Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 | Page 8

affrighted handmaid from Italy; all exchanging kindly partings,
and sending messages home, if any should survive to be their bearer.
Though persons were busy gathering into carts, on the shore, whatever
spoil was stranded, no life-boat appeared; and the few remaining on the
wreck were now fain to trust themselves to the rioting surf. Margaret
would not go alone. With her husband and attendant (Celeste), she was
just about to try the planks prepared by four seamen, and the steward
had just taken little Nino in his arms, pledged to save him or die, 'when
a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell, carrying with it the
deck and all upon it. The steward and Angelino were washed upon the
beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty minutes after. Celeste and

Ossoli were caught for a moment by the rigging, but the next wave
swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once. When last seen, she had
been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white
night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.' No trace was
found of her manuscript on Italy: her love-correspondence with Ossoli
was the only relic--the last memorial of that howling hurricane, pitiless
sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one
friend!
With the exception of certain sections of laboured, writhing wordiness,
the feverish restlessness and hectic symptoms of which are but too
familiar to persons read in the literature of second-rate
transcendentalism, these volumes comprise a large amount of matter
that will well repay perusal, and portray a character of no ordinary
type--a 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1852.
[2] Mr Fuller's Autobiography, which comprises the first sixty pages of
these Memoirs.

THE COUNTER-STROKE.
Just after breakfast one fine spring morning in 1837, an advertisement
in the Times for a curate caught and fixed my attention. The salary was
sufficiently remunerative for a bachelor, and the parish, as I personally
knew, one of the most pleasantly situated in all Somersetshire. Having
said that, the reader will readily understand that it could not have been
a hundred miles from Taunton. I instantly wrote, enclosing testimonials,
with which the Rev. Mr Townley, the rector, was so entirely satisfied,
that the return-post brought me a positive engagement, unclogged with
the slightest objection to one or two subsidiary items I had stipulated
for, and accompanied by an invitation to make the rectory my home till
I could conveniently suit myself elsewhere. This was both kind and

handsome; and the next day but one I took coach, with a light heart, for
my new destination. It thus happened that I became acquainted, and in
some degree mixed up, with the train of events it is my present purpose
to relate.
The rector I found to be a stout, portly gentleman, whose years already
reached to between sixty and seventy. So many winters, although they
had plentifully besprinkled his hair with gray, shone out with ruddy
brightness in his still handsome face, and keen, kindly, bright-hazel
eyes; and his voice, hearty and ringing, had not as yet one quaver of
age in it. I met him at breakfast on the morning after my arrival, and his
reception of me was most friendly. We had spoken together but for a
few minutes, when one of the French windows, that led from the
breakfast-room into a shrubbery and flower-garden, gently opened and
admitted a lady, just then, as I afterwards learned, in her nineteenth
spring. I use this term almost unconsciously, for I cannot even now, in
the glowing summer of her life, dissociate her image from that season
of youth and joyousness. She was introduced to me, with old-fashioned
simplicity, as 'My grand-daughter, Agnes Townley.' It is difficult to
look at beauty through other men's eyes, and, in the present instance, I
feel that I should fail miserably in the endeavour to stamp upon this
blank, dead paper, any adequate idea of the fresh loveliness, the
rose-bud beauty of that young girl. I will merely say, that her perfectly
Grecian head, wreathed with wavy bandeaux of bright hair, undulating
with golden light, vividly brought to my mind Raphael's halo-tinted
portraitures of the Virgin--with this difference, that in place of the holy
calm and resignation of the painting, there was in Agnes Townley a
sparkling youth and life, that even amidst the heat and glare of a
crowded ball-room or of a theatre, irresistibly suggested and recalled
the freshness and perfume of the morning--of a cloudless, rosy morning
of May. And, far higher charm than feature-beauty, however exquisite,
a sweetness of disposition, a kind gentleness of mind and temper, was
evidenced in every line of her face, in every accent of the low-pitched,