[Footnote A:  Horace Sumner, one of the victims of the lamentable wreck of the Elizabeth, was the youngest son of the late Hon. Charles P. Sumner, of Boston, for many years Sheriff of Suffolk County, and the brother of George Sumner, Esq., the distinguished American writer, now resident at Paris, and of Hon. Charles Sumner of Boston, who is well known for his legal and literary eminence throughout the country.  He was about twenty-four years of age, and had been abroad for nearly a year, travelling in the South of Europe for the benefit of his health.  The past winter was spent by him chiefly in Florence, where he was on terms of familiar intimacy with the Marquis and Marchioness Ossoli, and was induced to take passage in the same vessel with them for his return to his native land.  He was a young man of singular modesty of deportment, of an original turn of mind, and greatly endeared to his friends by the sweetness of his disposition and the purity of his character.]

Margaret Fuller was the daughter of Hon. Timothy Fuller, a lawyer of Boston, but nearly all his life a resident of Cambridge, and a Representative of the Middlessex District in Congress from 1817 to 1825.  Mr. Fuller, upon his retirement from Congress, purchased a farm at some distance from Boston, and abandoned law for agriculture, soon after which he died.  His widow and six children still survive.

Margaret, if we mistake not, was the first-born, and from a very early age evinced the possession of remarkable intellectual powers.  Her father regarded her with a proud admiration, and was from childhood her chief instructor, guide, companion, and friend.  He committed the too common error of stimulating her intellect to an assiduity and persistency of effort which severely taxed and ultimately injured her physical powers.[A] At eight years of age he was accustomed to require of her the composition of a number of Latin verses per day, while her studies in philosophy, history, general science, and current literature were in after years extensive and profound.  After her father’s death, she applied herself to teaching as a vocation, first in Boston, then in Providence, and afterward in Boston again, where her “Conversations” were for several seasons attended by classes of women, some of them married, and including many from the best families of the “American Athens.”

[Footnote A:  I think this opinion somewhat erroneous, for reasons which I have already given in the edition recently published of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.  The reader is referred to page 352 of that work, and also to page 38, where I believe my sister personified herself under the name of Miranda, and stated clearly and justly the relation which, existed between her father and herself.—­ED.]