happy period, because she allowed herself to be
intensely miserable. Six years later, in a moment of penitence, she
said of this period, "Had I been wise in such matters then as now, how
easy and fair I might have made the whole."

She fought her homesickness by overwork, so that Emerson says, "her
reading in Groton was at a rate like Gibbon's," and she paid the
penalty of her excesses by a serious illness which threatened to be
fatal, and from which perhaps she never fully recovered. It was some
consolation that her father was melted to an unwonted exhibition of
tenderness, and that he said to her in this mood, "My dear, I have
been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have
any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do
not know that you have a single fault."

Events were soon to make this remark one of her dearest memories. In a
short time, death separated the father and child, who had been so much
to each other. In 1835, Mr. Fuller fell a victim to cholera, and died
in three days. For a year or more, Margaret's heart had been set upon
a visit to Europe for study; the trip had been promised by her father;
it had been arranged that she should accompany her friends, the
Farrars; but the death of Mr. Fuller dissolved this dream, and, in her
journal, solemnly praying that "duty may now be the first object and
self set aside," she dedicates her strength to her "mother, brothers,
and sister." No one can read the "Memoirs" without feeling that she
kept her vows.

The estate of Mr. Fuller finally yielded $2,000 to each of the seven
children, much less, Margaret says, than was anticipated. With
reason, she wrote, "Life, as I look forward, presents a scene of
struggle and privation only." In the winter, at Mrs. Farrar's,
Margaret met Mr. Emerson; the summer following she visited at his
house in Concord. There she met Mr. Alcott and engaged to teach in his
school in Boston.

Margaret Fuller's visit at Mr. Emerson's in 1836 had for her very
important consequences. It was the first of many visits and was the
beginning of an intimacy which takes its place among the most
interesting literary friendships in the history of letters. To this
friendship Col. Higginson devotes a separate chapter in his biography
of Margaret, and in the "Memoirs," under the title of "Visits to
Concord," Mr. Emerson gives a charming account of it in more than a
hundred pages.

Mr. Emerson was by no mea