n. At New York, she took an active interest,
after Mrs Fry's manner, in the various benevolent institutions, and
especially the prisons on Blackwell's Island. For more than a year she
wrote regularly for the _Tribune_, 'always freshly, vigorously, but
not always clearly.' The notice attracted by her articles insured
fresh hosts of acquaintances, and she became a distinguished character
at Miss Lynch's reunions, and at literary soirees of a similar order.
In 1846, she left her native land--for ever, as the melancholy event
proved--to join Mr and Mrs Spring in a European tour. Her letters home
contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities.
Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat,
with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She
visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais,
Beranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she
went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked in 1850 on board
that doomed ship, the _Elizabeth_. As a resident in Rome, her safety
was seriously imperiled during the French siege of 1849. She was
appointed by the 'Roman Commission for the succour of the wounded,' to
the superintendence of an hospital, and all along took the liveliest
interest in the fortunes of Mazzini and the republic. She was then a
wife and a mother, having been married privately to the Marquis
Ossoli, a Roman, 'of a noble but impoverished house,' whom she
described, in a letter to her mother, as 'not in any respect such a
person as people in general would expect to find with her,' being a
man 'absolutely ignorant of books, and with no enthusiasm of
character,' but endowed with excellent practical sense, a nice sense
of duty, native refinement, and much sweetness of temper. The peculiar
circumstances attending the marriage in that country, and at that
agitated crisis, involved Margaret in numerous afflictions, and taxed
her powers of endurance to the very uttermost.

She had to suffer compulsory separation from husband and child--the
one in hourly peril of a bloody death, the other neglected and pining
away in the hands of strangers: penury, loneliness, prostrating
sickness, and treachery on the part of those around her, were
meanwhile her own lot in the land of strangers. How this season of
trial affected her character, may be inferred from the remarks of her
friend Mrs Story, then sojourning in Italy, who says