Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge
of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In
1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli.
In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to America, with her
husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were
lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disappointing,
being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her books
than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman Clarke,
T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her
strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not
altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell
introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his _Fable for
Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the
biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers.
"Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" was Carlyle's
characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspirations
after perfection.

To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence
there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though
naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall
decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in
little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and
subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always
jealously guarded its independence and resented the too close
approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at
Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and
biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great
Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a
volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptous review from Edgar