Margaret was, to persons younger than herself, a Makaria and Natalia.  She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and glory “known to neither sea nor land.”  To those of her own age she was sibyl and seer,—­a prophetess, revealing the future, pointing the path, opening their eyes to the great aims only worthy of pursuit in life.  To those older than herself she was like the Euphorion in Goethe’s drama, child of Faust and Helen,—­a wonderful union of exuberance and judgment, born of romantic fulness and classic limitation.  They saw with surprise her clear good-sense balancing her now of sentiment and ardent courage.  They saw her comprehension of both sides of every question, and gave her their confidence, as to one of equal age, because of so ripe a judgment.

But it was curious to see with what care and conscience she kept her friendships distinct.  Her fine practical understanding, teaching her always the value of limits, enabled her to hold apart all her intimacies, nor did one ever encroach on the province of the other.  Like a moral Paganini, she played always on a single string, drawing from each its peculiar music,—­bringing wild beauty from the slender wire, no less than from the deep-sounding harp string.  Some of her friends had little to give her when compared with others; but I never noticed that she sacrificed in any respect the smaller faculty to the greater.  She fully realized that the Divine Being makes each part of this creation divine, and that He dwells in the blade of grass as really if not as fully as in the majestic oak which has braved the storm for a hundred years.  She felt in full the thought of a poem which she once copied for me from Barry Cornwall, which begins thus:—­

  “She was not fair, nor full of grace,
  Nor crowned with thought, nor aught beside
  No wealth had she of mind or face,
  To win our love, or gain our pride,—­
  No lover’s thought her heart could touch,—­
  No poet’s dream was round her thrown;
  And yet we miss her—­ah, so much! 
  Now—­she has flown.”

I will close this section of Cambridge Friendship with the two following passages, the second of which was written to some one unknown to me: 

’Your letter was of cordial sweetness to me, as is ever the thought of our friendship,—­that sober-suited friendship, of which the web was so deliberately and well woven, and which wears so well.

* * * * *

    ’I want words to express the singularity of all my past
    relations; yet let me try.

’From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot.  I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn; that I should be a pilgrim and sojourner on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a place to lay the head than I. You understand