’Jamaica Plains, July, 1840.—­Do you remember my telling you, at Cohasset, of a Mr. ——­ staying with us, when I was fifteen, and all that passed?  Well, I have not seen him since, till, yesterday, he came here.  I was pleased to find, that, even at so early an age, I did not overrate those I valued.  He was the same as in memory; the powerful eye dignifying an otherwise ugly face; the calm wisdom, and refined observation, the imposing maniere d’etre, which anywhere would give him an influence among men, without his taking any trouble, or making any sacrifice, and the great waves of feeling that seemed to rise as an attractive influence, and overspread his being.  He said, nothing since his childhood had been so marked as his visit to our house; that it had dwelt in his thoughts unchanged amid all changes.  I could have wished he had never returned to change the picture.  He looked at me continually, and said, again and again, he should have known me anywhere; but O how changed I must be since that epoch of pride and fulness!  He had with him his son, a wild boy of five years old, all brilliant with health and energy, and with the same powerful eye.  He said,—­You know I am not one to confound acuteness and rapidity of intellect with real genius; but he is for those an extraordinary child.  He would astonish you, but I look deep enough into the prodigy to see the work of an extremely nervous temperament, and I shall make him as dull as I can. “Margaret,” (pronouncing the name in the same deliberate searching way he used to do,) “I love him so well, I will try to teach him moderation.  If I can help it, he shall not feed on bitter ashes, nor try these paths of avarice and ambition.”  It made me feel very strangely to hear him talk so to my old self.  What a gulf between!  There is scarce a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he remembered and loved.  I felt affection for him still; for his character was formed then, and had not altered, except by ripening and expanding!  But thus, in other worlds, we shall remember our present selves.’

Margaret’s constancy to any genuine relation, once established, was surprising.  If her friends’ aim changed, so as to take them out of her sphere, she was saddened by it, and did not let them go without a struggle.  But wherever they continued “true to the original standard,” (as she loved to phrase it) her affectionate interest would follow them unimpaired through all the changes of life.  The principle of this constancy she thus expresses in a letter to one of her brothers:—­

    ’Great and even fatal errors (so far as this life is
    concerned) could not destroy my friendship for one in whom I
    am sure of the kernel of nobleness.’

She never formed a friendship until she had seen and known this germ of good; and afterwards judged conduct by this.  To this germ of good, to this highest law of each individual, she held them true.  But never did she act like those who so often judge of their friend from some report of his conduct, as if they had never known him, and allow the inference from a single act to alter the opinion formed by an induction from years of intercourse.  From all such weakness Margaret stood wholly free.