Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form passionate attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.
"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious, over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer."
The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and this it is which seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable—her romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fashion in which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation classes on West Street, Boston, and labours on the Dial, a transcendental paper in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not space to speak here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that performed on the Tribune, in the days of Horace Greeley.
Greeley brought Boston's high priestess to New York for the purpose of putting the literary criticism of the Tribune on a higher plane than any American newspaper then occupied, as well as that she might discuss in a large and stimulating way all philanthropic questions. That she rose to the former opportunity her enemies would be the first to grant, but only those who, like Margaret herself, believe in the sisterhood of women could freely endorse her attitude on philanthropic subjects.
Surely, though, it could not have been a hard woman of whom Horace Greeley wrote: "If she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been one of her most cherished and first realised conceptions. She once attended, with other noble women, a gathering of outcasts of their sex, and, being asked how they appeared to her, replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.'"
While labouring for the Tribune, Margaret Fuller was all the time saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse into her private journal in which she had many years before recorded her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.
"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyse me...."
The circumstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in 1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she examined the church by a young man of gentlemanly address, who, perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.
Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he, accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was thoroughly in sympathy.
When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story, who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy. He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love, and she married him."