guess pretty nearly the range of their thoughts.  There yet remained to command her constancy, what she valued more, the quality and affection proper to each.  But she could rarely find natures sufficiently deep and magnetic.  With her sleepless curiosity, her magnanimity, and her diamond-ring, like Annie of Lochroyan’s, to exchange for gold or for pewter, she might be pardoned for her impatient questionings.  To me, she was uniformly generous; but neither did I escape.  Our moods were very different; and I remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised with hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness.  She stigmatized our friendship as commercial.  It seemed, her magnanimity was not met, but I prized her only for the thoughts and pictures she brought me;—­so many thoughts, so many facts yesterday,—­so many to-day;—­when there was an end of things to tell, the game was up:  that, I did not know, as a friend should know, to prize a silence as much as a discourse,—­and hence a forlorn feeling was inevitable; a poor counting of thoughts, and a taking the census of virtues, was the unjust reception so much love found.  On one occasion, her grief broke into words like these:  ’The religious nature remained unknown to you, because it could not proclaim itself, but claimed to be divined.  The deepest soul that approached you was, in your eyes, nothing but a magic lantern, always bringing out pretty shows of life.’

But as I did not understand the discontent then,—­of course, I cannot now.  It was a war of temperaments, and could not be reconciled by words; but, after each party had explained to the uttermost, it was necessary to fall back on those grounds of agreement which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence.  The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius.  It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, that existed between us.

I ought to add here, that certain mental changes brought new questions into conversation.  In the summer of 1840, she passed into certain religious states, which did not impress me as quite healthy, or likely to be permanent; and I said, “I do not understand your tone; it seems exaggerated.  You are one who can afford to speak and to hear the truth.  Let us hold hard to the common-sense, and let us speak in the positive degree.”

And I find, in later letters from her, sometimes playful, sometimes grave allusions to this explanation.

’Is ——­ there?  Does water meet water?—­no need of wine, sugar, spice, or even a soupcon of lemon to remind of a tropical climate?  I fear me not.  Yet, dear positives, believe me superlatively yours, MARGARET.’

The following letter seems to refer, under an Eastern guise, and with something of Eastern exaggeration of compliment too, to some such native sterilities in her correspondent:—–­