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

The siege ended, the anxious mother was free to seek her child once more, in his nest among the mountains. Her fears had been but too prophetic. ‘Though the physician sent me reassuring letters,’ she writes, ‘I yet often seemed to hear Angelino calling to me amid the roar of the cannon, and always his tone was of crying. And when I came, I found mine own fast waning to the tomb! His nurse, lovely and innocent as she appeared, had betrayed him, for lack of a few scudi! He was worn to a skeleton; his sweet, childish grace all gone! Everything I had endured seemed light to what I felt when I saw him too weak to smile, or lift his wasted little hand. Now, by incessant care, we have brought him back,— who knows if that be a deed of love?—into this hard world once more. But I could not let him go, unless I went with him; and I do hope that the cruel law of my life will, at least, not oblige us to be separated. When I saw his first returning smile,—that poor, wan, feeble smile!-and more than four weeks we watched him night and day, before we saw it,--new resolution dawned in my heart. I resolved to live, day by day, hour by hour, for his dear sake. So, if he is only treasure lent,—if he too must go, as sweet Waldo, Pickie, Hermann, did,—as all my children do!—I shall at least have these days and hours with him.’

How intolerable was this last blow to one stretched so long on the rack, is plain from Margaret's letters. ‘I shall never again,’ she writes, ‘be perfectly, be religiously generous, so terribly do I need for myself the love I have given to other sufferers. When you read this, I hope your heart will be happy; for I still like to know that others are happy,—it consoles me.’ Again her agony wrung from her these bitter words,—the bitterest