him, and the wave of
supervital aspiration swept him, as it did Channing and Emerson, beyond
the region of the visible and sensible. At that day, and for ten years
later, one might occasionally have seen in some street of Boston a
fragile figure, and upon it a head distinguished by snowy curls and
starry eyes. Here was the winter of age; here the perpetual summer of
the soul. The coat and hat did not matter; but they were of some quaint,
forgotten fashion, outlining the vision as belonging to the past. You
felt a modesty in looking at anything so unique and delicate. I remember
this vision as suddenly disclosed out of a bitter winter's day. And the
street was Chestnut Street, and the figure was Washington Allston going
to visit the poet Richard H. Dana. And not long afterwards the silvery
snows melted, and the soul which had made those eyes so luminous shot
back to its immortal sphere.

But, to leave the man and return to the artist. Mr. Allston's real merit
was too great to be seriously obscured by the over-sweep of imagination
to which he was subject. His best works still remain true classics of
the canvas; but the spirit which, through them, seemed to pass from his
mind into that of the public, has not to-day the recognition and
commanding interest which it then had.

Margaret had expected, as she says, to be greatly a gainer by her study
of this exhibition, and had been somewhat disappointed. Possibly her
expectations regarded a result too immediate and definite. Sights and
experiences that enrich the mind often do so insensibly. They pass out
of our consciousness; but in our later judgments we find our standard
changed, and refer back to them as the source of its enlargement.

Margaret was already familiar with several of the ideal heads of which
we have spoken, and which bore the names of Beatrice, Rosalie, the
Valentine, etc. Of these, as previously seen and studied, she says:--

"The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that
shone through rather than in them, and the harmony of coloring were as
unlike anything else I saw, as the 'Vicar of Wakefield' to Cooper's
novels. I seemed to recognize in painting that self-possessed elegance,
that transparent depth, which I most admire in literature."

With these old favorites she classes, as most beautiful among those now
shown, the Evening Hymn, the Italian Shepherd Boy, Edwin, Lorenzo and
Jessica.

"The excellence of these pictures is subj