y.' 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
AEschylus, 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 m