Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
W. H. Channing, Ed.

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[1383] years' residence there, removed with him to Boston, residing with him and her loving daughter-in-law¹ till the departure of the latter to ‘the better land,’ in 1856. During this mournful year, our pure and noble sister Ellen was also called to the higher divine life of heaven. Excepting these bereavements, these were sunny years for our mother. She was able to do much good in the parish, and she was the object of much attention. Mother had, for Margaret's sake, a particular sympathy for Italians. She would hear the poor man with his organ, and invariably give; which made the street of my brother's residence quite a common resort for these poor sons and daughters of the land of music. She also visited the suffering Italian women in their homes of penury, more, perhaps, than those of other poor, though she delighted to ‘lend to the Lord’ by bestowing her widow's mite to the destitute of whatever kindred and nation.

We notice in the above narrative that mother had three different successive homes while father lived, and after his death five. But her flowers went with her every where; they were certain to spring up and bloom around her wherever she was. From first to last, as types of the Creator's infinite goodness, beauty, and perfection, she loved them with ardent and undiminished tenderness. Washington said his biography could not be written without the history of his country. Neither could mother's be expressively written without the history of flowers. Families and generations of plants adhered to her, year after year, like the tenantry of a feudal lord. When she left one residence, they accompanied her, or perhaps were set out in the hospitable garden of a friend till she acquired another home. There was a family of lilies, in particular, which adhered to her fortunes for a quarter of a century; and some of them she left in my garden. Mother felt much this frequent change of home. No longer, God be praised! is she tossed to and fro. She is