a felicitous quotation, pungent apothegm, or
symbolic epithet, dropped unawares in undertone, showed how swiftly
scattered rays were brought in her mind to a focus.

When her turn came, by a graceful transition she resumed the subject
where preceding speakers had left it, and, briefly summing up their
results, proceeded to unfold her own view. Her opening was deliberate,
like the progress of some massive force gaining its momentum; but as
she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her
speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious,
free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality.
Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most
delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical
collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was
affluent in historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as
in novel hints. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the
essential truth gathered from wide research, and distilled with
patient toil; and by skilful treatment she could make green again the
wastes of common-place. Her statements, however rapid, showed breadth
of comprehension, ready memory, impartial judgment, nice analysis of
differences, power of penetrating through surfaces to realities, fixed
regard to central laws and habitual communion with the Life of
life. Critics, indeed, might have been tempted to sneer at a certain
oracular grandiloquence, that bore away her soberness in moments of
elation; though even the most captious must presently have smiled at
the humor of her descriptive touches, her dexterous exposure of
folly and pretension, the swift stroke of her bright wit, her shrewd
discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind. The reverential,
too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men,
measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at
her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash,
revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could fail
to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of
character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement
or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to break every
trammel that checked her growth or fettered her movement.

In conversations like these, one saw that the richness of Margaret's
genius resulted from a rare combination of opposite qualities. To her
might hav