I.
YOUTH.
‘Tieck, who has embodied so many Runic secrets,
explained to me what I have often felt toward myself,
when he tells of the poor changeling, who, turned from
the door of her adopted home, sat down on a stone and
so pitied herself that she wept. Yet me also, the wonderful
bird, singing in the wild forest, has tempted on, and
not in vain.’
Thus wrote Margaret in the noon of life, when looking back through youth to the “dewy dawn of memory.” She was the eldest child of Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, and was born in Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, on the 23d of May, 1810.
Among her papers fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth, prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance.
PARENTS.
‘My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely endowed with that sagacious energy, which the state of New England society, for the last half
