A “mountainous me.”
It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, “He appreciates me.” There was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which as yet had found no right channels.
R. W. Emerson: ‘Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.’
Humor.
Those who think of this accomplished woman as a mere bas bleu, a pedant, a solemn Minerva, should have heard the peals of laughter which her profuse and racy humor drew from old and young. The Easy Chair remembers stepping into Noah Gerrish’s West Roxbury omnibus one afternoon in Cornhill, in Boston, to drive out the nine miles to Brook Farm. The only other passenger was Miss Fuller, then freshly returned from her “summer on the lakes,” and never was a long, jolting journey more lightened and shortened than by her witty and vivid sketches of life and character. Her quick and shrewd observation is shown in the book, but the book has none of the comedy of the croquis of persons which her sparkling humor threw off, and which she too enjoyed with the utmost hilarity, joining heartily in the laughter, which was only increased by her sympathy with the amusement of her auditor.
Geo. Wm. Curtis, ‘Easy Chair,’ Harper’s Magazine, March, 1882.
Ill health.
Alleged second sight.