heard by night, and the eagle soars, and the thunder resounds in prolonged peals, and wide blue shadows fall like brooding wings across the valleys! Amid such scenes, expand and feel at home. All the fine days I spend among the mountain passes, along the mountain brooks, or beside the stately river, I enjoy just the tranquil happiness I need in communion with this fair grandeur.’
And, again: — ‘The boldness, sweetness, and variety here, are just what I like. I could pass the autumn in watching the exquisite changes of light and shade on the heights across the river. How idle to pretend that one could live and write as well amid fallow flat fields! This majesty, this calm splendor, could not but exhilarate the mind, and make it nobly free and plastic.’
These few weeks among the Highlands, — spent mostly
in the open air, under October’s golden sunshine, the
slumberous softness of the Indian summer, or the
brilliant, breezy skies of November, — were an important
era for Margaret. She had —
“lost the dream of Doing
And the other dream of Done;
The first spring in the pursuing,
The first pride in the Begun,
First recoil from incompleteness in the face of what is won.”
But she was striving, also, to use her own words, ‘to be patient to the very depths of the heart, to expect no hasty realizations, not to make her own plan her law of life, but to learn the law and plan of God.’ She
