This aim, from first to last, was SELF-CULTURE.  If she ever was ambitious of knowledge and talent, as a means of excelling others, and gaining fame, position, admiration,—­this vanity had passed before I knew her, and was replaced by the profound desire for a full development of her whole nature, by means of a full experience of life.

In her description of her own youth, she says, ’VERY EARLY I KNEW THAT THE ONLY OBJECT IN LIFE WAS TO GROW.’  This is the passage:—­

’I was now in the hands of teachers, who had not, since they came on the earth, put to themselves one intelligent question as to their business here.  Good dispositions and employment for the heart gave a tone to all they said, which was pleasing, and not perverting.  They, no doubt, injured those who accepted the husks they proffered for bread, and believed that exercise of memory was study, and to know what others knew, was the object of study.  But to me this was all penetrable.  I had known great living minds.—­I had seen how they took their food and did their exercise, and what their objects were. Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow.  I was often false to this knowledge, in idolatries of particular objects, or impatient longings for happiness, but I have never lost sight of it, have always been controlled by it, and this first gift of thought has never been superseded by a later love.’

In this she spoke truth.  The good and the evil which flow from this great idea of self-development she fully realized.  This aim of life, originally self-chosen, was made much more clear to her mind by the study of Goethe, the great master of this school, in whose unequalled eloquence this doctrine acquires an almost irresistible beauty and charm.

“Wholly religious, and almost Christian,” I said, was this aim.  It was religious, because it recognized something divine, infinite, imperishable in the human soul,—­something divine in outward nature and providence, by which the soul is led along its appointed way.  It was almost Christian in its superiority to all low, worldly, vulgar thoughts and cares; in its recognition of a high standard of duty, and a great destiny for man.  In its strength, Margaret was enabled to do and bear, with patient fortitude, what would have crushed a soul not thus supported.  Yet it is not the highest aim, for in all its forms, whether as personal improvement, the salvation of the soul, or ascetic religion, it has at its core a profound selfishness.  Margaret’s soul was too generous for any low form of selfishness.  Too noble to become an Epicurean, too large-minded to become a modern ascetic, the defective nature of her rule of life, showed itself in her case, only in a certain supercilious tone toward “the vulgar herd,” in the absence (at this period) of a tender humanity, and in an idolatrous hero-worship of genius and power.  Afterward, too, she may have suffered from her desire for a universal human experience, and an unwillingness to see that we must often be content to enter the Kingdom, of Heaven halt and maimed,—­that a perfect development here must often be wholly renounced.