No garlands deck thee, no libations poured
    Tell to the earth the triumphs of thy song;
    No princely halls echo thy strains along. 
  But still the strings are there; and, if they break,
  Even in death rare melody will make,
    Might’st thou once more be tuned, and power be given
    To tell in numbers all thou canst of heaven!’

VISITS TO CONCORD.

BY R.W.  EMERSON.

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER FROM MADAME ARCONATI TO R.W.  EMERSON.

Je n’ai point rencontre, dans ma vie, de femme plus noble; ayant autant de sympathie pour ses semblables, et dont l’esprit fut plus vivifiant.  Je me suis tout de suite sentie attiree par elle.  Quand je fis sa connoissance, j’ignorais que ce fut une femme remarquable.

IV.

VISITS TO CONCORD.

* * * * *

I became acquainted with Margaret in 1835.  Perhaps it was a year earlier that Henry Hedge, who had long been her friend, told me of her genius and studies, and loaned me her manuscript translation of Goethe’s Tasso.  I was afterwards still more interested in her, by the warm praises of Harriet Martineau, who had become acquainted with her at Cambridge, and who, finding Margaret’s fancy for seeing me, took a generous interest in bringing us together.  I remember, during a week in the winter of 1835-6, in which Miss Martineau was my guest, she returned again and again to the topic of Margaret’s excelling genius and conversation, and enjoined it on me to seek her acquaintance:  which I willingly promised.  I am not sure that it was not in Miss Martineau’s company, a little earlier, that I first saw her.  And I find a memorandum, in her own journal, of a visit, made by my brother Charles and myself, to Miss Martineau, at Mrs. Farrar’s.  It was not, however, till the next July, after a little diplomatizing in billets by the ladies, that her first visit to our house was arranged, and she came to spend a fortnight with my wife.  I still remember the first half-hour of Margaret’s conversation.  She was then twenty-six years old.  She had a face and frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life.  She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong fair hair.  She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-possession.  For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing.  Her extreme plainness,—­a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,—­the nasal tone of her voice,—­all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far.  It is to be said, that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her.  This was partly the effect of her manners,