previous next

[246] of its nurse, whose milk failing, [she] fed it upon wine and bread, and this at the time when Mr.Ossoli and Mrs. Ossoli were shut up in Rome, during the siege. When, at last, she could leave Rome and go into the country to see him, she found him quite ill, almost, as she feared, beyond recovery, so that she at once took him to Florence, where he has regained his health.

Mr. Ossoli does not speak English, not even a sentence, that I ever heard, so that he has not been known to many Americans, not even to some of William's friends; but he was often at our house, and we knew him, perhaps, better than any one.

You may have seen this before, but not in the same form, and I thought it might be interesting to you to hear from a fresh person so pleasant a statement of Mr. Ossoli's character, pleasanter than those we have sometimes heard here.

I shall not give up that day you promised me, but find you soon, and make you fix upon one.

Yours very truly, Maria Lowell, Cambridge, Elmwood, Friday morn.

It is a curious fact that, throughout this letter, Mrs. Lowell uniformly spells the name of Margaret Fuller's husband “Ossili,” and it illustrates how vague a knowledge of the whole affair had at first reached America. Through such statements as these it came to be better understood; and the really simple and noble character of Margaret Fuller's young lover stood out above all distrust. There lie before me two old-fashioned daguerreotypes of him, and a lock of his hair, the characteristic

Hougton, Mifflin and Company, 1890.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
United States (United States) (1)
Florence (Italy) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Margaret Fuller Ossoli (4)
Maria Lowell (2)
Margaret Fuller (2)
English (1)
Americans (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: