’Master, I have this summer envied the oriole which had even a swinging nest in the high bough.  I have envied the least flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the wind.  But I envy none when I am with thee.’

SELF-ESTEEM.

Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger.  She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted.  In the coolest way, she said to her friends, ’I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’  In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth of genius, and my curiosity in his future,—­’O no, she was intimate with his mind,’ and I ‘spoiled him, by overrating him.’  Meantime, we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle superiorities.

I have heard, that from the beginning of her life, she idealized herself as a sovereign.  She told—­she early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, and that for years she dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her parents’ child, but an European princess confided to their care.  She remembered, that, when a little girl, she was walking one day under the apple trees with such an air and step, that her father pointed her out to her sister, saying, Incedit regina. And her letters sometimes convey these exultations, as the following, which was written to a lady, and which contained Margaret’s translation of Goethe’s “Prometheus.”

    To ——.

1838.—­Which of us has not felt the questionings expressed in this bold fragment?  Does it not seem, were we gods, or could steal their fire, we would make men not only happier, but free,—­glorious?  Yes, my life is strange; thine is strange.  We are, we shall be, in this life, mutilated beings, but there is in my bosom a faith, that I shall see the reason; a glory, that I can endure to be so imperfect; and a feeling, ever elastic, that fate and time shall have the shame and the blame, if I am mutilated.  I will do all I can,—­and, if one cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom.

Your letters are excellent.  I did not mean to check your writing, only I thought that you might wish a confidence that I must anticipate with a protest.  But I take my natural position always:  and the more I see, the more I feel that it is regal.  Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen.

It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense.  She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, ‘He appreciates