SARAH MARGARET FULLER, Marchioness, the eldest child of Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, was born at Cambridge Port, Massachusetts, U.S., on the 23rd of May 1810. Her father, who was a lawyer there, took charge himself of her education, but with an imprudence which afterwards cost her much suffering, began too early and exacted too much for the health of his child. She was of nervous and excitable temperament, and of a precocious activity of mind, which required a different regimen from the stimulants of school tasks. She was able to read Latin at six years of age, picked up some knowledge of French, and eagerly devoured all the English books within her reach. Headaches, somnambulism, and spectral illusions were the results of this injudicious excitement of the brain, and, attributing her feeble health to her solitude, her father sent her to a ladies' school at Groton. Afterwards she received instruction in Greek and mathematics from Dr Park of Boston. In 1832 she studied German, and in three months could enjoy the masterpieces of German

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1 The Rev. T. M'Lauchlan, Archaeological Journal, 1857. Mr M'Lauchlan considers these passages as interpolations of the Irish bardic school, in which so many of the Scottish bards were trained. (See also Transactions of the Ossianic Society, Dublin, 1855.) The Irish poems represent Ossian as reciting his strains to St Patrick "in the latter days, when the glory of the Finians having departed for ever, he alone of them survived, infirm, blind, and dependent upon the bounty of the first Christian missionaries to Ireland." The discipline of Christianity sat most uneasily upon the old pagan bard, who sighed for the harp and feast, the battle and the chase. In the number of the Archaeological Journal above referred to is an able paper on the Ossianic controversy by Lord Neaves, a Scottish judge. literature. She was at once brought under the fascination of Goethe, whose doctrine of self-culture the highest aim took possession of her whole soul. Her reading, though diligent and extensive, does not seem to have been systematic, and she never subjected herself to the wholesome discipline of science. She did not lack for her self-culture whatever advantages the most intellectual society of Boston could confer. By her remarkable powers of conversation, and her noble and sympathetic nature, she attracted round her, and personally attached, a very great number of young and ardent friends of both sexes. It is not to be questioned, at the same time, that she was enormously conceited, dogmatic, and exaggerated in thought and feeling, and she was only spoiled by the intense adoration of her coterie. She had a cherished purpose of visiting Europe, and hoped to do so in the society of Miss Martineau, whom she met in 1835; but the death of her father, in October of the same year, laid new responsibilities on her, from which she did not shrink. In the autumn of 1836 she went to Boston to teach Latin and French in a public school, and also formed classes for young ladies in French, German, and Italian. Her success and ability procured her in 1837 the situation of "lady superior" in the Green Street School, Providence, Rhode Island, which she occupied till 1839.

After various migrations, she settled with her mother and family in Boston in 1841. In 1839 she had published a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, and this was followed in 1841 by a translation of the letters of Gunderode and of Bettine. Her intended Life of Goethe was never completed; but she found continuous literary occupation in the Dial, a publication established by the so-called Transcendentalists, which she edited for two years from its commencement in 1840, and in which she published three noticeable papers—a criticism on Goethe; "The Great Lawsuit," afterwards expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and "A Summer on the Lakes," also enlarged into a book in 1844. A characteristic undertaking of hers in Boston was her conversation classes, reunions once a week, in which many of the most cultivated ladies took part, and where such subjects as Greek mythology, the fine arts, the position of women, daemonology, and the ideal, were discussed, Miss Fuller presiding. What has been reported of the debates of these ecclesiasticae gives no high idea of their practical utility; they have rather a peculiar comic aspect, and bear a striking resemblance to the immortal conversations at which Mr Martin Chuzzlewit was present. On the other hand, her writings, in which she felt herself comparatively cramped, display much sense and vigour, some originality, and a growing felicity of image and expression. In 1844 she went to New York as literary contributor to the Tribune, and while there, resided in the house of the editor, Mr Horace Greeley. Her articles were collected and published in two volumes in 1846. That year she made her visit to Europe, passing some time in England and France, and finally fixing her abode in Italy. She had always been attached to that country and its literature, had made the acquaintance of Mazzini in England, and was warmly interested in the progress of liberalism. In December 1847 she was married to the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, but their union was kept secret to save his fortune till the establishment of the hoped-for reforms might render an avowal safe. She had a son in September 1848. She was in Rome during the siege in 1848-49, and superintended one of the two hospitals, while her husband fought on the walls, and her child was left in charge of a nurse in the village of Rieti. In September 1849 they retired to Florence, where they lived in painfully narrow circumstances. She occupied her leisure with the completion of a history of the recent events which she had all along been preparing. She determined to return to America with her family, and to resume her literary career with the publication of her work, on which she founded high expectations. They set sail from Leghorn, 17th May 1850, in the barque Elizabeth; and the voyage was prosperous till they reached the coast of New Jersey, when, in a dreadful gale, the ship struck on Fire Island beach, 16th July. Some of the crew and passengers saved themselves, but the Ossolis perished. Margaret Fuller was a woman of very extraordinary endowments, and her loss was deeply regretted as a calamity to American literature and progress. Memoirs of her, compiled by her friends, W. H. Clarke, R. W. Emerson, and W. E. Channing, were published in 1852.