I fear the remark already made on that susceptibility to details in art and nature which precluded the exercise of Margaret’s sound catholic judgment, must be extended to more than her connoisseurship.  She had a sound judgment, on which, in conversation, she could fall back, and anticipate and speak the best sense of the largest company.  But, left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the victim of Lord Bacon’s idols of the cave, or self-deceived by her own phantasms.  I have looked over volumes of her letters to me and others.  They are full of probity, talent, wit, friendship, charity, and high aspiration.  They are tainted with a mysticism, which to me appears so much an affair of constitution, that it claims no more respect than the charity or patriotism of a man who has dined well, and feels better for it.  One sometimes talks with a genial bon vivant, who looks as if the omelet and turtle have got into his eyes.  In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world.  This is easily felt in ordinary women, and a large deduction is civilly made on the spot by whosoever replies to their remark.  But when the speaker has such brilliant talent and literature as Margaret, she gives so many fine names to these merely sensuous and subjective phantasms, that the hearer is long imposed upon, and thinks so precise and glittering nomenclature cannot be of mere muscae volitantes, phoenixes of the fancy, but must be of some real ornithology, hitherto unknown to him.  This mere feeling exaggerates a host of trifles into a dazzling mythology.  But when one goes to sift it, and find if there be a real meaning, it eludes search.  Whole sheets of warm, florid writing are here, in which the eye is caught by “sapphire,” “heliotrope,” “dragon,” “aloes,” “Magna Dea,” “limboes,” “stars,” and “purgatory,” but can connect all this, or any part of it, with no universal experience.

In short, Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism.  That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable.  As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson’s Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors, of wonderful gleams,—­so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and stimulated thought, and communicated mental activity to all who approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her fancy, and she made numerous mistakes.  Her integrity was perfect, and she was led and followed by love, and was really bent on truth, but too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy.

FRIENDSHIP.

  “Friends she must have, but in no one could find
  A tally fitted to so large a mind.”