. This mode of speech implies that I was not solely the beneficiary; that I conferred as well as received . This was true. With all her intellect and all its rich stores she could not dwell on the isolated heights of the mind alone. Her heart was equally large, and craved friendship with a yearning which would not yield to intellectual ambition. She depended on the reciprocal sentiment of those she loved. She was at least once cruelly disappointed in friendship. I was the witness as well as the confidant...

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