’During my last weeks of solitude I was very happy, and all that had troubled me became clearer.  The angel was not weary of waiting for Gunhilde, till she had unravelled her mesh of thought, and seeds of mercy, of purification, were planted in the breast.  Whatever the past has been, I feel that I have always been reading on and on, and that the Soul of all souls has been patient in love to mine.  New assurances were given me, that if I would be faithful and humble, there was no experience that would not tell its heavenly errand.  If shadows have fallen, already they give way to a fairer if more tempered light; and for the present I am so happy that the spirit kneels.

’Life, is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope:  and I take it to my breast.  Amid these scenes of beauty, all that is little, foreign, unworthy, vanishes like a dream.  So shall it be some time amidst the Everlasting Beauty, when true joy shall begin and never cease.’

Filled thus as Margaret was with ecstasy, she was yet more than willing,—­even glad,—­to bear her share in the universal sorrow.  Well she knew that pain must be proportioned to the fineness and fervor of her organization; that the very keenness of her sensibility exposed her to constant disappointment or disgust; that no friend, however faithful, could meet the demands of desires so eager, of sympathies so absorbing.  Contrasted with her radiant visions, how dreary looked actual existence; how galling was the friction of petty hindrances; how heavy the yoke of drudging care!  Even success seemed failure, when measured by her conscious aim; and experience had brought out to consciousness excesses and defects, which humbled pride while shaming self-confidence.  But suffering as she did with all the intensity of so passionate a nature, Margaret still welcomed the searching discipline.  ’It is only when Persephone returns from lower earth that she weds Dyonysos, and passes from central sadness into glowing joy,’ she writes.  And again:  ’I have no belief in beautiful lives; we are born to be mutilated; and the blood must flow till in every vein its place is supplied by the Divine ichor.’  And she reiterates:  ’The method of Providence with me is evidently that of “cross-biassing,” as Herbert hath it.  In a word, to her own conscience and to intimate friends she avowed, without reserve, that there was in her ’much rude matter that needed to be spiritualized.’  Comment would but weaken the pathos of the following passages, in which so plainly appears a once wilful temper striving, with child-like faith, to obey:—­