human blood and life. So living men
and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid
fancy,--every trait intensified, developed, ennobled. Lessing says
that "The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him
as art ought to flatter,--painting the face not as it actually is,
but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the
resistance of the material worked in." Margaret's portrait-painting
intellect treated persons in this way. She saw them as God designed
them,--omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from
friction of untoward circumstances. If we may be permitted to take
a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they
_actually_ were, but as they _really_ were. This accounts for her
high estimate of her friends,--too high, too flattering, indeed, but
justified to her mind by her knowledge of their interior capabilities.

* * * * *

The following extract illustrates her power, even at the age of
nineteen, of comprehending the relations of two things lying far apart
from each other, and of rising to a point of view which could overlook
both:--

'I have had,--while staying a day or two in Boston,--some of
Shirley's, Ford's, and Hey wood's plays from the Athenaeum.
There are some noble strains of proud rage, and intellectual,
but most poetical, all-absorbing, passion. One of the finest
fictions I recollect in those specimens of the Italian
novelists,--which you, I think, read when I did,--noble, where
it illustrated the Italian national spirit, is ruined by the
English novelist, who has transplanted it to an uncongenial
soil; yet he has given it beauties which an Italian eye could
not see, by investing the actors with deep, continuing, truly
English affections.'

* * * * *

The following criticism on some of the dialogues of Plato, (dated June
3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the book, illustrates her downright
way of asking world-revered authors to accept the test of plain common
sense. As a finished or deliberate opinion, it ought not to be read;
for it was not intended as such, but as a first impression hastily
sketched. But read it as an illustration of the method in which her
mind worked, and you will see that she meets the great Plato modestly,
but boldly, on human ground, asking him for satisfactory proof of all
that he s