material worked in.” Margaret's portrait-painting intellect treated persons in this way. She saw them as God designed them, — omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from friction of untoward circumstances. If we may be permitted to take a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they actually were, but as they really were. This accounts for her high estimate of her friends, — too high, too flattering, indeed, but justified to her mind by her knowledge of their interior capabilities.
The following extract illustrates her power, even at
the age of nineteen, of comprehending the relations of
two things lying far apart from each other, and of rising
to a point of view which could overlook both: —
‘I have had, — while staying a day or two in
Boston, — some of Shirley's, Ford's, and Heywood's plays
from the Athenæum. There are some noble strains
of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical,
all-absorbing, passion. One of the finest fictions I recollect
in those specimens of the Italian novelists, —
which you, I think, read when I did, — noble, where it
illustrated the Italian national spirit, is ruined by the
English novelist, who has transplanted it to an
uncongenial soil; yet he has given it beauties which an
Italian eye could not see, by investing the actors with
deep, continuing, truly English affections.’
*****
The following criticism on some of the dialogues of
Plato, (dated June 3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the
book, illustrates her downright way of asking world-
