THE WOMAN.

* * * * *

In 1839 I had met Margaret upon the plane of intellect.  In the summer of 1840, on my return from the West, she was to be revealed in a new aspect.

It was a radiant and refreshing morning, when I entered the parlor of her pleasant house, standing upon a slope beyond Jamaica Plain to the south.  She was absent at the moment, and there was opportunity to look from the windows on a cheerful prospect, over orchards and meadows, to the wooded hills and the western sky.  Presently Margaret appeared, bearing in her hand a vase of flowers, which she had been gathering in the garden.  After exchange of greetings, her first words were of the flowers, each of which was symbolic to her of emotion, and associated with the memory of some friend.  I remember her references only to the Daphne Odora, the Provence Rose, the sweet-scented Verbena, and the Heliotrope; the latter being her chosen emblem, true bride of the sun that it is.

From flowers she passed to engravings hanging round the room.  ‘Here,’ said she, ’are Dante and Beatrice.

  “Approach, and know that I am Beatrice. 
  The power of ancient love was strong within me.”

’She is beautiful enough, is not she, for that higher moment?  But Dante!  Yet who could paint a Dante,—­and Dante in heaven?  They give but his shadow, as he walked in the forest-maze of earth.  Then here is the Madonna del Pesce; not divine, like the Foligno, not deeply maternal, like the Seggiola, not the beaetified “Mother of God” of the Dresden gallery, but graceful, and “not too bright and good for human nature’s daily food.”  And here is Raphael himself, the young seer of beauty, with eyes softly contemplative, yet lit with central fires,’ &c.

There were gems, too, and medallions and seals, to be examined, each enigmatical, and each blended by remembrances with some fair hour of her past life.

Talk on art led the way to Greece and the Greeks, whose mythology Margaret was studying afresh.  She had been culling the blooms of that poetic land, and could not but offer me leaves from her garland.  She spoke of the statue of Minerva-Polias, cut roughly from an olive-tree, yet cherished as the heaven-descended image of the most sacred shrine, to which was due the Panathenaic festival.

’The less ideal perfection in the figure, the greater the reverence of the adorer.  Was not this because spiritual imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence to unfold Olympic splendors?’

She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane erected in its place:—­

    ’This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in
    which life’s earliest experiences become glorified by our
    perfecting destiny?’

    ’In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose,
    a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice;—­who can read that
    riddle?