The summer of 1884 Margaret Preston spent abroad in the places of which she had read with a loving enthusiasm which made them her own.  “Don’t show me; let me find it,” she would say, and go straight to the object of her quest.  Her reading had brought her into companionship with all the beautiful minds of the world, and all the places that had been dear to them were sacred to her heart.  Windermere was “redolent all over with the memories of Wordsworth, Southey, Kit North, Hartley Coleridge, Harriet Martineau, Dr. Arnold.”  “Ambleside—­Wordsworth’s Ambleside—­Southey’s; and such hills, such greenery, I never expect to see again.  Then we took carriage to Grasmere Lake, a lovely little gem.”

“I walked to Wordsworth’s grave without being directed, and on reading his name on his stone, and Mary Wordsworth’s on his wife’s, I am free to confess to a rush of tears, Dora Quillinan, his daughter’s, and dear old Dorothy, whom Coleridge, you know, pronounced the grandest woman he had ever known.  Suddenly turning I read the name of poor Hartley Coleridge and again I felt my eyes flow.”

Perhaps few travellers have seen as much in a summer’s wandering as did Margaret Preston, yet it was on her “blind slate” that she was forced to write of these things and of the “crowning delight of the summer,” the tour through Switzerland.  She said, “My picture gallery of memory is hung henceforth with glorious frescoes which blindness cannot blot or cause to fade.”

Life in Preston House with all its enchantments came to an end for Margaret Preston with the passing of the noble and loving man who had made her the priestess of that home shrine.  The first two years after his death she spent with her stepdaughter, Mrs. Allan, who lived near the old home.  Then she went to the home of Dr. George J. Preston, of Baltimore, where she was the centre of the home and took great delight in his children with their pretty “curly red heads.”  She never walked again except to take a few steps with a crutch.

From 819 North Charles Street she wrote:  “Here my large airy room faces brick walls and housetops and when I sit at the library windows I only see throngs of passers-by, all of whom are strangers to me.”  Her life was beautiful and content, but she must often have longed for the old friends and the “laureled avenues” and the “edges of the glorious Goshen Pass lit with the wavering flames of the July rhododendrons.”

March 29, 1897, Margaret Preston died as she had wished when she expressed her desire in her poem “Euthanasia,” written in memory of a friend who had passed away unconscious of illness or death: 

    With faces the dearest in sight,
      With a kiss on the lips I love best,
    To whisper a tender “Good-night”
      And pass to my pillow of rest.

    To kneel, all my service complete,
      All duties accomplished—­and then
    To finish my orisons sweet
      With a trustful and joyous “Amen.”