Though persons were busy gathering into carts, on the shore, whatever
spoil was stranded, no life-boat appeared; and the few remaining on
the wreck were now fain to trust themselves to the rioting surf.
Margaret would not go alone. With her husband and attendant (Celeste),
she was just about to try the planks prepared by four seamen, and the
steward had just taken little Nino in his arms, pledged to save him or
die, 'when a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell,
carrying with it the deck and all upon it. The steward and Angelino
were washed upon the beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty
minutes after. Celeste and Ossoli were caught for a moment by the
rigging, but the next wave swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once.
When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still
clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her
shoulders.' No trace was found of her manuscript on Italy: her
love-correspondence with Ossoli was the only relic--the last memorial
of that howling hurricane, pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle
life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend!
With the exception of certain sections of laboured, writhing
wordiness, the feverish restlessness and hectic symptoms of which are
but too familiar to persons read in the literature of second-rate
transcendentalism, these volumes comprise a large amount of matter
that will well repay perusal, and portray a character of no ordinary
type--a 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.
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