And mapped the track where safely through
The lightning-footed thought might travel.

And yet unflattered by the store
Of these supremer revelations,
Who bowed more reverently before
The lowliest of earth's fair creations?

What sage of all the ages past,
Ambered in Plutarch's limpid story,
Upon the age he served, has cast
A radiance touched with worthier glory?

His noble living for the ends
God set him (duty underlying
Each thought, word, action) naught transcends
In lustre, save his nobler dying.

Do homage, sky, and air, and grass,
All things he cherished, sweet and tender,
As through our gorgeous mountain pass
We bear him in the May-day splendor!

The summer of 1884 Margaret Preston spent abroad in the places of
which she had read with a loving enthusiasm which made them her own.
"Don't show me; let me find it," she would say, and go straight to the
object of her quest. Her reading had brought her into companionship
with all the beautiful minds of the world, and all the places that had
been dear to them were sacred to her heart. Windermere was "redolent
all over with the memories of Wordsworth, Southey, Kit North, Hartley
Coleridge, Harriet Martineau, Dr. Arnold." "Ambleside--Wordsworth's
Ambleside--Southey's; and such hills, such greenery, I never expect to
see again. Then we took carriage to Grasmere Lake, a lovely little
gem."

"I walked to Wordsworth's grave without being directed, and on reading
his name on his stone, and Mary Wordsworth's on his wife's, I am free
to confess to a rush of tears, Dora Quillinan, his daughter's, and
dear old Dorothy, whom Coleridge, you know, pronounced the grandest
woman he had ever known. Suddenly turning I read the name of poor
Hartley Coleridge and again I felt my eyes flow."

Perhaps few travellers have seen as much in a summer's wandering as
did Margaret Preston, yet it was on her "blind slate" that she was
forced to write of these things and of the "crowning delight of the
summer," the tour through Switzerland. She said, "My picture gallery
of memory is hung henceforth with glorious frescoes which blindness
cannot blot or cause to fade."

Life in Preston House with all its enchantments came to an end for
Margaret Preston with the passing of the noble and loving man who had
made her the priestess of that home shrine. The first two years after
his death she spent with h