ective, and even feminine. They
tell us the painter's ideal of character: a graceful repose, with a
fitness for moderate action; a capacity of emotion, with a habit of
reverie. Not one of these beings is in a state of _epanchement_. Not one
is, or perhaps could be, thrown off its equipoise. They are, even the
softest, characterized by entire though unconscious self-possession."

The head called Beatrice was sometimes spoken of in those days as
representing the Beatrice of Dante. Margaret finds in it nothing to
suggest the "Divina Commedia."

"How fair, indeed, and not unmeet for a poet's love. But what she is,
what she can be, it needs no Dante to discover. She is not a lustrous,
bewitching beauty, neither is she a high and poetic one. She is not a
concentrated perfume, nor a flower, nor a star. Yet somewhat has she of
every creature's best. She has the golden mean, without any touch of the
mediocre."

The landscapes in the exhibition gave her "unalloyed delight." She found
in them Mr. Allston's true mastery,--"a power of sympathy, which gives
each landscape a perfectly individual character.... The soul of the
painter," she says, "is in these landscapes, but not his character. Is
not that the highest art? Nature and the soul combined; the former freed
from crudities or blemishes, the latter from its merely human aspect."

Allston's Miriam suggests to Margaret a different treatment of the
subject:--

"This maiden had been nurtured in a fair and highly civilized country,
in the midst of wrong and scorn indeed, but beneath the shadow of
sublime institutions. Amid all the pains and penances of slavery, the
memory of Joseph, the presence of Moses, exalt her soul to the highest
pitch of national pride.

"Imagine the stately and solemn beauty with which such nurture and such
a position might invest the Jewish Miriam. Imagine her at the moment
when her lips were unsealed, and she was permitted to sing the song of
deliverance. Realize this situation, and oh, how far will this beautiful
picture fall short of your demands!"

To such a criticism Mr. Allston might have replied that a picture in
words is one thing, a picture in colors quite another; and that the
complex intellectual expression in which Margaret delighted is
appropriate to literary, but not to pictorial art.

Much in the same way does she reason concerning one of Allston's most
admired paintings, which represents Jeremiah in prison dictating to
Baruch:--