to combine with intense personal aspirations and desires a
wide outlook into the destinies of the human race.

We find her, in these very days, "engaged in surveying the level on
which the public mind is poised." She turns from the poetic tragedy and
comedy of life to study, as she says, "the rules of its prose," and to
learn from the talk of common people what elements and modes of thought
go to make up the average American mind. She listens to George Thompson,
the English anti-slavery orator, and is led to say that, if she had been
a man, she should have coveted the gift of eloquence above all others,
and this for the intensity of its effects. She thinks of writing six
historical tragedies, and devises the plan for three of them. Tales of
Hebrew history it is also in her mind to compose. Becoming convinced
that "some fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics is an essential
aid to systematic culture," she addresses herself to the study of
Fichte and Jacobi, of Brown and Stewart. The first of these appeared to
her incomprehensible. Of the second, she conjectures that his views are
derived from some author whom she has not read. She thinks in good
earnest of writing a life of Goethe, and wishes to visit Europe in order
to collect the material requisite for this. Her appreciation of Dr.
Channing is shown in a warm encomium on his work treating of slavery, of
which she says, "It comes like a breath borne over some solemn sea which
separates us from an island of righteousness."

In summing up his account of this part of Margaret's life, Mr. Clarke
characterizes self-culture as the object in which she was content to
lose sight of all others. Her devotion to this great end was, he says,
"wholly religious, and almost Christian." She was religious in her
recognition of the divine element in human experience, and Christian in
her elevation above the sordid interests of life, and in her devotion to
the highest standards of duty and of destiny. He admits, however, that
her aim, noble as it was, long remained too intensely personal to reach
the absolute generosity required by the Christian rule. This defect made
itself felt outwardly by a certain disesteem of "the vulgar herd," and
in an exaggerated worship of great personalities. Its inner effects
were more serious. To her darling desire for growth and development she
sacrificed "everything but manifest duty." The want of harmony between
her outward circumstances and her inwar