however good things in their place, they were not in place there. And this, not in consideration of the public, but of my own sense of fitness and harmony.’
The next extract is from a letter written to me in
1842, after a journey which we had taken to the White
Mountains, in the company of my sister, and Mr. and
Mrs. Farrar. During this journey Margaret had
conversed with me concerning some passages of her private
history and experience, and in this letter she asks me to
be prudent in speaking of it, giving her reasons as
follows: —
‘Cambridge, July 31, 1842.— * * I said I was happy
in having no secret. It is my nature, and has been
the tendency of my life, to wish that all my thoughts
and deeds might lie, as the “open secrets” of Nature,
free to all who are able to understand them. I have no
reserves, except intellectual reserves; for to speak of
things to those who cannot receive them is stupidity,
rather than frankness. But in this case, I alone am
not concerned. Therefore, dear James, give heed to
the subject. You have received a key to what was
before unknown of your friend; you have made use
of it, now let it be buried with the past, over whose
passages profound and sad, yet touched with heaven-born
beauty, “let silence stand sentinel.”’
I shall endeavor to keep true to the spirit of these
sentences in speaking of Margaret’s friendships. Yet not
to speak of them in her biography would be omitting
the most striking feature of her character. It would
be worse than the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted.
Henry the Fourth without Sully, Gustavus
