Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

[9]

Sometimes I am on mountains high,
Sometimes in valleys low:--
The state that man's in here below,
Doth oft-times ebb and flow ....

But surely God will save my soul!
And, though you trouble have,
My children dear, who fear the Lord,
Your souls at death he'll save.

The author of these lines was detained in America, it seems, by the preaching of Rev. Mr. Shepard, of Cambridge, known in the obituaries of that period as “the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting and soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard.” Thus guided and influenced, Lieutenant Fuller bought lands in Middleton, then a part of Salem, Mass.,--lands a portion of which is still in the possession of some of his descendants. He built a house there, but afterwards removed to Woburn, where he died. His son Jacob and his grandson Jacob succeeded him at Middleton, and a great-grandson, Timothy, was also born there in 1739, of whom more must be said.

Timothy Fuller graduated at Harvard College in 1760, and his name, with that date, might long be seen upon the corner-stone of the building called Stoughton. He became a clergyman, was settled in Princeton, Mass., and differed from most of his parishioners in regarding the impending American Revolution as premature. He therefore preached a sermon to the “minute-men,” choosing for his text the passage, “Let not him that girdeth on the harness boast himself as he that putteth ”