“Here let me say a word respecting the character of Margaret’s mind.  It was what in woman is generally called a masculine mind; that is, its action was determined by ideas rather than by sentiments.  And yet, with this masculine trait, she combined a woman’s appreciation of the beautiful in sentiment and the beautiful in action.  Her intellect was rather solid than graceful, yet no one was more alive to grace.  She was no artist,—­she would never have written an epic, or romance, or drama,—­yet no one knew better the qualities which go to the making of these; and though catholic as to kind, no one was more rigorously exacting as to quality.  Nothing short of the best in each kind would content her.

“She wanted imagination, and she wanted productiveness.  She wrote with difficulty.  Without external pressure, perhaps, she would never have written at all.  She was dogmatic, and not creative.  Her strength was in characterization and in criticism.  Her critique on Goethe, in the second volume of the Dial, is, in my estimation, one of the best things she has written.  And, as far as it goes, it is one of the best criticisms extant of Goethe.

“What I especially admired in her was her intellectual sincerity.  Her judgments took no bribe from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom nor tradition, nor caprice.  She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others.  The question with her was not what should be believed, or what ought to be true, but what is true.  Her yes and no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unexpected dissent from the common-places of popular acceptation.”

* * * * *

Margaret, we have said, saw in each of her friends the secret interior capability, which might become hereafter developed into some special beauty or power.  By means of this penetrating, this prophetic insight, she gave each to himself, acted on each to draw out his best nature, gave him an ideal out of which he could draw strength and liberty hour by hour.  Thus her influence was ever ennobling, and each felt that in her society he was truer, wiser, better, and yet more free and happy, than elsewhere.  The “dry light” which Lord Bacon loved, she never knew; her light was life, was love, was warm with sympathy and a boundless energy of affection and hope.  Though her love flattered and charmed her friends, it did not spoil them, for they knew her perfect truth.  They knew that she loved them, not for what she imagined, but for what she saw, though she saw it only in the germ.  But as the Greeks beheld a Persephone and Athene in the passing stranger, and ennobled humanity into ideal beauty, Margaret saw all her friends thus idealized.  She was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float, far above the low details of earthly life.  Earth lay beneath us as a lovely picture,—­its sounds came up mellowed into music.