said, that women never are so lovely and enchanting in the company of their own sex, merely, but it requires the other to draw them out.  Certain it is that Margaret never appears, when I see her, either so brilliant and deep in thought, or so desirous to please, or so modest, or so heart-touching, as in this very party.  Well, she began to say how gratifying it was to her to see so many come, because all knew why they came,—­that it was to learn from each other and ourselves the highest ends of life, where there could be no excitements and gratifications of personal ambition, &c.  She spoke of herself, and said she felt she had undergone changes in her own mind since the last winter, as doubtless we all felt we had done; that she was conscious of looking at all things less objectively,—­more from the law with which she identified herself.  This, she stated, was the natural progress of our individual being, when we did not hinder its development, to advance from objects to law, from the circumference of being, where we found ourselves at our birth, to the centre.

“This advance was enacted poesy.  We could not, in our individual lives, amid the disturbing influences of other wills, which had as much right to their own action as we to ours, enact poetry entirely; the discordant, the inferior, the prose, would intrude, but we should always keep in mind that poetry of life was not something aside,—­a path that might or might not be trod,—­it was the only path of the true soul; and prose you may call the deviation.  We might not always be poetic in life, but we might and should be poetic in our thought and intention.  The fine arts were one compensation for the necessary prose of life.  The man who could not write his thought of beauty in his life,—­the materials of whose life would not work up into poetry,—­wrote it in stone, drew it on canvas, breathed it in music, or built it in lofty rhyme.  In this statement, however, she guarded her meaning, and said that to seek beauty was to miss it often.  We should only seek to live as harmoniously with the great laws as our social and other duties permitted, and solace ourselves with poetry and the fine arts.”

I find a further record by the same friendly scribe, which seems a second and enlarged account of the introductory conversation, or else a sketch of the course of thought which ran through several meetings, and which very naturally repeated occasionally the same thoughts.  I give it as I find it:—­

“She then recurred to the last year’s conversations; and, first, the Grecian mythologies, which she looked at as symbolical of a deeper intellectual and aesthetic life than we were wont to esteem it, when looking at it from a narrow religious point of view.  We had merely skimmed along the deeper study.  She spoke of the conversations on the different part played by Inspiration and Will in the works of man, and stated the different views of inspiration,—­how