Of Margaret’s studies while at Cambridge, I knew personally only of the German.  She already, when I first became acquainted with her, had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian and Spanish literature.  But all this amount of reading had not made her “deep-learned in books and shallow in herself;” for she brought to the study of most writers “a spirit and genius equal or superior.”—­so far, at least, as the analytic understanding was concerned.  Every writer whom she studied, as every person whom she knew, she placed in his own class, knew his relation to other writers, to the world, to life, to nature, to herself.  Much as they might delight her, they never swept her away.  She breasted the current of their genius, as a stately swan moves up a stream, enjoying the rushing water the more because she resists it.  In a passionate love-struggle she wrestled thus with the genius of De Stael, of Rousseau, of Alfieri, of Petrarch.

The first and most striking element in the genius of Margaret was the clear, sharp understanding, which keenly distinguished between things different, and kept every thought, opinion, person, character, in its own place, not to be confounded with any other.  The god Terminus presided over her intellect.  She knew her thoughts as we know each other’s faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities.  Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both.  No sophist could pass on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy.  This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show the one Truth, or the one Law, manifesting itself in such various phenomena.  Add to this her profound faith in truth, which made her a Realist of that order that thoughts to her were things.  The world of her thoughts rose around her mind as a panorama,—­the sun-in the sky, the flowers distinct in the foreground, the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance,—­and all in pure light and shade, all in perfect perspective.

Margaret began to study German early in 1832.  Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards in the Foreign Quarterly.

I believe that in about three months from the time that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of its literature.  Within the year, she had read Goethe’s Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck’s William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Koerner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller’s principal dramas, and his lyric poetry.  Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies.  Her mind opened under this influence, as the apple-blossom at the end of a warm week in May.  The thought and the beauty of this rich literature equally filled her mind and fascinated her imagination.