The peculiar
circumstances attending the marriage in that country, and at that
agitated crisis, involved Margaret in numerous afflictions, and taxed
her powers of endurance to the very uttermost.
She had to suffer compulsory separation from husband and child--the
one in hourly peril of a bloody death, the other neglected and pining
away in the hands of strangers: penury, loneliness, prostrating
sickness, and treachery on the part of those around her, were
meanwhile her own lot in the land of strangers. How this season of
trial affected her character, may be inferred from the remarks of her
friend Mrs Story, then sojourning in Italy, who says, that in Boston
she had regarded Margaret as a person on intellectual stilts, with a
large share of arrogance, and little sweetness of temper; and adds:
'How unlike to this was she now!--so delicate, so simple, confiding,
and affectionate; with a true womanly heart and soul, sensitive and
generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed of
so broad a charity, that she could cover with its mantle the faults
and defects of all about her.' Her devotion to her husband, and her
passionate attachment to her little Angelo, were exhibited in the
liveliest colour: the influence she exercised, too, by love and
sympathy, over Italians of every class with whom she came in contact,
appears of a kind more tender, chastened, and womanly than that which
previously characterised her.
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