"She wanted imagination, and she wanted productiveness. She wrote with
difficulty. Without external pressure, perhaps, she would never have
written at all. She was dogmatic, and not creative. Her strength was
in characterization and in criticism. Her _critique_ on Goethe, in
the second volume of the Dial, is, in my estimation, one of the best
things she has written. And, as far as it goes, it is one of the best
criticisms extant of Goethe.

"What I especially admired in her was her intellectual sincerity. Her
judgments took no bribe from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom
nor tradition, nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for
herself and others. The question with her was not what should be
believed, or what ought to be true, but what _is_ true. Her yes and
no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and
unexpected dissent from the common-places of popular acceptation."

* * * * *

Margaret, we have said, saw in each of her friends the secret interior
capability, which might become hereafter developed into some special
beauty or power. By means of this penetrating, this prophetic insight,
she gave each to himself, acted on each to draw out his best nature,
gave him an ideal out of which he could draw strength and liberty hour
by hour. Thus her influence was ever ennobling, and each felt that in
her society he was truer, wiser, better, and yet more free and happy,
than elsewhere. The "dry light" which Lord Bacon loved, she never
knew; her light was life, was love, was warm with sympathy and a
boundless energy of affection and hope. Though her love flattered and
charmed her friends, it did not spoil them, for they knew her perfect
truth. They knew that she loved them, not for what she imagined,
but for what she saw, though she saw it only in the germ. But as the
Greeks beheld a Persephone and Athene in the passing stranger, and
ennobled humanity into ideal beauty, Margaret saw all her friends thus
idealized. She was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up
with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float,
far above the low details of earthly life. Earth lay beneath us as a
lovely picture,--its sounds came up mellowed into music.

Margaret was, to persons younger than herself, a Makaria and Natalia.
She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and
glory "known to neither sea nor land." To those of her own ag