This arrogant tone of her conversation, if it came to be the subject of comment, of course, she defended, and with such broad good nature, and on grounds of simple truth, as were not easy to set aside.  She quoted from Manzoni’s Carmagnola, the lines:—­

  “Tolga il ciel che alcuno
  Piu altamente di me pensi ch’io stesso.”

“God forbid that any one should conceive more highly of me than I myself.”  Meantime, the tone of her journals is humble, tearful, religious, and rises easily into prayer.

I am obliged to an ingenious correspondent for the substance of the following account of this idiosyncrasy:—­

Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art.  She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights.  She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act.  She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her.  No one could be more lenient in her judgments of those whom she saw to be living in this light.  Their faults were to be held as “the disproportions of the ungrown giant.”  But the faults of persons who were unjustified by this ideal, were odious.  Unhappily, her constitutional self-esteem sometimes blinded the eyes that should have seen that an idea lay at the bottom of some lives which she did not quite so readily comprehend as beauty; that truth had other manifestations than those which engaged her natural sympathies; that sometimes the soul illuminated only the smallest arc—­of a circle so large that it was lost in the clouds of another world.

This apology reminds me of a little speech once made to her, at his own house, by Dr. Channing, who held her in the highest regard:  “Miss Fuller, when I consider that you are and have all that Miss ——­ has so long wished for, and that you scorn her, and that she still admires you,—­I think her place in heaven will be very high.”

But qualities of this kind can only be truly described by the impression they make on the bystander; and it is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any other.  Many years since, one of her earliest and fastest friends quoted Spenser’s sonnet as accurately descriptive of Margaret:—­

  “Rudely thou wrongest my dear heart’s desire,
       In finding fault with her too portly pride;
  The thing which I do most in her admire
       Is of the world unworthy most envied. 
  For, in those lofty looks is close implied
       Scorn of base things, disdain of foul dishonor,
  Threatening rash eyes which gaze on her so wide
       That loosely they ne dare to look upon her: 
  Such pride is praise, such portliness