’Cambridge, July 31, 1842.—...  I said I was happy in having no secret.  It is my nature, and has been the tendency of my life, to wish that all my thoughts and deeds might lie, as the “open secrets” of Nature, free to all who are able to understand them.  I have no reserves, except intellectual reserves; for to speak of things to those who cannot receive them is stupidity, rather than frankness.  But in this case, I alone am not concerned.  Therefore, dear James, give heed to the subject.  You have received a key to what was before unknown of your friend; you have made use of it, now let it be buried with the past, over whose passages profound and sad, yet touched with heaven-born beauty, “let silence stand sentinel."’

I shall endeavor to keep true to the spirit of these sentences in speaking of Margaret’s friendships.  Yet not to speak of them in her biography would be omitting the most striking feature of her character.  It would be worse than the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted.  Henry the Fourth without Sully, Gustavus Adolphus without Oxenstiern, Napoleon without his marshals, Socrates without his scholars, would be more complete than Margaret without her friends.  So that, in touching on these private relations, we must be everywhere “bold,” yet not “too bold.”  The extracts will be taken indiscriminately from letters written to many friends.

The insight which Margaret displayed in finding her friends, the magnetism by which she drew them toward herself, the catholic range of her intimacies, the influence which she exercised to develop the latent germ of every character, the constancy with which she clung to each when she had once given and received confidence, the delicate justice which kept every intimacy separate, and the process of transfiguration which took place when she met any one on this mountain of Friendship, giving a dazzling lustre to the details of common life,—­all these should be at least touched upon and illustrated, to give any adequate view of her in these relations.

Such a prejudice against her had been created by her faults of manner, that the persons she might most wish to know often retired from her and avoided her.  But she was “sagacious of her quarry,” and never suffered herself to be repelled by this.  She saw when any one belonged to her, and never rested till she came into possession of her property.  I recollect a lady who thus fled from her for several years, yet, at last, became most nearly attached to her.  This “wise sweet” friend, as Margaret characterized her in two words, a flower hidden in the solitude of deep woods, Margaret saw and appreciated from the first.

See how, in the following passage, she describes to one of her friends her perception of character, and her power of attracting it, when only fifteen years old.