.'

* * * * *

'I have quite a desire to try my powers in a narrative poem;
but my head teems with plans, of which there will be time
for very few only to take form. Milton, it is said, made
for himself a list of a hundred subjects for dramas, and the
recorder of the fact seems to think this many. I think it very
few, so filled is life with innumerable themes.'

* * * * *

'_Sunday Evening._--I have employed some hours of the day,
with great satisfaction, in copying the Poet's Dreams from the
Pentameron of Landor. I do not often have time for such slow,
pleasing labor. I have thus imprinted the words in my mind, so
that they will often recur in their original beauty.

'I have added three sonnets of Petrarca, all written after the
death of Laura. They are among his noblest, all pertinent to
the subject, and giving three aspects of that one mood. The
last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio's
dream.

'In copying both together, I find the prose of the Englishman
worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see
such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary.

'How fine it is to see the terms "onesto," "gentile," used in
their original sense and force.

'Soft, solemn day!
Where earth and heaven together seem to meet,
I have been blest to greet
From human thought a kindred sway;
In thought these stood
So near the simple Good,
That what we nobleness and honor call,
They viewed as honesty, the common dower of all.'

Margaret was reading, in these weeks, the Four Books of Confucius,
the Desatir, some of Taylor's translations from the Greek, a work on
Scandinavian Mythology, Moehler's Symbolism, Fourier's Noveau Monde
Industriel, and Landor's Pentameron,--but she says, in her journal,

'No book is good enough to read in the open air, among these
mountains; even the best seem partial, civic, limiting,
instead of being, as man's voice should be, a tone higher than
nature's.'

And again:--

'This morning came ----'s letter, announcing Sterling's
death:--

'"Weep for Dedalus all that is fairest."

'The news was very sad: Sterling did so earnestly wish to do
a man's work, and had done so small a portion of his own. This
made me feel h