s not this because spiritual
imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence
to unfold Olympic splendors?'

She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the
first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane
erected in its place:--

'This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in
which life's earliest experiences become glorified by our
perfecting destiny?'

'In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose,
a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice;--who can read that
riddle?

'"Better is it," said Appollonius, "on entering a small shrine
to find there a statue of gold and ivory, than in a large
temple to behold only a coarse figure of terra cotta." How
often, after leaving with disgust the so-called great affairs
of men, do we find traces of angels' visits in quiet scenes of
home.

'The Hours and the Graces appear as ornaments on all thrones
and shrines, except those of Vulcan and Pluto. Alas for us,
when we become so sunk in utilitarian toil as to be blind to
the beauty with which even common cares are daily wreathed!'

And so on and on, with myth and allusion.

Next, Margaret spoke of the friends whose generosity had provided
the decorations on her walls, and the illustrated books for her
table,--friends who were fellow-students in art, history, or
science,--friends whose very life she shared. Her heart seemed full
to overflow with sympathy for their joys and sorrows, their special
trials and struggles, their peculiar tendencies of character and
respective relations. The existence of each was to her a sacred
process, whose developments she watched with awe, and whose leadings
she reverently sought to aid. She had scores of pretty anecdotes
to tell, sweet bowers of sentiment to open, significant lessons of
experience to interpret, and scraps of journals or letters to read
aloud, as the speediest means of introducing me to her chosen circle.
There was a fascinating spell in her piquant descriptions, and a
genial glow of sympathy animated to characteristic movement the
figures, who in varying pantomime replaced one another on the theatre
of her fancy. Frost-bound New England melted into a dreamland of
romance beneath the spice-breeze of her Eastern narrative. Sticklers
for propriety might have found fault at the freedom with which she
confided her friends' hist