Mary Fuller

“ Chester, Chester, they are taking our children off; Isabel—Mary Fuller, come back!"
"I am here—no one shall take me away," said Mary Fuller, bending over the bed; "Isabel, too, is close by your pillow—she has been crying to see you so sick; do not mind her eyes, they will grow bright again when you are well!"
Mrs. Chester started up in the bed. A moment of consciousness seemed to come over her. She looked at Mary and at Isabel, and spoke to them in a whisper, leaning half out of bed—
"Girls, where is he? tell me now, Mary, that's a good little girl—what have they done with him?" ”

“ Indeed, I much doubt if regular methodical teaching can ever be applied to a nature like hers. Such organisms generally study through the taste and heart.
Certain it is, Mary Fuller, whom no one understood, except, it may be, Enoch Sharp, through his acute observation, and uncle Nathan through his great warm heart, had pretty much her own way, and oftener studied poems and histories from Judge Sharp's library, than anything else even in the schoolroom. Thus her mind grew and thrived in its own rich fancies ”

“ While nature is so beautiful, art should never appear, save to enhance its splendor.
In her whole life she had never been thoroughly homesick before, for never had her young heart been taken from all its loving support so completely as now.
Mrs. Farnham made a great effort to be kind, and to impress upon the child all the importance which she would henceforth derive from an association with herself, and the immense difference that must hereafter exist between her and Mary Fuller. ”

“ From its pauper bed at Bellevue a strong earnest soul was pleading for that child, and thus God sent his angel down to trouble the waters of life within her.
As we grow good, a sense of the beautiful always awakens within us; and this became manifest in Mary Fuller. ”

“ Is this the self-sacrificing Mary Anne, who prides herself——"
Again she interrupted him. She was no more afraid of her father now, than she was of the Moonlight Sonata, and flinging herself with the whole force of her nature upon the catastrophe, she cried, "I will never be self-sacrificing again as long as I live! I will never do another thing for anybody else! I am going to be a perfect pig!"
James Spencer stared for a few seconds in speechless astonishment at his daughter, standing before him with flaming cheeks and defiant eyes. ”

“ Elizabeth and Mary Stuart seem types, moulded by the spirit of the time, and placed upon an elevated platform to show to the coming ages, woman such as the conduct and wishes of man in general is likely to make her, lovely even to allurement, quick in apprehension and weak in judgment, with grace and dignity of sentiment, but no principle; credulous and indiscreet, yet artful; capable of sudden greatness or of crime, but not of a steadfast wisdom, or self-restraining virtue ”

“ And when he had made some such demonstration, Mary Anne's cheeks would flush, and all day long she would gloat over the recollection as a miser gloats over his gold. She was not as unconscious as so good a girl should have been. When she played the piano for a whole evening that a party of boys and girls might dance, she was not above reflecting that they owed their enjoyment to her. ”

“ Fuller remained in prison till June 1695, when he was released by the influence of Charles Herbert, who made him an allowance. Fuller formed a new intimacy with Oates, and published ‘A Brief Discovery of the True Mother of the Prince of Wales,’ 1696. Fuller repeated the old story, and declared that as a page in St. James's Palace he had witnessed on 10 June 1688 the transference of a warming pan from the chamber of a pregnant lady, Mary Grey, to that of the queen, and that this warming-pan contained the child of Mary Grey. ”

“ We wa'n't made to lie down for other folks to walk over. What's the good of a backbone, I should like to know, if not so's we can stand up straight and make the most of the chances the Lord gives us!"
This had been the old lady's stand from the very first, and she held her position stoutly to the last. The "unselfish" Mary Anne had always given her greater cause for uneasiness than did Mary Anne's scapegrace brother Tom, who, in his boyhood, was the despair of his other elders. ”

“ It is hard, however, to believe a story told by Fuller (Worthies, p. 131) , that, to show his contempt for the doctrine of transubstantiation, he on one occasion broke the Host in pieces in the college chapel at evening prayers and trampled it under his feet. Anyhow, he was too notable a man to stay with safety in the country during the reign of Mary, and accordingly he retired to France, where he spent most of his time in study at Paris and Orleans. ”

“ Think of a highly intellectual woman struggling year after year with madness, triumphant over it for a season, and then at last succumbing to it. The saddest lines that ever were written are those descriptive of this brother and sister just before Mary, on some return of insanity, was to leave Charles Lamb. 'On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little foot-path in Hoxton Fields, both weeping bitterly, and found, on joining them, that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum.' What pathos is there not here?"—New York Times. ”

“ It's my opinion that women like Mary Anne do more mischief than they'd relish bein' called to account for. There's Betsy, now! You don't 'spose I'm any the better for havin' ordered her about for more 'n sixty years runnin'?"
The old lady looked at her patient daughter with a softened, pitiful expression.
"Poor Betsy! She ain't to blame, seein' she's deaf as a post. She's a good girl, and she'd ben smart's anybody if she could only ha' heard a little of what folks was sayin'. But there! There's no need o' cryin' over spilt milk. ”

“ The demand for woman's emancipation of thought, her breadth of freedom of action, met with its first great interpreter in Margaret Fuller: she fed that first hunger.
From the glimmer of twilight's solitude through which Hawthorne's shrewd and curious eye dissected the movements of the human heart, Margaret Fuller might have seemed to be like Zenobia, but I did not think it a portrait. ”

“ About this time occurred what a contemporary reporter called "an unhappy chance and monstrous;" the marriage of lady Mary Grey to the serjeant-porter: a circumstance thus recorded by Fuller, with his accustomed quaintness. "Mary Grey... frighted with the infelicity of her two elder sisters, Jane and this Catherine, forgot her honor to remember her safety, and married one whom she could love and none need fear, Martin Kays, of Kent esquire, who was a judge at court, (but only of doubtful casts at dice, being-404-
-vol i- serjeant-porter,) and died without issue the 20th of April 1578 [58] ." ”

“ Many distinguished men kept this opinion of her to their deaths. With such wonderful imagination and a genius like that of George Eliot, there was much that was morbid and unhealthy and strange in Margaret Fuller. ”

“ Samuel Fuller, born in 1625, his son by his third wife, Britlget Lee, was minister at Middleboro. Samuel Fuller, third, born in 165S, son of the Rev. Samuel and his wife Elizabeth, married Mercy Eaton. Deacon John Fuller, born in 1698, married Deborah Ring in 1723. Their daughter, Deborah Fuller, born in 1729, married Kimball Prince. Deacon .John Prince, born in 1768, married Elizabeth Sherman. Mercy Prince, born hi 1793, married Hervey Cushman, a lineal descendant of Robert Cushman through his only son, Thomas, whose wife was Mary, daughter of Isaac Allerton. ”

“ There is a half-smile on her red lips, and her black eyes sparkle with a girlish gayety—for she does not know how bad the world is. At the same time her chin advances confidently, and her dark eyebrows contract with a certain soft imperiousness—for she does not know how hard the world is nor how unyielding. Sometimes she withdraws her glance from the jostling throng to study the untidy and overlapping labels on the big portmanteau; she betrays a certain curiosity, but she shows at the same time a full determination not to seem over-impressed. No, the returned traveller is not Rosy Marshall ”

“ She who stands by your side is not my niece, but my daughter,” and he took Marie Colchis’ hand in his, and drew her toward him. “She is my daughter; no blood makes the tie, but that of love has given her to me. She stands before you alone in this life. No father or mother, brother or sister, or relative has she in the wide world.” The tears were now falling from Marie’s eyes, and she clung closer to her adopted father. Hugh and Lester looked on in silence but wonder. ”

“ XXI "Where are you, Jane?"
Eliza Marshall's voice sounded impatiently in the hallway, and presently her nervous hand was placed on the knob of her daughter's door.
"Well, here you are, finally. And what is the matter, for the land's sake? And where is the pillow you went to get for your father?—we can't keep him waiting out in the carriage on such a day as this. Come, get up; you'll catch your death of cold yourself." ”

“ I'll tell you what; all my children but one are married and gone off; we have property enough; I will have a good room fixed for her, and she shall live with us. My husband wants her to, as much as me."
The council acquiesced in this truly humane arrangement, and Caroline lives there still; and we are assured that none of her friends dread her departure so much as the blacksmith's wife.
"'Ta'n't no trouble at all to have her," she says, "and if it was, I shouldn't care; she is so good and still, and talks so pretty! It's as good bein' with her as goin' to meetin'!" ”

“ This lady had kept her mostly at home with herself, and Mariana had gone from her house to a dayschool; but the aunt, being absent for a time in Europe, she had now been unfortunately committed for some time to the mercies of a boarding-school.
A strange bird she proved there, — a lonely swallow that could not make for itself a summer. At first, her schoolmates were captivated with her ways; her love of wild dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and of wit. She was always new, always surprising, and, for a time, charming. ”

“ No doubt many of my dear countrymen would play just the same pranks now, if the spirit of the age would permit; the will is not wanting, witness our courts of law.
I have been reading the "Life of Margaret Fuller." What a tragedy from first to last! She must have been odious in Boston in spite of her power and her strong sense of duty, with which I always sympathize; but at New York, where she dwindled from a sibyl to a "lionne," one begins to like her better, and in England and Paris, where she was not even that, better still ”

“ There, she saw fair Woman carried in the waltz close to the heart of a being who appeared to her a Satyr. Being warned by a male friend that he was in fact of that class, and not fit for such familiar nearness to a chaste being, the advised replied that "women should know nothing about such things." She saw one fairer given in wedlock to a man of the same class. "Papa and mamma said that 'all men were faulty at some time in their lives; they had a great many temptations.' Frederick would be so happy at home; he would not want to do wrong." ”

“ Mignon and Theresa wear male attire when they like, and it is graceful for them to do so, while Macaria is confined to her arm-chair behind the green curtain, and the Fair Saint could not bear a speck of dust on her robe.
All things are in their places in this little world, because all is natural and free, just as "there is room for everything out of doors." Yet all is rounded in by natural harmony, which will always arise where Truth and Love are sought in the light of Freedom. ”

“ Eliza Marshall's thought flew swiftly towards the second-hand dealer of those purlieus who had carried away so much good, solid furniture, and then had declined to pay for it. But this did not prevent her from looking on her child now as if a viper, warmed at her hearth, had roused to life and stung her.
"Why can't we change?" Rosy proceeded; "why can't we move? Why can't we build somewhere—where we can have neighbors, and a house to invite them to?"
"What do you call the Blackburns and the Freemans?" asked her mother, severely. "Where can you find nicer folks? ”

“ Eliza Marshall set back the candelabrum and transferred her attention to a Rock of Ages in Parian marble. "I believe things get dirtier here every year. I'm sure more dust comes in at that window than goes out." Then: "Well, I don't see but what we're as good as anybody else; I don't see but what we are as well worth taking pains for." She ran her cloth resentfully between the arms of Faith and the arms of the cross.
"Oh, dear me suz!" cried Jane; "are you trying to get the poor woman both ways? ”

“ The little widow stood at the gate, her heart feeling bigger and warmer than for many a long day. Once more she looked down under the row of cotton woods, which had come into full leaf during the past week, looked to where her giant mountain neighbor stood, strong and constant as an old friend. The air seemed clearer, the sunshine brighter, than ever before. The running stream was singing its own gay song, and for once it waked no longing in her breast. As Mrs. Nancy turned to walk up the path, she drew forth Almira's letter, not without a momentary pang of remorse. ”