rgaret," and saying, "I feel that you are entitled,
through our love and regard to be told directly.... Mr. Hawthorne,
last evening, in the midst of his emotions, so deep and absorbing,
after deciding, said that Margaret can now, when she visits Mr.
Emerson spend part of the time with us." A month after the marriage,
Hawthorne himself wrote to Margaret, "There is nobody to whom I would
more willingly speak my mind, because I can be certain of being
understood." Evidently he is not beginning an acquaintance; he already
knows Margaret intimately and respects her thoroughly. There is no
evidence, I believe, that during her life, he held any different
opinion of her.

These facts have become of special interest because, in Italy, eight
years after her death, he wrote in his Note-Book, that Margaret "had a
strong and coarse nature" and that "she was a great humbug." The most
reasonable explanation of this change of view is that Margaret was
dead, poor woman, and could not speak for herself; that she had fought
with all her might in an Italian Revolution that had failed; that
having failed, she and her party were discredited; that her enemies
survived, and Hawthorne listened to them. However his later opinions
may be explained, the quality of her friends in America, among whom
had been Hawthorne himself, is evidence that Margaret was not of a
"coarse nature," and it is incredible that a "humbug" could have
imposed herself for five years upon those ladies who attended her
conversations, not to speak of James Freeman Clarke who was a fair
scholar and Dr. Hedge who was a very rare scholar.

Margaret had her weaknesses, which her friends do not conceal. It was
a weakness, not perhaps that she overestimated herself; that might be
pardoned; but that she took no pains to conceal her high opinion of
her abilities and worth. One likes to see an appearance of modesty,
and that little deceit Margaret did not practice. On the contrary, Mr.
Emerson says, "Margaret at first astonished and then repelled us by a
complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of
Scaligar.... In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know
all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect
comparable to my own.'... It is certain that Margaret occasionally let
slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the
presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who
knew her good sense." Col. Higginso