’But where to find fit, though few, representatives for all we value in humanity?  Where obtain those golden keys to the secret treasure-chambers of the soul?  No samples are perfect.  We must look abroad into the wide circle, to seek a little here, and a little there, to make up our company.  And is not the “prent book” a good beacon-light to tell where we wait the bark?—­a reputation, the means of entering the Olympic game, where Pindar may perchance be encountered?

’So it seems the mind must reveal its secret; must reproduce.  And I have no castle, and no natural circle, in which I might live, like the wise Makaria, observing my kindred the stars, and gradually enriching my archives.  Makaria here must go abroad, or the stars would hide their light, and the archive remain a blank.

’For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into a form.  No old one suits me.  If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to write.  What shall I do, dear friend?  I want force to be either a genius or a character.  One should be either private or public.  I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope.  At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist.’

HEROISM.

These practical problems Margaret had to entertain and to solve the best way she could.  She says truly, ’there was none to take up her burden whilst she slept.’  But she was formed for action, and addressed herself quite simply to her part.  She was a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money; and these negatives will suggest what difficulties were to be surmounted where the tasks dictated by her talents required the good-will of “good society,” in the town where she was to teach and write.  But she was even-tempered and erect, and, if her journals are sometimes mournful, her mind was made up, her countenance beamed courage and cheerfulness around her.  Of personal influence, speaking strictly,—­an efflux, that is, purely of mind and character, excluding all effects of power, wealth, fashion, beauty, or literary fame,—­she had an extraordinary degree; I think more than any person I have known.  An interview with her was a joyful event.  Worthy men and women, who had conversed with her, could not forget her, but worked bravely on in the remembrance that this heroic approver had recognized their aims.  She spoke so earnestly, that the depth of the sentiment prevailed, and not the accidental expression, which might chance to be common.  Thus I learned, the other day, that, in a copy of Mrs. Jameson’s Italian Painters, against