Chapter V: BOSTON, By R.W. Emerson (7)

This rumor was much spread abroad, that she was sneering, scoffing, critical, disdainful of humble people, and of all but the intellectual. I had heard it whenever she was named. It was a superficial judgment. Her satire was only the pastime and necessity of her talent, the play of superabundant animal spirits. And it will be seen, in the sequel, that her mind presently disclosed many moods and powers, in successive platforms or terraces, each above each, that quite effaced this first impression, in the opulence of the following pictures.

Let us hear what she has herself to say on the subject of tea-table-talk, in a letter to a young lady, to whom she was already much attached:--

I am repelled by your account of your party. It is beneath you
to amuse yourself with active satire, with what is vulgarly
called quizzing. When such a person as ---- chooses to throw
himself in your way, I sympathize with your keen perception of
his ridiculous points. But to laugh a whole evening at vulgar
nondescripts,--is that an employment for one who was born
passionately to love, to admire, to sustain truth? This would
be much more excusable in a chameleon like me. Yet, whatever
may be the vulgar view of my character, I can truly say, I
know not the hour in which I ever looked for the ridiculous.
It has always been forced upon me, and is the accident of my
existence. I would not want the sense of it when it comes, for
that would show an obtuseness of mental organization; but, on
peril of my soul, I would not move an eyelash to look for it.'

When she came to Concord, she was already rich in friends, rich in experiences, rich in culture. She was well read in French, Italian, and German literature. She had learned Latin and a little Greek. But her English reading was incomplete; and, while she knew Molière, and Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that her sympathy and taste had led her to an exclusive culture of southern European books.

She had large experiences. She had been a precocious scholar at Dr. Park's school; good in mathematics and in languages. Her father, whom she had recently lost had been proud of her, and petted her. She had drawn at Cambridge, numbers of lively young men about her. She had had a circle of young women who were devoted to her, and who described her as "a wonder of intellect, who had yet no religion." She had drawn to her every superior young man or young woman she had met, and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy.

These histories are rapid, so that she had already beheld many times the youth, meridian, and old age of passion. She had, besides, selected, from so many, a few eminent companions, and already felt that she was not likely to see anything more beautiful than her beauties, anything more powerful and generous than her youths. She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. Her powers were maturing, and nobler sentiments were subliming the first heats and rude experiments. She had outward calmness and dignity. She had come to the ambition to be filled with all nobleness.

Of the friends who surrounded her, at that period, it is neither easy to speak, nor not to speak. A life of Margaret is impossible without them, she mixed herself so inextricably with her company; and when this little book was first projected, it was proposed to entitle it "Margaret and her Friends," the subject persisting to offer itself in the plural number. But, on trial, that form proved impossible, and it only remained that the narrative, like a Greek tragedy, should suppose the chorus always on the stage, sympathizing and sympathized with by the queen of the scene.

Yet I remember these persons as a fair, commanding troop, every one of them adorned by some splendor of beauty, of grace, of talent, or of character, and comprising in their band persons who have since disclosed sterling worth and elevated aims in the conduct of life.

Three beautiful women,--either of whom would have been the fairest ornament of Papanti's Assemblies, but for the presence of the other,--were her friends. One of these early became, and long remained, nearly the central figure in Margaret's brilliant circle, attracting to herself, by her grace and her singular natural eloquence, every feeling of affection, hope, and pride.

Two others I recall, whose rich and cultivated voices in song were,--one a little earlier, the other a little later,--the joy of every house into which they came; and, indeed, Margaret's taste for music was amply gratified in the taste and science which several persons among her intimate friends possessed. She was successively intimate with two sisters, whose taste for music had been opened, by a fine and severe culture, to the knowledge and to the expression of all the wealth of the German masters.

I remember another, whom every muse inspired, skilful alike with the pencil and the pen, and by whom both were almost contemned for their inadequateness, in the height and scope of her aims.

'With her,' said Margaret, 'I can talk of anything. She is
like me. She is able to look facts in the face. We enjoy the
clearest, widest, most direct communication. She may be no
happier than ----, but she will know her own mind too clearly
to make any great mistake in conduct, and will learn a deep
meaning from her days.'

'It is not in the way of tenderness that I love ----. I prize
her always; and this is all the love some natures ever know.
And I also feel that I may always expect she will be with me.
I delight to picture to myself certain persons translated,
illuminated. There are a few in whom I see occasionally the
future being piercing, promising,--whom I can strip of all
that masks their temporary relations, and elevate to their
natural position. Sometimes I have not known these persons
intimately,--oftener I have; for it is only in the deepest
hours that this light is likely to break out. But some of
those I have best befriended I cannot thus portray, and very
few men I can. It does not depend at all on the beauty of
their forms, at present; it is in the eye and the smile, that
the hope shines through. I can see exactly how ---- will look:
not like this angel in the paper; she will not bring flowers,
but a living coal, to the lips of the singer; her eyes will
not burn as now with smothered fires, they will be ever
deeper, and glow more intensely; her cheek will be smooth, but
marble pale; her gestures nobly free, but few.'

Another was a lady who was devoted to landscape-painting, and who enjoyed the distinction of being the only pupil of Allston, and who, in her alliance with Margaret, gave as much honor as she received, by the security of her spirit, and by the heroism of her devotion to her friend. Her friends called her "the perpetual peace-offering," and Margaret says of her,--'She is here, and her neighborhood casts the mildness and purity too of the moonbeam on the else parti-colored scene.'

There was another lady, more late and reluctantly entering Margaret's circle, with a mind as high, and more mathematically exact, drawn by taste to Greek, as Margaret to Italian genius, tempted to do homage to Margaret's flowing expressive energy, but still more inclined and secured to her side by the good sense and the heroism which Margaret disclosed, perhaps not a little by the sufferings which she addressed herself to alleviate, as long as Margaret lived. Margaret had a courage in her address which it was not easy to resist. She called all her friends by their Christian names. In their early intercourse I suppose this lady's billets were more punctiliously worded than Margaret liked; so she subscribed herself, in reply, 'Your affectionate "Miss Fuller."' When the difficulties were at length surmounted, and the conditions ascertained on which two admirable persons could live together, the best understanding grew up, and subsisted during her life. In her journal is a note:--

'Passed the morning in Sleepy Hollow, with ----. What fine,
just distinctions she made! Worlds grew clearer as we
talked. I grieve to see her fine frame subject to such rude
discipline. But she truly said, "I am not a failed experiment;
for, in the bad hours, I do not forget what I thought in the
better."'

None interested her more at that time, and for many years after, than a youth with whom she had been acquainted in Cambridge before he left the University, and the unfolding of whose powers she had watched with the warmest sympathy. He was an amateur, and, but for the exactions not to be resisted of an _American_, that is to say, of a commercial, career,--his acceptance of which she never ceased to regard as an apostasy,--himself a high artist. He was her companion, and, though much younger, her guide in the study of art. With him she examined, leaf by leaf, the designs of Raphael, of Michel Angelo, of Da Vinci, of Guercino, the architecture of the Greeks, the books of Palladio, the Ruins, and Prisons of Piranesi; and long kept up a profuse correspondence on books and studies in which they had a mutual interest. And yet, as happened so often, these literary sympathies, though sincere, were only veils and occasions to beguile the time, so profound was her interest in the character and fortunes of her friend.

There was another youth, whom she found later, of invalid habit, which had infected in some degree the tone of his mind, but of a delicate and pervasive insight, and the highest appreciation for genius in letters, arts, and life. Margaret describes 'his complexion as clear in its pallor, and his eye steady.' His turn of mind, and his habits of life, had almost a monastic turn,--a jealousy of the common tendencies of literary men either to display or to philosophy. Margaret was struck with the singular fineness of his perceptions, and the pious tendency of his thoughts, and enjoyed with him his proud reception, not as from above, but almost on equal ground, of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and Petrarch, of Montaigne, of Calderon, of Goethe. Margaret wished, also, to defend his privacy from the dangerous solicitations to premature authorship:--

'His mind should be approached close by one who needs its
fragrance. All with him leads rather to glimpses and insights,
than to broad, comprehensive views. Till he needs the public,
the public does not need him. The lonely lamp, the niche, the
dark cathedral grove, befit him best. Let him shroud himself
in the symbols of his native ritual, till he can issue forth
on the wings of song.'

She was at this time, too, much drawn also to a man of poetic sensibility, and of much reading,--which he took the greatest pains to conceal,--studious of the art of poetry, but still more a poet in his conversation than in his poems,--who attracted Margaret by the flowing humor with which he filled the present hour, and the prodigality with which he forgot all the past.

'Unequal and uncertain,' she says, 'but in his good moods,
of the best for a companion, absolutely abandoned to the
revelations of the moment, without distrust or check of any
kind, unlimited and delicate, abundant in thought, and free of
motion, he enriches life, and fills the hour.'

'I wish I could retain ----'s talk last night. It was
wonderful; it was about all the past experiences frozen down
in the soul, and the impossibility of being penetrated by
anything. "Had I met you," said he, "when I was young!--but
now nothing can penetrate." Absurd as was what he said, on
one side, it was the finest poetic-inspiration on the other,
painting the cruel process of life, except where genius
continually burns over the stubble fields.

"Life," he said, "is continually eating us up." He said, "Mr.
E. is quite wrong about books. He wants them all good; now I
want many bad. Literature is not merely a collection of gems,
but a great system of interpretation." He railed at me as
artificial. "It don't strike me when you are alone with me,"
he says; "but it does when others are present. You don't
follow out the fancy of the moment; you converse; you have
treasured thoughts to tell; you are disciplined,--artificial."
I pleaded guilty, and observed that I supposed that it must
be so with one of any continuity of thought, or earnestness
of character. "As to that," says he, "I shall not like you the
better for your excellence. I don't know what is the matter.
I feel strongly attracted towards you; but there is a drawback
in my mind,--I don't know exactly what. You will always be
wanting to grow forward; now I like to grow backward, too. You
are too ideal. Ideal people anticipate their lives; and they
make themselves and everybody around them restless, by always
being beforehand with themselves."

'I listened attentively; for what he said was excellent.
Following up the humor of the moment, he arrests admirable
thoughts on the wing. But I cannot but see, that what they say
of my or other obscure lives is true of every prophetic, of
every tragic character. And then I like to have them make me
look on that side, and reverence the lovely forms of nature,
and the shifting moods, and the clinging instincts. But I must
not let them disturb me. There is an only guide, the voice in
the heart, that asks, "Was thy wish sincere? If so, thou canst
not stray from nature, nor be so perverted but she will make
thee true again." I must take my own path, and learn from
them all, without being paralyzed for the day. We need great
energy, faith, and self-reliance to endure to-day. My age
may not be the best, my position may be bad, my character
ill-formed; but Thou, oh Spirit! hast no regard to aught but
the seeking heart; and, if I try to walk upright, wilt guide
me. What despair must he feel, who, after a whole life passed
in trying to build up himself, resolves that it would have
been far better if he had kept still as the clod of the
valley, or yielded easily as the leaf to every breeze! A path
has been appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I
could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the
others. I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of
doubt. E. must not shake me in my worldliness, nor ---- in the
fine motion that has given me what I have of life, nor this
child of genius make me lay aside the armor, without which I
had lain bleeding on the field long since; but, if they can
keep closer to nature, and learn to interpret her as souls,
also, let me learn from them what I have not.'

And, in connection with this conversation, she has copied the following lines which this gentleman addressed to her:--

"TO MARGARET.

I mark beneath thy life the virtue shine
That deep within the star's eye opes its day;
I clutch the gorgeous thoughts thou throw'st away
From the profound unfathomable mine,
And with them this mean common hour do twine,
As glassy waters on the dry beach play.
And I were rich as night, them to combine
With, my poor store, and warm me with thy ray.
From the fixed answer of those dateless eyes
I meet bold hints of spirit's mystery
As to what's past, and hungry prophecies
Of deeds to-day, and things which are to be;
Of lofty life that with the eagle flies,
And humble love that clasps humanity."

I have thus vaguely designated, among the numerous group of her friends, only those who were much in her company, in the early years of my acquaintance with her.

She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other, that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and, to know her, was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, and the nobleness in New England, seemed, at that moment, related to her, and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were open to her, and every hospitable attention eagerly offered. Her arrival was a holiday, and so was her abode. She stayed a few days, often a week, more seldom a month, and all tasks that could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating, to talk with this joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad web of relations to so many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been finally referred.

Persons were her game, specially, if marked by fortune, or character, or success;--to such was she sent. She addressed them with a hardihood,--almost a haughty assurance,--queen-like. Indeed, they fell in her way, where the access might have seemed difficult, by wonderful casualties; and the inveterate recluse, the coyest maid, the waywardest poet, made no resistance, but yielded at discretion, as if they had been waiting for her, all doors to this imperious dame. She disarmed the suspicion of recluse scholars by the absence of bookishness. The ease with which she entered into conversation made them forget all they had heard of her; and she was infinitely less interested in literature than in life. They saw she valued earnest persons, and Dante, Petrarch, and Goethe, because they thought as she did, and gratified her with high portraits, which she was everywhere seeking. She drew her companions to surprising confessions. She was the wedding-guest, to whom the long-pent story must be told; and they were not less struck, on reflection, at the suddenness of the friendship which had established, in one day, new and permanent covenants. She extorted the secret of life, which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow; and thus had the best of those she saw. Whatever romance, whatever virtue, whatever impressive experience,--this came to her; and she lived in a superior circle; for they suppressed all their common-place in her presence.

She was perfectly true to this confidence. She never confounded relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling any. An entire intimacy, which seemed to make both sharers of the whole horizon of each others' and of all truth, did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the history that an equal trust of another friend had put in her keeping. In this reticence was no prudery and no effort. For, so rich her mind, that she never was tempted to treachery, by the desire of entertaining. The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,--from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe,--never saw her without surprise at her new powers.

Of the conversations above alluded to, the substance was whatever was suggested by her passionate wish for equal companions, to the end of making life altogether noble. With the firmest tact she led the discourse into the midst of their daily living and working, recognizing the good-will and sincerity which each man has in his aims, and treating so playfully and intellectually all the points, that one seemed to see his life _en beau_, and was flattered by beholding what he had found so tedious in its workday weeds, shining in glorious costume. Each of his friends passed before him in the new light; hope seemed to spring under his feet, and life was worth living. The auditor jumped for joy, and thirsted for unlimited draughts. What! is this the dame, who, I heard, was sneering and critical? this the blue-stocking, of whom I stood in terror and dislike? this wondrous woman, full of counsel, full of tenderness, before whom every mean thing is ashamed, and hides itself; this new Corinne, more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent, who seems to have learned all languages, Heaven knows when or how,--I should think she was born to them,--magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles like this, 'Yours is an example of a destiny springing from character:' and, again, 'I see your destiny hovering before you, but it always escapes from you.'

The test of this eloquence was its range. It told on children, and on old people; on men of the world, and on sainted maids. She could hold them all by her honeyed tongue. A lady of the best eminence, whom Margaret occasionally visited, in one of our cities of spindles, speaking one day of her neighbors, said, "I stand in a certain awe of the moneyed men, the manufacturers, and so on, knowing that they will have small interest in Plato, or in Biot; but I saw them approach Margaret, with perfect security, for she could give them bread that they could eat." Some persons are thrown off their balance when in society; others are thrown on to balance; the excitement of company, and the observation of other characters, correct their biases. Margaret always appeared to unexpected advantage in conversation with a large circle. She had more sanity than any other; whilst, in private, her vision was often through colored lenses.

Her talents were so various, and her conversation so rich and entertaining, that one might talk with her many times, by the parlor fire, before he discovered the strength which served as foundation to so much accomplishment and eloquence. But, concealed under flowers and music, was the broadest good sense, very well able to dispose of all this pile of native and foreign ornaments, and quite able to work without them. She could always rally on this, in every circumstance, and in every company, and find herself on a firm footing of equality with any party whatever, and make herself useful, and, if need be, formidable.

The old Anaximenes, seeking, I suppose, for a source sufficiently diffusive, said, that Mind must be _in the air_, which, when all men breathed, they were filled with one intelligence. And when men have larger measures of reason, as Æsop, Cervantes, Franklin, Scott, they gain in universality, or are no longer confined to a few associates, but are good company for all persons,--philosophers, women, men of fashion, tradesmen, and servants. Indeed, an older philosopher than Anaximenes, namely, language itself, had taught to distinguish superior or purer sense as _common_ sense.

Margaret had, with certain limitations, or, must we say, _strictures_, these larger lungs, inhaling this universal element, and could speak to Jew and Greek, free and bond, to each in his own tongue. The Concord stage-coachman distinguished her by his respect, and the chambermaid was pretty sure to confide to her, on the second day, her homely romance.

I regret that it is not in my power to give any true report of Margaret's conversation. She soon became an established friend and frequent inmate of our house, and continued, thenceforward, for years, to come, once in three or four months, to spend a week or a fortnight with us. She adopted all the people and all the interests she found here. Your people shall be my people, and yonder darling boy I shall cherish as my own. Her ready sympathies endeared her to my wife and my mother, each of whom highly esteemed her good sense and sincerity. She suited each, and all. Yet, she was not a person to be suspected of complaisance, and her attachments, one might say, were chemical.

She had so many tasks of her own, that she was a very easy guest to entertain, as she could be left to herself, day after day, without apology. According to our usual habit, we seldom met in the forenoon. After dinner, we read something together, or walked, or rode. In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held, whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner;--talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest. Her topics were numerous, but the cardinal points of poetry, love, and religion, were never far off. She was a student of art, and, though untravelled, knew, much better than most persons who had been abroad, the conventional reputation of each of the masters. She was familiar with all the field of elegant criticism in literature. Among the problems of the day, these two attracted her chiefly, Mythology and Demonology; then, also, French Socialism, especially as it concerned woman; the whole prolific family of reforms, and, of course, the genius and career of each remarkable person.

She had other friends, in this town, beside those in my house. A lady, already alluded to, lived in the village, who had known her longer than I, and whose prejudices Margaret had resolutely fought down, until she converted her into the firmest and most efficient of friends. In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne, already then known to the world by his Twice-Told Tales, came to live in Concord, in the "Old Manse," with his wife, who was herself an artist. With these welcomed persons Margaret formed a strict and happy acquaintance. She liked their old house, and the taste which had filled it with new articles of beautiful form, yet harmonized with the antique furniture left by the former proprietors. She liked, too, the pleasing walks, and rides, and boatings, which that neighborhood commanded.

In 1842, William Ellery Channing, whose wife was her sister, built a house in Concord, and this circumstance made a new tie and another home for Margaret.

ARCANA.

It was soon evident that there was somewhat a little pagan about her; that she had some faith more or less distinct in a fate, and in a guardian genius; that her fancy, or her pride, had played with her religion. She had a taste for gems, ciphers, talismans, omens, coincidences, and birth-days. She had a special love for the planet Jupiter, and a belief that the month of September was inauspicious to her. She never forgot that her name, Margarita, signified a pearl. 'When I first met with the name Leila,' she said, 'I knew, from the very look and sound, it was mine; I knew that it meant night,--night, which brings out stars, as sorrow brings out truths.' Sortilege she valued. She tried _sortes biblicæ_, and her hits were memorable. I think each new book which interested her, she was disposed to put to this test, and know if it had somewhat personal to say to her. As happens to such persons, these guesses were justified by the event. She chose carbuncle for her own stone, and when a dear friend was to give her a gem, this was the one selected. She valued what she had somewhere read, that carbuncles are male and female. The female casts out light, the male has his within himself. 'Mine,' she said, 'is the male.' And she was wont to put on her carbuncle, a bracelet, or some selected gem, to write letters to certain friends. One of her friends she coupled with the onyx, another in a decided way with the amethyst. She learned that the ancients esteemed this gem a talisman to dispel intoxication, to give good thoughts and understanding 'The Greek meaning is _antidote against drunkenness_.' She characterized her friends by these stones, and wrote to the last mentioned, the following lines:--

'TO ----.

'Slow wandering on a tangled way,
To their lost child pure spirits say:--
The diamond marshal thee by day,
By night, the carbuncle defend,
Heart's blood of a bosom friend.
On thy brow, the amethyst,
Violet of purest earth,
When by fullest sunlight kissed,
Best reveals its regal birth;
And when that haloed moment flies,
Shall keep thee steadfast, chaste, and wise.'

Coincidences, good and bad, _contretemps_, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent's calendar. She signalized saints' days, "All-Souls," and "All-Saints," by poems, which had for her a mystical value. She remarked a preëstablished harmony of the names of her personal friends, as well as of her historical favorites; that of Emanuel, for Swedenborg; and Rosencrantz, for the head of the Rosicrucians. 'If Christian Rosencrantz,' she said, 'is not a made name, the genius of the age interfered in the baptismal rite, as in the cases of the archangels of art, Michael and Raphael, and in giving the name of Emanuel to the captain of the New Jerusalem. _Sub rosa crux_, I think, is the true derivation, and not the chemical one, generation, corruption, &c.' In this spirit, she soon surrounded herself with a little mythology of her own. She had a series of anniversaries, which she kept. Her seal-ring of the flying Mercury had its legend. She chose the _Sistrum_ for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time:--

'In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the
early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me,
on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but,
midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her
face that it was she, but refused to believe it.'

She valued, of course, the significance of flowers, and chose emblems for her friends from her garden.

'TO ----, WITH HEARTSEASE.

'Content, in purple lustre clad,
Kingly serene, and golden glad,
No demi-hues of sad contrition,
No pallors of enforced submission;--
Give me such content as this,
And keep awhile the rosy bliss.'

DÆMONOLOGY.

This catching at straws of coincidence, where all is geometrical, seems the necessity of certain natures. It, is true, that, in every good work, the particulars are right, and, that every spot of light on the ground, under the trees, is a perfect image of the sun. Yet, for astronomical purposes, an observatory is better than an orchard; and in a universe which is nothing but generations, or an unbroken suite of cause and effect, to infer Providence, because a man happens to find a shilling on the pavement just when he wants one to spend, is puerile, and much as if each of us should date his letters and notes of hand from his own birthday, instead of from Christ's or the king's reign, or the current Congress. These, to be sure, are also, at first, petty and private beginnings, but, by the world of men, clothed with a social and cosmical character.

It will be seen, however, that this propensity Margaret held with certain tenets of fate, which always swayed her, and which Goethe, who had found room and fine names for all this in his system, had encouraged; and, I may add, which her own experiences, early and late, seemed strangely to justify.

Some extracts, from her letters to different persons, will show how this matter lay in her mind.

'_December 17, 1829_.--The following instance of beautiful
credulity, in Rousseau, has taken my mind greatly. This remote
seeking for the decrees of fate, this feeling of a destiny,
casting its shadows from the very morning of thought, is the
most beautiful species of idealism in our day. 'Tis finely
manifested in Wallenstein, where the two common men sum up
their superficial observations on the life and doings of
Wallenstein, and show that, not until this agitating crisis,
have they caught any idea of the deep thoughts which shaped
that hero, who has, without their feeling it, moulded _their_
existence.

'"Tasso," says Rousseau, "has predicted my misfortunes. Have
you remarked that Tasso has this peculiarity, that you cannot
take from his work a single strophe, nor from any strophe
a single line, nor from any line a single word, without
disarranging the whole poem? Very well! take away the strophe
I speak of, the stanza has no connection with those that
precede or follow it; it is absolutely useless. _Tasso
probably wrote it involuntarily, and without comprehending it
himself_."

'As to the impossibility of taking from Tasso without
disarranging the poem, &c., I dare say 'tis not one whit more
justly said of his, than, of any other narrative poem. _Mais,
n'importe_, 'tis sufficient if Rousseau believed this. I found
the stanza in question; admire its meaning beauty.

'I hope you have Italian enough to appreciate the singular
perfection in expression. If not, look to Fairfax's Jerusalem
Delivered, Canto 12, Stanza 77; but Rousseau says these lines
have no connection with what goes before, or after; _they are
preceded_, stanza 76, by these three lines, which he does not
think fit to mention.'

* * * * *

"Misero mostro d'infelice amore;
Misero mostro a cui sol pena è degna
Dell' immensa impietà, la vita indegna."

"Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e fra le cure,
Mie giuste furie, forsennato errante.
Paventerò l'ombre solinghe e scure,
Che l'primo error mi recheranno avante
E del sol che scoprì le mie sventure,
A schivo ed in orrore avrò il sembiante.
Temerò me medesmo; e da me stesso
Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso."

LA GERUSALEMME: LIBERATA, C. XII. 76, 77.

TO R.W.E.

'_Dec._12, 1843.--When Goethe received a letter from Zelter,
with a handsome superscription, he said. "Lay that aside; it
is Zelter's true hand-writing. Every man has a dæmon, who is
busy to confuse and limit his life. No way is the action of
this power more clearly shown, than in the hand-writing. On
this occasion, the evil influences have been evaded; the mood,
the hand, the pen and paper have conspired to let our friend
write truly himself."

'You may perceive, I quote from memory, as the sentences
are anything but Goethean; but I think often of this little
passage. With me, for weeks and months, the dæmon works his
will. Nothing succeeds with me. I fall ill, or am otherwise
interrupted. At these times, whether of frost, or sultry
weather, I would gladly neither plant nor reap,--wait for
the better times, which sometimes come, when I forget that
sickness is ever possible; when all interruptions are upborne
like straws on the full stream of my life, and the words that
accompany it are as much in harmony as sedges murmuring near
the bank. Not all, yet not unlike. But it often happens, that
something presents itself, and must be done, in the bad time;
nothing presents itself in the good: so I, like the others,
seem worse and poorer than I am.'

In another letter to an earlier friend, she expatiates a little.

'As to the Dæmoniacal, I know not that I can say to you
anything more precise than you find from Goethe. There are
no precise terms for such thoughts. The word _instinctive_
indicates their existence. I intimated it in the little piece
on the Drachenfels. It may be best understood, perhaps, by a
symbol. As the sun shines from the serene heavens, dispelling
noxious exhalations, and calling forth exquisite thoughts
on the surface of earth in the shape of shrub or flower, so
gnome-like works the fire within the hidden caverns and secret
veins of earth, fashioning existences which have a longer
share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in
thought. Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but
this power moves only to seize its prey. It is not necessarily
either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond
demonstrating its existence. When conscious, self-asserting,
it becomes (as power working for its own sake, unwilling to
acknowledge love for its superior, must) the devil. That is
the legend of Lucifer, the star that would not own its
centre. Yet, while it is unconscious, it is not devilish, only
dæmoniac. In nature, we trace it in all volcanic workings, in
a boding position of lights, in whispers of the wind, which
has no pedigree; in deceitful invitations of the water, in the
sullen rock, which never shall find a voice, and in the shapes
of all those beings who go about seeking what they may devour.
We speak of a mystery, a dread; we shudder, but we approach
still nearer, and a part of our nature listens, sometimes
answers to this influence, which, if not indestructible, is at
least indissolubly linked with the existence of matter.

'In genius, and in character, it works, as you say,
instinctively; it refuses to be analyzed by the understanding,
and is most of all inaccessible to the person who possesses
it. We can only say, I have it, he has it. You have seen it
often in the eyes of those Italian faces you like. It is most
obvious in the eye. As we look on such eyes, we think on
the tiger, the serpent, beings who lurk, glide, fascinate,
mysteriously control. For it is occult by its nature, and if
it could meet you on the highway, and be familiarly known as
an acquaintance, could not exist. The angels of light do not
love, yet they do not insist on exterminating it.

'It has given rise to the fables of wizard, enchantress, and
the like; these beings are scarcely good, yet not necessarily
bad. Power tempts them. They draw their skills from the dead,
because their being is coeval with that of matter, and matter
is the mother of death.'

In later days, she allowed herself sometimes to dwell sadly on the resistances which she called her fate, and remarked, that 'all life that has been or could be natural to me, is invariably denied.'

She wrote long afterwards:--

'My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy
hours, but they all lead to sorrow, and not only the cups of
wine, but of milk, seem drugged with poison, for me. It does
not seem to be my fault, this destiny. I do not court these
things,--they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be
wounded by the bodies I attract.'

TEMPERAMENT.

I said that Margaret had a broad good sense, which brought her near to all people. I am to say that she had also a strong temperament, which is that counter force which makes individuality, by driving all the powers in the direction of the ruling thought or feeling, and, when it is allowed full sway, isolating them. These two tendencies were always invading each other, and now one and now the other carried the day. This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer. We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would say with emphasis the very word.

I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament. In the first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner,--that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk. She had a strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her _fate_. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration. She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed formed for high emergencies.

Her life concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy moments. The rest was a void. She had read that a man of letters must lose many days, to work well in one. Much more must a Sappho or a sibyl. The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain. 'If I had wist!--' she writes, 'I am a worse self-tormentor than Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire. My beautiful lore, like the tropic clime, hatches scorpions to sting me. There is a verse, which Annie of Lochroyan sings about her ring, that torments my memory, 'tis so true of myself.'

When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises, and had a feeling as if a voice cried, _Stand from under!_--as if, a little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses, which no friendship could avert or console. This feeling partly wore off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more purely intellectual natures. She seemed more vulnerable. For the same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my strength,--her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head. 'My parents,' she said,

'were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion
destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but
I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.'

She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She read and wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in recent years.

She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot.' In some verses which she wrote 'To the Moon,' occur these lines:--

'But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye.'

And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac's, "_Le Livre Mystique_," in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot.

Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious, and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would carry, and to draw advantage from it. 'Attica,' she said to a friend, 'is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.'

'I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and
leap, blind force for the sake of force.'

* * * * *

'Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of
Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half
unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.'

* * * * *

'Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I
see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods. The
more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at
giving out thought and life in regulated rations,--the more I
weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without
props and sedan chairs.'

TO R.W.E.

'_Dec._ 26, 1839.--If you could look into my mind just now,
you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am
on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my
naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter,
describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to
send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this
might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm
and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in
magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due
direction.

'I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out
the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been
reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped
to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener
insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make
a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.'

She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon's, and, later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to write every day. 'I think less than a daily offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems to pass unspoken.' In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has 'more than a hundred correspondents;' and it was her habit there to devote one day of every week to those distant friends. The facility with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders of the press would shrink from,--assumed and performed,--when her friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonder, and with fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health, and the manner in which her life heaped itself in high and happy moments, which were avenged by lassitude and pain.

'As each task comes,' she said, 'I borrow a readiness from its
aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend.
Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.'

I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated, and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow circulation of others as a torrent with a rill. She found no full expression of it but in music. Beethoven's Symphony was the only right thing the city of the Puritans had for her. Those to whom music has a representative value, affording them a stricter copy of their inward life than any other of the expressive arts, will, perhaps, enter into the spirit which dictated the following letter to her patron saint, on her return, one evening, from the Boston Academy of Music.

TO BEETHOVEN.

'_Saturday Evening. 25th Nov._, 1843.

'My only friend,

'How shall I thank thee for once more breaking the chains of
my sorrowful slumber? My heart beats. I live again, for I feel
that I am worthy audience for thee, and that my being would be
reason enough for thine.

'Master, my eyes are always clear. I see that the universe is
rich, if I am poor. I see the insignificance of my sorrows. In
my will, I am not a captive; in my intellect, not a slave. Is
it then my fault that the palsy of my affections benumbs my
whole life?

'I know that the curse is but for the time. I know what the
eternal justice promises. But on this one sphere, it is sad.
Thou didst say, thou hadst no friend but thy art. But that one
is enough. I have no art, in which to vent the swell of a soul
as deep as thine, Beethoven, and of a kindred frame. Thou wilt
not think me presumptuous in this saying, as another might.
I have always known that thou wouldst welcome and know me, as
would no other who ever lived upon the earth since its first
creation.

'Thou wouldst forgive me, master, that I have not been true to
my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side
"the pangs of despised love." Thou didst the same; but thou
didst borrow from those errors the inspiration of thy genius.
Why is it not thus with me? Is it because, as a woman, I
am bound by a physical-law, which prevents the soul from
manifesting itself? Sometimes the moon seems mockingly to say
so,--to say that I, too, shall not shine, unless I can find a
sun. O, cold and barren moon, tell a different tale!

'But thou, oh blessed master! dost answer all my questions,
and make it my privilege to be. Like a humble wife to the
sage, or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand and
cherish thee: like a mistress, I arm thee for the fight: like
a young daughter, I tenderly bind thy wounds. Thou art to me
beyond compare, for thou art all I want. No heavenly sweetness
of saint or martyr, no many-leaved Raphael, no golden
Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee. The infinite
Shakspeare, the stern Angelo, Dante,--bittersweet like
thee,--are no longer seen in thy presence. And, beside these
names, there are none that could vibrate in thy crystal
sphere. Thou hast all of them, and that ample surge of life
besides, that great winged being which they only dreamed of.
There is none greater than Shakspeare; he, too, is a god; but
his creations are successive; thy _fiat_ comprehends them all.

'Last summer, I met thy mood in nature, on those wide
impassioned plains flower and crag-bestrown. There, the tide
of emotion had rolled over, and left the vision of its smiles
and sobs, as I saw to-night from thee.

'If thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself--! I am lost in
this world, where I sometimes meet angels, but of a different
star from mine. Even so does thy spirit plead with all
spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in.

'Master, I have this summer envied the oriole which had even
a swinging nest in the high bough. I have envied the least
flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the
wind. But I envy none when I am with thee.'

SELF-ESTEEM.

Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.' In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth of genius, and my curiosity in his future,--'O no, she was intimate with his mind,' and I 'spoiled him, by overrating him.' Meantime, we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle superiorities.