Both Madame Ossoli and her husband were very fearful as they embarked on the fated ship which was to take them to America. He had been cautioned by one who had told his fortune when a boy to beware of the sea, and his wife had long cherished a superstition that the year 1850 would be a marked epoch in her life. It is remarkable that in writing to a friend of her fear Madame Ossoli said: "I pray that if we are lost it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together."
They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, on the _Elizabeth_, a new merchant vessel, which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune soon began. The captain sickened and died of malignant smallpox, and after his burial at sea and a week's detention at Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the dread disease and was restored with difficulty. Yet a worse fate was to follow.
At noon of July 18, while they were off the coast of New Jersey, there was a gale, followed by a hurricane, which dashed the ship on that Fire Island Beach which has engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret Fuller and her husband were drowned with their child. The bodies of the parents were never recovered, but that of little Angelo was buried in a seaman's chest among the sandhills, from which it was later disinterred and brought to our own Mount Auburn by the relatives who had never seen the baby in life.
And there to-day in a little green grave rests the child of this great woman's great love.
"The Old Manse," writes Hawthorne, in his charming introduction to the quaint stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse", "had never been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It is awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written here!... Here it was, too, that Emerson wrote 'Nature;' for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moon-rise from the summit of our eastern hill."
[Illustration: OLD MANSE, CONCORD, MASS.]
Emerson's residence in the Old Manse is to be accounted for by the fact that his grandfather was its first inhabitant. And it was while living there with his mother and kindred, before his second marriage in 1835, that he produced "Nature."