The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and 75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants. The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.
[Illustration: FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.]
The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.
"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."
With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the class--William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke--she formed a lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.
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.