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NARRATOR: Izak Starfisher Productions presents American Profile: Margaret Fuller.

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NARR: Ralph Waldo Emerson described Margaret Fuller this way:

EMERSON: I have never known any example of such steady progress from stage to stage of thought and character…Her growth is visible.

NARR: Likewise, Margaret wrote of Emerson:

FULLER: When I look forward to eternal growth, I am always aware that I am far larger and deeper for him. His influence has been to me that of lofty assurance and sweet serenity.

NARR: Margaret Fuller was schooled in philosophy from her earliest years by her father, Congressman Timothy Fuller. Her Transcendentalism came before she'd ever heard of Channing, Emerson, or Alcott. It was the Germans, especially Goethe, and their popularizer, Thomas Carlyle, that served as her education, right after the alphabet, English and Latin grammar. She'd early formed the ambition to go to Europe to write a biography of Goethe, who had died in 1832. But Timothy Fuller died in 1835, and the twenty-five year old Margaret had to forego the dream of Europe in order to help support the family. She'd already set herself a rigorous schedule of self-culture, embracing German, French and Italian literature, Greek, metaphysics, and journal writing. Growth was her watchword.

Margaret Fuller had a religious experience Thanksgiving Day, 1831. After enduring the sermon, she fled to the fields to be by herself.

FULLER: I saw that there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that for that hour I was taken up into God.

NARR: But even aside from the question of selfishness, Margaret Fuller's rich and intense mind required a suitable outlet. She would continue a search throughout her short life for an appropriate medium in which to express herself.

FULLER: With regard to what you say about the American Monthly, my answer is I would gladly sell some part of my mind for lucre, to get the command of time; but I will not sell my soul; that is, I am not willing to have what I write mutilated or what I say dictated to suit the public taste. It is my earnest wish to interpret the German authors of whom I am most fond to such Americans as are ready to reoeive. Perhaps some might sneer at the notion of my becoming a teacher; but where I love so much, surely I might inspire others to love a little; and I think this kind of culture would be precisely the counterpoise required by the utilitarian tendencies of our day and place. I hope a periodical may arise, by and by, which may think me worthy to furnish a series of articles on German literature, giving room enough and freedom to say what I please.

NARR: Then, in 1835, Margaret moved to Boston, a busy commercial and cultural cener for all New England. Her first contact with the group that was to form the Transcendentalists came in the form of a job as teacher of foreign languages in Bronson Alcott's Temple School, an unconventional school dedicated to cultivating genius, not imparting knowledge. Alcott and the venerable William Ellery Channing encouraged the Socratic method, personal journals to develop self-knowledge, and self-government of the school itself. Fuller taught Latin, French, German, Italian an overfull schedule, which nearly ruined her health.

FULLER: I am still quite unwell, and all my pursuits and propensities have a tendency to make my head worse. It is but a bad head -- as bad as if I were a great man! I am not entitled to so bad a head by anything I have done; but I flatter myself it is very interesting to suffer so much, and a fair excuse for not writing pretty letters.

I was so desirous of doing all that I could that I took a great deal more upon myself than I was able to bear. Yet now that twenty-five weeks of incessant toil are over, I rejoice in it all, and would not have done an iota less. I have fulfilled all my engagements faithfully; have acqutred more power of attention, self-command, and fortitude; have acted in life as I thought I would in my lonely meditations; and have gained some knowledge of means.

NARR: A teaching post in Providence opened up for her at high pay for fewer hours. There she heard a talk that started her thinking about Feminism. But Boston was the center that attracted her again in 1839. Unitarianism had overthrown the more conservative Calvinism and now the Unitarians faced an idealism in part derived from the modern German thinkers — Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte — and in part from New England's own heritage -- Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards. The new spirit in Boston progressed from Dr. Channing's liberal Unitarianism to the radical idealism of Theodore Parker, Frederick Henry Hedge, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke -- and pantheists who forsook the pulpit for the pen: George Ripley, John Sullivan Dwight, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott and Henry David Thoreau held by no church at all.

Over fifty experimental communities, including Brook Farm, shared the excitement of "Newness," but the impetus behind the new Transcendentalism was at base religious-philosophical.

An informal gathering of Emerson, Hedge, Ripley and George Putnam became a circle including Sara Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody — and Emerson's friend Margaret Fuller, although she described herself as "Germanico," not "transcendental." Bronson Alcott describes one meeting:

ALCOTT: Monday, 16th Sept. We rode to Watertown, dining on our way with E. Quincy, at whose house we found H.G. Wright. We discussed the doctrine of Non-Resistance.

The following persons comprised our circle for Conversation. at the house of Dr. Francis: Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Hedge, Ripley, Dwight, Parker, Bartlett, Bartol, May, Stetson, Morrison, Mrs. Ripley, Miss Fuller.

I proposed the Esoteric and Exoteric doctrine for discussion. The conversation was general, lively, continuous. Emerson, Channing Ripley, Bartlett had good words to say. I tried to show the roots of this doctrine in the functions of the Soul; discrimination the functions of Prophet, Scribe, Priest; the order of Revelation; Inspiration of all Scriptures, etc.

This was one of our best interviews. It was marked by candor, independence, charity. Our best materials were gathered in this circle. But we are yet too feeble to execute works worthy of the position in which the good Soul has placed us. Yet we must watch and labor as becomes faithful disciples of Hers, and She shall make us strong betimes.

NARR: Talk of a magazine was afoot. George Ripley enlisted Fuller to contribute her translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe in his series of contemporary European authors. Elizabeth Peabody had opened a bookshop where the English, French, and German reviews could be found — it too became a meeting ground for the new spirit. Two other patrons of the store were Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of them more interested in the Peabody sisters than in books at the time. But when Margaret Fuller came around to the shop, she put all her energies into conversation, which Emerson reported as the most entertaining in America — conversation was shortly to become her chief occupation. William Henry Channing describes one such occasion,

CHANNING: When her turn came, by a graceful transition she resumed the subject where preceding speakers had left it, and briefly summing up their results, proceeded to unfold her own view. Her opening was deliberate, like the progress of some massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality. Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was affluent in historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as in novel hints. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the essential truth fathered from wide research, and distilled with patient toil; and by skilful treatment she could make green again the wastes of ommonplace. Her statements, however rapid, showed breadth of omprehension, ready memory, impartial judgment, nice analysis, differences, power of penetrating through surfaces to realities, ixed regard to central laws and habitual communion with the Life f life. Critics, indeed, might have been tempted to sneer at a oracular grandiloquence, that bore away her soberness in of elation; though even the most captious must presently ave smiled at the humor of her aescriptive touches, her dextrous exposure of folly and pretension, the swift stroke of her bright wit, her sheewd discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind.

The reverential, too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men, measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash, revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could iail to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to break every trammel that checked her growth or fettered her movement.

NARR: Elizabeth Peabody offered her store, and Margaret set up shop as a Conversationalist; she found twenty-five women her purpose was to strengthen the self-image of women — eager to pay $20 for a series of ten conversations. The conversations lasted four years -- daughters and wifes of Boston aristocracy came, as well as the intellectuals. Her living secured with conversations and private tutoring, Fuller turned agaunn to the unwritten biography of Goethe -- but in the summer of 1839, the Transcendentalists of various stripes invited Margaret Fuller to be the first editor of a new journal called The Dial.

She expresses her own cautious aims for The Dial:

FULLER: A perfectly free organ is to be offered for the expression of individual thought and character. There are no party measures to be curried, no particular standard to be set up. A fair calm tone, a recognition of universal principles will, I hope, pervade the essays in every form. I hope there will neither be a spirit of dogmatism nor of compromise. That this periodical will not aim at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to think for himself, to think more deeply and more nobly by letting them see how some minds are kept alive by a wise self-trust.

I am sure we cannot show high culture, and I doubt about vigorous thought. But I hope we shall show free action as far as it goes and a high aim. It were much if a periodical could be kept open to accomplish no outward object, but merely to afford an avenue for what of free and calm thought might be originated among us by the wants of individual minds.

NARR: The Dial proved to be a challenge from the very beginning. Emerson, Alcott. Ripley would contribute to the first number, planned for April 1840 — so would Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Caroline Sturgis and Ellen Hooper. But others were shy or dilatory. Margaret as editor had to fill in much with her own writings, done in every scrap of time available. The issue was uneven as a result of Margaret's insistence on freshness and vitality at the expense of literary quality. Emerson's and Parker's contributions sustained the journal's later issues, but in 1841 the printer went bankrupt. Makeshift arrangements continued until Emerson -- who became editor after the first two years — ended up paying for the last few issues himself. The editor's salary never materialized — circulation probably never topped five hundred. For reasons of health, income. and family troubles, Margaret Fuller left the Dial. Her greatest piece, "The Great Lawsuit," was the most radical feminist document yet published. The Dial years had not been a loss but a schooling.

After one of Margaret's visits with Emerson — which occurred every few months — Emerson wrote this appraisal of her in his journal:

EMERSON: A pure and purifying mind, self-purifying also, full of faith in men and inspiring it. unable to find any companion great enough to receive the rich effusions of her thought, so that her riches are still unknown and seem unknowable. We are taught by her plenty how lifeless and outward we are, what poor Laplanders burrowing under the snows of prudence and pedantry. Beside her friendship, other friendships seem trade, and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, all mortals are convinced that another road exists than that which their feet have trod.

NARR: Margaret Fuller also visited frequently at Ripley's community at Brook Farm, offering a series of Conversations there in 1842. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the founders of Brook Farm and would later incorporate his impressions of Fuller into the forceful character Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. On a visit to the married Hawthorne at Concord, the two of them took a moonlight row on the river.

FULLER: The wind being against us made it too hard for the boatman and soft clouds overspeeading the whole sky, it seemed that we should have no moon back, so we did not go quite to Fairhaven Bay, but stopped about half a mile this side and went on shore to walk. But soon the moon rose in great beauty, above a wood and we went to the boat again. We floated carelessly, running ashore every now and then, and reached home a little after ten. 0, it is a sweet dream in memory! Yet I regretted afterward that I had been led to talk so much.

NARR: Hawthorne's private comments on Fuller are likewise ambivalent. And Margaret mused:

FULLER: Say, is it not deeper and truer to live than to think? These chasings up and down the blind alleys of thought neither show the center nor the circumference.

NARR: In 1843 Margaret Fuller and Sarah Clarke set out for a summer vacation in the Great Lakes region -- the book of that trip, Summer on the Lakes, was panned by Orestes Brownson, but caught the attention of Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. On the basis of that book, he offered her the post of literary critic for the Tribune. It was a time for re-evaluation.

FULLER: Formerly the pen did not seem to me an instrument capable of expressing the spirit of a life like mine. An enchanter's mirror, on which with a word could be made to rise all the apparitions of the universe grouped in new relations; a magic ring, that could transport the wearer, himself invisible, into each region of grandeur or beauty. In earlier years I aspired to wield the sceptre or the lyre; for I loved with wise design and irresistible command to mold many to one common purpose, and it seemed all that man could desire to breathe in music and speak in words the harmonies of the universe. But the golden lyre was not given to my hand, and I am but the prophecy of a poet. Let me use, then, the slow pen. I will make no formal vow to the long-scorned Muse; I assume no garland; I dare not even dedicate myself as a novice; I cam promise neither patience nor energy — but I will court excellence as far as a humble heart and open eye can merit it, and if I may gradually grow to some degree of worthiness in this mode of expression, I shall be grateful.

NARR: She had another book project in mind as well -- an expansion of her Dial piece "The Great Lawsuit." Writing for the Trib would help. The book would be Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

FULLER: It is no more the order of nature that it should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form. Male and female represent the two sides of the great nadical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believe that the development of one cannot be effected without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth shall be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the conditions of life and freedome recognized as the same for the daughters and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought.

NARR: Woman opened New York's doors to Margaret Fuller — a storm of praise and criticism brought her center stage on the issue of Feminism. Greeley did not repent his offer.

GREELEY: Margaret Fuller is the most remarkable and in some respects the greatest woman whom America has yet known -- the loftiest, bravest soul that has yet irradiated the form of an American woman.

NARR: Her critical reviews and essays from the Tribune were published in 1846 as Papers on Literature and Art -- Edgar Allan Poe was the only other claimant to the role of leading literary critic.

Margaret's reviews were noted for frankness and originality, not for tact.

Mr. Longfellow has been accused of plagiarism. We have been surprised that anyone should have been anxious to fasten special charges of this kind upon him, when we had supposed it so obvious that the greater part of his mental stores were derived from the work of others. He has no style of his own, growing out of his own experiences and observation of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature.

NARR: And on Lowell.

FULLER. Lowell we must declare it, though to the grief of some friends and the disgust of more, is absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

NARRATOR: The Democratic Review called Fuller's Papers on Literature and Art a clear call for "a true, genuine, invincible AMERICANISM, " an idea definitely in the air around literary circles in New York — from Rufus Griswold, who tried to define an American literature in an uneven anthology of authors from colonial days to the present, which was rivaled by a similar encyclopedic project by the Duyckinck brothers, to the Knickerbocker magazine, to the recently acclaimed young novelist of the American adventure into the Pacific, Herman Melville, to the bombastic patriot editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Walter Whitman, who indeed had published some of Margaret's pieces before they were published as a book, and ten years before Whitman himself was to publish his own self-conscious effort at creating an American literature that was in no way beholden to Europe.

In the 1840s, New York was definitely the center of American literary life — besides its majestic and busy harbor and the mighty Hudson River, the recently opened Erie Canal assured New York of cheap transport of goods and books to the rapidly developing inland territories of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes — thus it was that by the 1840s, New York easily overshadowed Philadelphia and Boston. Every writer and artist of ambition felt its pull — it attracted Poe from the South, Melville and Margaret Fuller from New Eng land, and many others came to the city of opportunity.

In the twenties, William Cullen Bryant, that solid editor, had formed the center of one circle; Washington Irving attracted talented writers and artists into another group -- in a way that Fenimore Cooper, another New Yorker, never was able to do.

The Knickerbocker under George Gaylord set up the first consistent, though idiosyncratic, body of literary criticism -- and the dream of an American literature was born. By the forties, N.P. Wlliis , Poe and others founded and edited magazines of rival factions, the Young America writers proclaimed the new literature, and one 'of the Duykinck brothers was attempting to lead the Harper Brothers publishing firm toward more American writers and away from the outrageous practice of pirating the popular English novels, especially those of Charles Dickens, just as soon as the first copy arrived off the boat from England. This competition led some fast operators to printing whole books on giant newssheets called "mammoths" or in other cheap forms, and it was to continue for another fifty years before American publishers agreed among themselves to support a copyright law for American authors. In the meantime American writers were not protected, and didn't stand much of a chance against the pirated English novels

COOPER: I fear good wholesome profitable and continued pecuniary support is the applause that talent most craves. The fact that an American publisher can get an English work without any money, must, for a few years longer (unless legislative protection shall be extended to their own authors), have a tendency to repress a national literature. No man will pay a writer for an epic, a tragedy, a sonnet, a history, or a romance, when he can get a work of equal merit for nothing.

NARR: American literature had to wait years more before attaining an identity of its own. Hawthorne, it is true, had plumbed aspects of the American soul -- but it would be 1851 before Melville's Moby Dick saw light, and 1855 before the first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, handset by Whitman himself, cast the broad vision we now live in. So it was that Margaret Fuller wrote these words about a subject we take for granted:

FULLER: Some thinkers may object to this essay, that we are about to write of that which has, as yet, no existence.

For it does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.

We have no sympathy with national vanity. We are not anxious to prove that there is as yet much American literafure. Of those who think and write among us in the methods and of the thoughts of Europe, we are not impatient; if their minds are still best adapted to such food, and such action. If their books express life of mind and character in graceful forms, they are good and we like them. We consider them as colonists and useful schoolmasters to our people in a transition state; which lasts rather longer than is occupied in passing, bodily, the ocean which separates the new from the old world.

What suits Great Britain, with her insular position and consequent need to concentrate and intensify her life, her limited monarchy, and spirit of trade, does not suit a mixed race, continually enriched with new blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our first descent, with ample field and verge enough to range in and leave every impulse free, and abundant opportunity to develop a genius, wise and full as our rivers, flowery, luxuriant and impassioned as our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed.

NARR: Here is Edgar Poe's estimate of Margaret Fuller's own writings:

POE: The Dial was the most forcible and certainly the most peculiar paper. Her poetry is tainted with the affectations of the transcendentalist, but is brimful of the poetic sentiment. Woman is a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. Her criticism is nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholar-like. And her style is one of the very best with which I am acquainted. In general effect, I know of no style which surpasses it. It is singularly piquant, vivid, terse, bold, luminous -- leaving details out of sight, it is everyt.hing that a style need be.

NARR: Fuller took seriously the journalist's role of muckraker, too. Among other stories, she contributed an exposé of Sing Sing and other New York prisons -- a delight to Horace Greeley's crusading instincts.

She also had an affair, with secret meetings and passionate letters. Yet as before with another young man, her passion was never simply love:

FULLER: The destiny of each human being is no doubt great and peculiar, however obscure its rudiments to our present sight, but there are also in every age a few in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated. I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex. I feel chosen among women. I have deep mystic feelings within myself, and intimations from elsewhere. I coill.ld not, if I would; plt into words these spirit facts; indeed they are but swelling germs as yet, and all I do for them is to try to do nothing that might blight them. Yet as you say you need forget your call, so have I need of escaping from this overpowering sense. But when forced back upon myself, as now, though the first turnings of the key were painful, yet the inner door makes rapturous music upon its golden hinge. What it hides, you perhaps know, as you read me so deeply; indeed some things you say seem as if you did. Yet do not, unless you must. You look at things wo without their veils, yet that seems noble and antique to me. I do it when you hold me by the hand, yet, when I feel how you are thinking, I sometimes only say. Psyche was but a mortal woman, yet as the bride of Love, she became a daughter of the gods.

NARR: And shortly afterwards:

FULLER: The last three days have effedted as violent a chnge as the famous three days of Paris, and the sweet little garden, with which my mind had surrounded your image, lies all desecrated and trampled by the hoofs of the demon who conducted whis revolution, pelting with his cruel hailstones me, poor child, just as I had laid aside the protections of reserve and laid open my soul in heavenly trust. I must weep to think of it, and why, O God, must eyes that never looked falsehood be doomed to shed such tears! Truth is the first of jewels, yet let him feel that if Margaret dared express herself more frankly than another, it is because she has been in her way a queen and received her guests as also of royal blood.

NARR: Then came the chance to see Europe at last, in 1846 with Marcus and Rebecca Springs.

FULLER: I do not look forward to seeing Europe now as so very important to me. My mind and character are too much formed. I shall not modify them much but only add to my stores of knowledge. still, even in this sense, I wish much to go. It is important to me, almost needful in the career I am now engaged in. I feel that, if I persevere, there is nothing to hinder me having an important career even now. But it must be in the capacity of a journalist, and for that I need this new field of observation.

NARRI They visited, and were shocked by, Liverpool and Manchester. Margaret met Guiseppe Mazzini, the exiled leader of Italian republicanism, Harriet Martineau, the reform writer, whom Margaret had corresponded with for years, me ancient William Wordsworth, Jeremy Bentham — and Thomas Carlyle, as she reports to Emerson.

FULLER: That first time I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet humor -- full of wit and pathos, without being o~erbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great, full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad. He let me talk now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired. That evening he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, and some sweet homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a story of some poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world and sits reading your Essays and looking upon the sea.

NARR: Fuller's Papers on Literature and Art had just come out in an English edition, an excellent calling card in London -- but France was a different story, although La Revue Independante invited her to become their American correspondent. The former language teacher was admonished to attend the theater and opera to improve her French which she turned to account in articles for the Trib. A ball at the French court of Louis Philippe did not close her eyes to the social pressures that were building up all over Europe for revolution, for republicanism, for better working conditions. Adam Mickiewicz, the national poet of fragmented Poland, was, like Mazzini in England, the center of a group of revolutionaries in exile. George Sand, too, breathed the new spirit -- Fuller describes their meeting: .

FULLER: Madame Sand opened the door and stood looking at me for an instant. Our eyes met. I shall never forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her figure; she is large but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest taste, her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and lady-like dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. What fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and power that pervaded the whole -- the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "c'est vous," and held out her hand. I took it and want into her little study; we sat down a moment, then I said, "II me fait de bien de vous voir," and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed a character, and everything that is good in it so really good. I loved, shall always love her.

She holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of courage and energy in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but she has also enjoyed and done much, and her expression is one of calmness and happiness.

NARR: But it was in Italy that Margaret's destiny came to a head. Transcendentalism was becoming for her a political creed matched by the life~and-death struggles of Mazzini, Mickiewicz and others toward revolution.

FULLER: I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier's future. But I like no Fourierites; they are terribly wearisome here in Europe; the tide of things does not wash through as violently as with us, and they have time to run in the tread-mill of the system. Still, they serve this great future which I shall not live to see. I must be born again.

NARR: In Rome, Margaret ran into the young Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a fourth son and a republican in a family of rank that supported the Papal State, which had split Northern from Southern Italy for a thousand years. Italy had had a taste of unification under Napoleon for a brief period, but Metternich's Congress of Vienna had rewritten the old boundaries thirty years before -- Angelo Ossoli was too young to remember, but old enough to fall in love with the brilliant liberal woman -- now thirty-seven -- from America, who felt at home, finally, in the heady atmosphere of revolution.

The new Pope -- Pio Nono -- promised a new representative council, and Rome rejoiced:

FULLER: The stream of fire advanced slowly, with a perpetual surge-like sonnd of voices; the torches flashed on the animated Italian faces. I have never seen anything finer. Ascending the Quirinal they made it a mount of light. Bengal fires were thrown up, which cast their red and white light on the noble Greek figures of men and horses that reign over it. The Pope appeared on his balcony; the crowd shouted three vivas; he extended his arms; the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction; he tetired, and the torches were extinguished, and the multitude dispersed in an instant.

NARR: But Margaret Fuller's destiny, though linked to politics, had its own strange brew:

FULLER: I have known some happy hours, but they all lead to sorrow; and not only the cups of wine, but of milk, seemed drugged with poison for me. It does not seem to be my fault, this Destiny; I do not court these things ~- they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract.

When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many circumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, childlike well-being. That is all over now, and with this year I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult that I at present see no way out, except through the gate of death. It is useless to write of it: you are at a distance and cannot help me -- whether accident or angel will, I have no intimation. I have no reason to hope that I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark and sad enigma. The beautiful forms of art charm no more, and a love in which there is all fondness but no help flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this.

NARR: Margaret Fuller accompanied her traveling companions as far as Venice, but turned back from the trip to Germany — she had found "My Italy," as she put it. In Milan she befriended the Marchesa Arconati Visconti, who had been exiled twenty-six years before for liberalism. The Milan tobacco riots against the Austrians broke out in January 1848, and uprisings in Genoa and Leghorn were more than matched by the protests against Ferdinand II, King of Naples, who was forced to promise a constitution. Piedmont and Tuscany followed suit. Pio Nono in Rome granted a constitution but the gentle Pope had already shown signs of weakness in standing up to Austrian diplomacy or soldiery.

News from abroad was heartening to the republican cause. Louis Philippe in France had been overthrown, and in Austria itself, Metternich, the Architect of Europe, had been forced to resign and flee the country. The Milanese in five days of street fighting drove the Austrians out of the city, Venice did likewise, so did Parma and Modena -- and all of them set up provisional governments.

Young men from Rome, Sicily, and elsewhere enlisted in Piedmont's army, led by King Charles Albert, who vowed to drive the Austrians across the border. Adam Mickiewicz organized a Polish legion to join the fray. Pio Nono in the Papal States equivocated.

Meanwhile, Margaret Fuller had become Margaret Fuller Ossoli in a secret, and disputed, marriage. While Angelo stayed in Rome, Margaret moved south of Rome to Aquila to bide the time of her pregnancy, and to write the history of the Italian struggle.

As the time grew into months, Angelo Ossoli waited in the Papal army in Rome for orders to attack the Austrians at Bmlogna -- but Pio Nono gave a benediction instead. Ossoli was Margaret's contact with the outside world -- he would forward her mail, an immense pile, with over a hundred regular correspondents. But in September he came down to be with her -- and Angelo Philip Eugene Ossoli, Angelino for short, was born September 5, 1848.

In November, Margaret left Angelino in the care of a nurse, and set out for Rome. Count Rossi, the new re~ctionary prime minister, was assassinated. A riot broke out at the Quirinal Palace, and Pio Nono, once the hope of the people, fled south to Naples.

FULLER: None can now attach any value to the blessing of Pius IX. Those who loved him can no longer defend him. It has become obvious that those first acts of his in the Papacy were merely the result of a kindly, good-natured temperament; that he had not thought to understand their bearing nor force to abide by it. He seems quite destitute of moral courage. He is not resolute either on the wrong or the right side. First he abandoned the liberal party; then yielding to the will of the people and uniting in appearance with a liberal ministry, he let the cardinals betray it and defeat the hopes of Italy. He cried peace! peace! but had not a word of blame for the sanguinary acts of the King of Naples, a word of sympathy for the victims of Lombardy. Seizing the moment of dejection in the nation, he put in this retrograde ministry; sanctioned their acts, daily more impudent; let them neutralize the constitution he himself had given; and when the people slew his minister and assaulted him in his own. palace, he yielded anew; he dared not die, nor run the slightest risk -- for only by accident could he have perished. His person as a Pope is still respected, though his character as a man is despised. The common people were staring at the broken windows and burnt door of the palace where they have so often gone to receive a blessing, the children playing "Sedia Papale. Morte ai Cardinali, e morte al Papa!"

NARR: In February, the Roman Republic was declared, led by Garibaldi and Mazzini — Tuscany's Grand Duke fled about the same time -- freedom was in the air. Yet by April, reverses in the North were followed by news of a French force whose intent was to "liberate" -- Liberate Rome from itself. Garibaldi's troops and others rushed to the defense. Margaret was appointed director of a hospital on the very morning of the French attack, which was repulsed. For a month the French General Oudinot parleyed and reinforced his army, and in June Rome was bombarded mercilessly. The Roman Assembly at the last voted to surrender. Garibaldi, with several thousand compatriots, retreated to the hills.

FULLER: They had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the Greek cap, or else round hat with Puritan plume. Their long hair was blown back from resolute faces; all looked full of courage. They had counted the cost before they entered in this perilous struggle; they had weighed life and all its material advantages against liberty, and made their election; they turned not back, nor flinched, at this bitter rrisis. I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their baggage cars; some were already pale and fainting, still they wished to go. I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a hanftkerchief all their worldly goods. The women were ready, their eyes too were resolved, if sad. The wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback. He himself was distinguished by the white tunic, his look was entirely that of hero of the Middle Ages -- his face still young, for the excitements of his life, though so many, have all been youthful and there is no fatigue upon his brow of cheek. FaIl or stand, one sees in him a man engaged in the career for which he is adapted by nature. He went upon the parapet, and looked upon the road with a spy-glass, and, no obstruction being in sight, he turned his face for a moment back upon Rome, then led the way through the gate. Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye, that had no tear for that moment.

NARR: Margaret and Ossoli left the doomed city to reclaim little Angelino in the country south of Rome. Late in the year the Ossoli family made a trip to Florence there to meet the Brownings. For the first time the secret marriage and child were made public.

FULLER: Christmas Day I was just up, and Nino all naked on his sofa, when came some beautiful large toys that had been sent him: a bird, a horse, a cat, that could be moved to express different things. It almost made me cry to see the fearful rapture with which he regarded them -- legs and arms extended, fingers and toes quivering, mouth made up to a little round O, eyes dilated, for a time he did not even wish to touch them, after he began to, he was different with all three, loving the bird, very wild and shouting with the horse: with the cat, putting her face close to his, staring in her eyes, and then throwing her away. Afterwards I drew him in a lottery, at a child's party given by Mrs. Greenough, a toy of a child asleep on the neck of a tiger; the tiger is stretching up to look at the child. This he likes best of any of his toys. It is sweet to see him when he gets used to them and plays by himself, whispering to them, seeming to contrive stories. You would laugh to know how much remorse I feel that I never gave children more toys in the course of my life. I regret all the money I ever spent on myself or in little presents for grown people, hardened sinners. I did not know what pure delight could be bestowed.

There is snow all over Florence. In our most beautiful piazza, Santa Maria Novella, with its fair loggia and bridal church, is a carpet of snow, and the full moon looking down. I had forgotten how angelical all that is; how fit to die by. I have only seen snow in mountain patches for so long. Here it is even the holy shroud of a desired power. God bless all good and bad tonight, and save me from despair.

NARR: In the spring of 1850, Margaret, Angelo and Angelino set sail for New York. The bark Elizabeth struck a sandbar off Fire Island, and Ossoli, Margaret Fuller and the child to which she clung were all drowned. Their bodies were never found. Emerson wrote in his journal:

EMERSON: On Friday, July 19. Margaret dies on rocks of Fire Island Beach within sight of and within sixty rods of the shore. To the last her country proves inhospitable to her; brave, eloquent, subtle, accomplished, devoted, constant soul! She had a wonderful power of inspiring confidence and drawing out of people their last secret. I have lost in her my audience. There should be a gathering of her friends and some Beethoven should play the dirge.

NARR: Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

BROWNING: Now she is where there is no more grief and no more sea; and none of the restless in this world, none of the shipwrecked in heart, ever seemed to me to want peace more than she did. We saw much of her last winter; and over a great gulf of differing opinion we both felt drawn strongly to her. High and pure aspiration she had -- yes, and a tender woman's heart and we honored the truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man. The work she was preparing upon Italy would have probably been more equal to her faculty than anything previously produced by her pen (her other writings being curiously inferior to the impressions her conversation gave you). Blood colors of Socialistic views, which would have drawn the wolves on her, with a still more howling enmity, both in England and America •• Therefore it was better for her to go. Only God and a few friends can be expected to distinguish between the pure personality of a woman and her professed opinions. She was chiefly known in America, I believe, by oral lectures and a connection with the newspaper press, neither of them happy means of publicity. Was she happy in anything, I wonder? She told me that she never was. May God have made her happy in her death.

NARR: This has been American Profile: Margaret Fuller, an Izak Starfisher Production. Sources for this program include Margaret Fuller, Whetstone of Genius by Mason Wade, and Margaret Fuller, from Transcendentalism to Revolution, by Paula Blanchard. You have been listening to An American Profile: Margaret Fuller, produced in the studios of KCSB-FM, Santa Barbara. The players include Pat Fish as Margaret Fuller, and Dennis Holt, David Dahl, Paul Hunter, Kerri Windo. I'm your narrator and producer, Sasha Newborn. This has been Quite A Production. Thank you for listening.