The imperative drill of press-work was new and
somewhat irksome to her. She was accustomed indeed
to labour in season and out of season, and in so doing
to struggle with bodily pain and weariness. But to
take up the pen at the word of command, without the
interior bidding of the divine afflatus, was a new necessity, and one to which she found it difficult to submit.
Mr. Greeley prized her work highly, though with some
drawbacks. He could not always command it at will,
for the reason that she could not. He found her
writing, however, terse, vigorous, and Practical, and
considered her contributions to the Tribune more solid
in merit, though less ambitious in scope, than her
essays written earlier for the Dial. Margaret herself
esteemed them but moderately, feeling that she had
taken up this work at a time when her tired faculties
needed rest and recreation.
In a brief memorial of Margaret, Mr. Greeley gives us the titles of the most important of these papers. They are as follows: "Thomas Hood,” “Edgar A. Poe," "Capital Punishment," "Cassius M. Clay," “New Year's Day," "Christmas," "Thanksgiving," “St. Valentine's," "Fourth of July," "The First of August"—which she commemorates as the anniversary of slave-emancipation in the British West Indies.
In looking over the volumes which contain these and many others of Margaret's collected papers, we are carried back to a time in which issues now long settled were in the early stages of their agitation, and in which many of those whom we now most revere in memory were living actors on the stage of the century's life. Hawthorne and Longfellow were then young writers. The second series of, Emerson's Essays is noticed as of recent publication. At the time of her
