Sitting on the girls’ benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.  She came with the reputation of being “smart,” as we should have called it, clever as we say nowadays.  This was Margaret Fuller, the only one among us who, like “Jean Paul,” like “The Duke,” like “Bettina,” has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as “Margaret.”  Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them.  She was a great student and a great reader of what she used to call “naw-vels.”  I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks.  None know her aspect who have not seen her living.  Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.  A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother.  Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity.  Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a celebrity as Margaret.  I remember being greatly awed once, in our school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions.  Some themes were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among them one of hers.  I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first words.

“It is a trite remark,” she began.

I stopped.  Alas!  I did not know what trite meant.  How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?  I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders with her,—­she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was to enter college.  It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer advantages.  Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us.  We had been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries.  Some Boston boys of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,—­all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.