we have
been so happy.'" But love or prayer could not stay the hand of death,
which had marked all of this family for an early doom, and she passed
sweetly away in the arms of her devoted husband. Thank God for the
little glimpse of womanly happiness which He gave her at the last, and
for the faithful mourner who held her memory so sacred for many years in
the old gray manse. Mr. Nichols watched faithfully over the old father
in his last days, and only left Haworth when duty held him there no
longer, although the place had grown inexpressibly sad to him after his
affliction. To the graves of the gifted women who sleep there,
pilgrimages are made to this day. The Yorkshire region has changed much;
and many now seek its wild heathery moors, not only for its own sake,
but for the sake of those who loved and suffered in the little gray
parsonage among its bleak hills. Long will the genius which created
"Jane Eyre" and "Villette" and "Shirley" delight the world; but the
remembrance of the writer's womanly virtues will linger when all these
shall have passed away.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

MARGARET FULLER.

There was little in the life of the people of New England in the early
part of the present century upon which to feed the imagination of a
precocious and romantic child like Margaret Fuller; and her childhood,
though outwardly fortunate and well placed, was one of labor and
repression, and far from happy, if we may judge by her own account of
it. The theology of the people was gloomy. They made everything
connected with religion unlovely, and this austerity was particularly
distasteful to one of Margaret's imaginative temperament and heroic
disposition. Her ungratified imagination brought her early into conflict
with the circumstances and surroundings of her life.

All the poetry of her nature cried out against the lives of toil and
care by which she was surrounded,--lives at that time lighted up by
little of art or literature or music, but held to a stern standard of
duty and self-abnegation. Margaret's nature craved beauty and poetry and
art and lavish affection, and it was nursed on a somewhat grim diet of
hard work and little expressed affection, although her parents were both
loving and intelligent. Her father himself educated her, being a Harvard
graduate, and a lawyer and politician of that day. He taught her Latin
at the age of six years; and she says that the lessons set for her were
as many