soberly, and without disturbance, have been led to a better course.
‘“Ohildren of this generation!” — ye Festuses and Agrippas! — ye are wiser, we grant, than “the children of light;” yet we advise you to commend to a higher tribunal those whom much learning, or much love, has made “mad.” For if they stay here, almost will they persuade even you!’
Amidst these meetings of the Transcendentalists it
was, that, after years of separation, I again found
Margaret. Of this body she was member by grace of nature.
Her romantic freshness of heart, her craving for the
truth, her self-trust, had prepared her from childhood to
be a pioneer in prairie-land; and her discipline in German
schools had given definite form and tendency to her
idealism. Her critical yet aspiring intellect filled her
with longing for germs of positive affirmation in place
of the chaff of thrice-sifted negation; while her æsthetic
instinct responded in accord to the praise of Beauty as
the beloved heir of Good and Truth, whose right it is to
reign. On the other hand, strong common-sense saved
her from becoming visionary, while she was too well-read
as a scholar to be caught by conceits, and had been
too sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful effeminacy.
It was a pleasing surprise to see how this friend of
earlier days was acknowledged as a peer of the realm, in
this new world of thought. Men, — her superiors in
years, fame and social position, — treated her more with
the frankness due from equal to equal, than the
half-condescending deference with which scholars are wont
to adapt themselves to women. They did not talk down
to her standard, nor translate their dialect into popular
