one can say
her charm), were personal and practical. She went to Europe, expanded
to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself, married an
impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she
embarked to return to her own country, and was lost at sea in a
terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death
combined with many of the elements of her life to convert her memory
into a sort of legend, so that the people who had known her well, grew
at last to be envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to
have been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry as
this in the American Note-Books in 1841: "I was invited to dine at Mr.
Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had
given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is
true that, later, the lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a
gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth
quoting:--

"After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned through
the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady
reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was
Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon,
meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with
some strange title which I did not understand and have
forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and
was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of
Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of
people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed
a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed
near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground
and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the
beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the
shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about
the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the
crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the
experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon
the character after the recollection of them has passed
away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and
the view from their summits; and about other matters of high
and low philosophy."

It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a
high relish for the very positive personality of this ac