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Count Ossoli and his noble wife tear themselves away from the pleasures of this delightful state of existence and devote their sacred energies to the enfranchisement of Italy. No Roman patriot, neither Garibaldi nor any of his compeers, equals them in their efforts for the freedom of that sunny land. Madame Ossoli is sanguine of success.
Ossoli her husband, was a captain in the Civic Guard, on duty in Rome, and the letters which she wrote him at this period of trial, were the only fragments of her treasures recovered from the wreck in which she perished.
I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by plunging desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which holds out to its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already made for it, of objects of admiration already formed and systematised.
No service was too trivial, no sacrifice too great for him. 'How sweet it is to do little things for you, he would say." To her mother, Margaret wrote, though she did not tell her secret, "I have not been so happy since I was a child, as during the last six weeks." But days of anxiety soon came, with all the horrors of war. Ossoli was constantly exposed to death, in that dreadful siege of Rome.
On her way to Italy, the goal of her ambition, she visited George Sand and they had such a meeting as two women of genius might. She sailed from Genoa for Naples in February, 1847, and arrived in Rome in May following. There is much to interest a reader in her Italian life, but the one thing which cannot be omitted is the story of her marriage to the Marquis Ossoli.
In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took a part.
This was the young Marquis Ossoli, and thus fortuitously the acquaintance began, which was continued by occasional meetings. The summer Margaret spent in the north of Italy, and when she returned to Rome, she took modest apartments in which she received her friends every Monday evening, and the Marquis came very regularly.
Margaret Fuller Ossoli, competent by love and genius to be the historian and who had collected the materials day by day, lived the life of the combatants hour by hour, was wrecked with "Ossoli, Angelo" and her manuscript, in sight of her native shore. From details that reached him Garibaldi always maintained that there was a priest among the wreckers who secured and destroyed the treasure!
Ossoli and young Sumner, brother of Charles, gave each other lessons in Italian and English, and thus the weeks went by. On Thursday, July 18, after two months, the Elizabeth stood off the Jersey coast, between Cape May and Barnegat. Trunks were packed, good nights were spoken, and all were happy, for they would be in New York on the morrow.
The old Marquis Ossoli had recently died, leaving an unsettled estate, of which his two older sons, both in the Papal service, were the executors. "Every one knows," says Mrs. Story, "that law is subject to ecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestant would be destructive of all prospect of favorable administration."
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