ince the same
true hand which reported for the Ladies' Class, drew up, at the time,
the following note of the Evenings of Mythology. My distance from
town, and engagements, prevented me from attending again. I was told
that on the preceding and following evenings the success was more
decisive.

"Margaret's plan, in these conversations, was a very noble
one, and, had it been seconded, as she expected, they would
have been splendid. She thought, that, by admitting gentlemen,
who had access, by their classical education, to the whole
historical part of the mythology, her own comparative
deficiency, as she felt it, in this part of learning, would be
made up; and that taking her stand on the works of art, which
were the final development in Greece of these multifarious
fables, the whole subject might be swept from zenith to
nadir. But all that depended on others entirely failed. Mr. W.
contributed some isolated facts,--told the etymology of names,
and cited a few fables not so commonly known as most; but,
even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not
profess, on the subject, she proved the best informed of the
party, while no one brought an idea, except herself.

"Her general idea was, that, upon the Earth-worship and
Sabaeanism of earlier ages, the Grecian genius acted to
humanize and idealize, but, still, with some regard to the
original principle. What was a seed, or a root, merely, in the
Egyptian mind, became a flower in Greece,--Isis, and Osiris,
for instance, are reproduced in Ceres and Proserpine, with
some loss of generality, but with great gain of beauty;
Hermes, in Mercury, with only more grace of form, though with
great loss of grandeur; but the loss of grandeur was also an
advance in philosophy, in this instance, the brain in the hand
being the natural consequence of the application of Idea to
practice,--the Hermes of the Egyptians.

"I do not feel that the class, by their apprehension of
Margaret, do any justice to the scope and depth of her views.
They come,--myself among the number,--I confess,--to be
entertained; but she has a higher purpose. She, amid all her
infirmities, studies and thinks with the seriousness of one
upon oath, and there has not been a single conversation this
winter, in either class, that had not in it the spirit which
giveth life. Just