’There is no hour of absolute beauty in all my past, though some have been made musical by heavenly hope, many dignified by intelligence.  Long urged by the Furies, I rest again in the temple of Apollo.  Celestial verities dawn constellated as thoughts in the Heaven of my mind.

’But, driven from home to home, as a renouncer, I get the picture and the poetry of each.  Keys of gold, silver, iron, and lead, are in my casket.  No one loves me; but I love many a good deal, and see, more or less, into their eventual beauty.  Meanwhile, I have no fetter on me, no engagement, and, as I look on others,—­almost every other,—­can I fail to feel this a great privilege?  I have nowise tied my hands or feet; yet the varied calls on my sympathy have been such, that I hope not to be made partial, cold, or ignorant, by this isolation.  I have no child; but now, as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what low and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother!  The children of the muse come quicker, and have not on them the taint of earthly corruption.’

Practical questions in plenty the days and months brought her to settle,—­questions requiring all her wisdom, and sometimes more than all.  None recurs with more frequency, at one period, in her journals, than the debate with herself, whether she shall make literature a profession.  Shall it be woman, or shall it be artist?

WOMAN, OR ARTIST?

Margaret resolved, again and again, to devote herself no more to these disappointing forms of men and women, but to the children of the muse.  ‘The dramatis personae’ she said, ’of my poems shall henceforth be chosen from the children of immortal Muse.  I fix my affections no more on these frail forms.’  But it was vain; she rushed back again to persons, with a woman’s devotion.

Her pen was a non-conductor.  She always took it up with some disdain, thinking it a kind of impiety to attempt to report a life so warm and cordial, and wrote on the fly-leaf of her journal,—­

    ‘"Scrivo sol per sfogar’ l’interno."’

‘Since you went away,’ she said, ’I have thought of many things I might have told you, but I could not bear to be eloquent and poetical.  It is a mockery thus to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one’s own heart’s blood.  One would fain be no more artist, or philosopher, or lover, or critic, but a soul ever rushing forth in tides of genial life.’

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’26 Dec., 1842.—­I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby.  These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians.  What I demand of men,—­that they could act out all their thoughts,—­these have.  They are lives;—­and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year,—­there is the energy to redeem them.  Do you not admire Lord Herbert’s two poems on life, and the conjectures concerning celestial life?  I keep reading them.’

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