belonging to a serious life. Now she could say of herself, "I
have deserved most of the disappointments I have experienced; yet God
has softened them, as if he meant them not for penalties, but trials.
Benevolence surrounds me; my need of esteem is satisfied; I have
known the most distinguished people; my heart has been fortunate in
friendship. Self-detached, in a calm and sweet tranquillity, I need
no more, to close my course with courage." She was not one of those
who never speak of themselves because they are always thinking of
themselves. De Tocqueville, after receiving an epistle from her,
wrote back, with grateful delight in her frank and honoring
confidence, "Your letter is a full-length portrait of yourself." In
fact, she always spoke of herself with the utmost freedom, because
she looked at herself from without as she would at any other object.
Her last years were a fine illustration of her own thought, "Old age
is the majestic and imposing dome of human life."

The death of this memorable woman, touchingly described by Falloux in
a letter to Montalembert written at the time, was worthy of what had
gone before it, of the preparations she had made for it, and of the
glorious destiny to which she believed it the entrance. That "we are
to seek God, not deludedly wait for him to seek us," was not more the
maxim of her pen than of her practice. "I speak to others; but with
whom do I converse, if it be not, O my God with thee?" To one of the
group of tearful and venerating friends standing around her, she
said, "Do not, my good friend, ask for me one day more, or one pang
less." Without any decay of her faculties or waning of her moral
force, bearing her sufferings with invincible patience and sweetness,
maintaining a dignity of thought and speech comparable with that of
the last conversation of Socrates, but with the triumph of a perfect
Christian faith, she dropped what was mortal, and passed immortally
into the bosom of God. It was in September, 1857, and she was
seventy-five years young. The great, dazzling, guilty Paris has
loosed no purer or richer spirit for the skies. Her dust hallows the
cemetery of Montmartre, where, in the coming days, many a pilgrim
will go to look on her monument.

While Margaret Fuller was yet a little girl, in her father's house,
an elegant English lady came to pass a few weeks in Cambridge. Her
beauty, with her repose and softness of manner, wrought like a
strange spell on the idea