There was another lady, more late and reluctantly entering Margaret’s circle, with a mind as high, and more mathematically exact, drawn by taste to Greek, as Margaret to Italian genius, tempted to do homage to Margaret’s flowing expressive energy, but still more inclined and secured to her side by the good sense and the heroism which Margaret disclosed, perhaps not a little by the sufferings which she addressed herself to alleviate, as long as Margaret lived.  Margaret had a courage in her address which it was not easy to resist.  She called all her friends by their Christian names.  In their early intercourse I suppose this lady’s billets were more punctiliously worded than Margaret liked; so she subscribed herself, in reply, ’Your affectionate “Miss Fuller."’ When the difficulties were at length surmounted, and the conditions ascertained on which two admirable persons could live together, the best understanding grew up, and subsisted during her life.  In her journal is a note:—­

’Passed the morning in Sleepy Hollow, with ——.  What fine, just distinctions she made!  Worlds grew clearer as we talked.  I grieve to see her fine frame subject to such rude discipline.  But she truly said, “I am not a failed experiment; for, in the bad hours, I do not forget what I thought in the better."’

None interested her more at that time, and for many years after, than a youth with whom she had been acquainted in Cambridge before he left the University, and the unfolding of whose powers she had watched with the warmest sympathy.  He was an amateur, and, but for the exactions not to be resisted of an American, that is to say, of a commercial, career,—­his acceptance of which she never ceased to regard as an apostasy,—­himself a high artist.  He was her companion, and, though much younger, her guide in the study of art.  With him she examined, leaf by leaf, the designs of Raphael, of Michel Angelo, of Da Vinci, of Guercino, the architecture of the Greeks, the books of Palladio, the Ruins, and Prisons of Piranesi; and long kept up a profuse correspondence on books and studies in which they had a mutual interest.  And yet, as happened so often, these literary sympathies, though sincere, were only veils and occasions to beguile the time, so profound was her interest in the character and fortunes of her friend.

There was another youth, whom she found later, of invalid habit, which had infected in some degree the tone of his mind, but of a delicate and pervasive insight, and the highest appreciation for genius in letters, arts, and life.  Margaret describes ’his complexion as clear in its pallor, and his eye steady.’  His turn of mind, and his habits of life, had almost a monastic turn,—­a jealousy of the common tendencies of literary men either to display or to philosophy.  Margaret was struck with the singular fineness of his perceptions, and the pious tendency of his thoughts, and enjoyed with him his proud reception, not as from above, but almost on equal ground, of Homer and AEschylus, of Dante and Petrarch, of Montaigne, of Calderon, of Goethe.  Margaret wished, also, to defend his privacy from the dangerous solicitations to premature authorship:—­