with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but which was afterwards edited by him only, though she continued a contributor to its pages. In 1843, she accompanied some friends on a tour by Niagara, Detroit, and Mackinac to Chicago, and across the Prairies of Illinois, and her resulting volume, entitled “Summer on the Lakes,” is considered one of the best works in its department ever issued from the American press. Her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”—an extension of her essay in “The Dial”—was published early in 1845, and a moderate edition sold. The next year a selection from her “Papers on Literature and Art” was issued by Wiley & Putnam, in two fair volumes of their “Library of American Books.” These “Papers” embody some of her best contributions to “The Dial,” “The Tribune,” and perhaps one or two which had not appeared in either.
In the summer of 1845, Miss Fuller accompanied the family of a devoted friend to Europe, visiting England, Scotland, France, and passing through Italy to Rome, where they spent the ensuing winter. She accompanied her friends next spring to the north of Italy, and there stopped, spending most of the summer at Florence, and returning at the approach of winter to Rome, where she was soon after married to Giovanni, Marquis d’Ossoli, who had made her acquaintance during her first winter in the Eternal City. They afterwards resided in the Roman States until the summer of 1850, after the surrender of Rome to the French army of assassins of liberty, when they deemed it expedient to migrate to Florence, both having taken an active part in the Republican movement. Thence in June they departed and set sail at Leghorn for New York, in the Philadelphia brig Elizabeth, which was doomed to encounter a succession of disasters. They had not been many days at sea when the captain was prostrated by a disease which ultimately exhibited itself as confluent small-pox of the most malignant type, and terminated his life soon after they touched at Gibraltar, after a sickness of intense agony and loathsome horror. The vessel was detained some days in quarantine by reason of this affliction, but finally set sail again just in season to bring her on our coast on the fearful night between the 18th and 19th of July, 1850, when darkness, rain, and a terrific gale from the south-west conspired to hurl her into the very jaws of destruction. She struck during the night, and before the next evening was a mass of drifting sticks and planks, while her passengers and part of her crew were buried in the boiling surges.
Among those drowned in this fearful wreck were the Marquis and Marchioness d’Ossoli, and their only child.
Miss Fuller was more remarkable for strength and vigour of thought, and a certain absolute and almost scornful independence, than for the graces of style and diction. She had the reputation of being “the best talker since Madame de Staël,” and by those who knew her most inti-
