ex

of French blood). All these details I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was the pression of goodness, nobleness, and power that pervade the whole -the truly human heart and nature that shone in her eyes. As our eyes met she said, 'C'est vous,' and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little study. We sat down a moment; then I said, 'Il me fait de bien de Vous voir;' and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, So large and so developed a character, and everything that is good in it so really good. I loved, shall always love her.

"She looked away and said, 'Ah,

Vous m'avez écrit une lettre

charmante.' This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went on as if we had always known one another. She told me, before I went away, that she was going that very day to write to me; that when the servant announced me she did not recognise the name, but after a moment it struck her it might be la dame Americaine, as the foreigners very commonly call me, for they find my name hard to remember. She was very much pressed for time, as she was then preparing copy for the printer, and, having just returned, there were many applications to see her; but she wanted me to stay then, saying, 'It is better to throw things aside and live for the present moment.' I stayed a good part of the day, and was very glad afterwards, for I did not see her again uninterrupted.

"I saw, as one sees in her writings, the want of an independent, interior life; but I did not feel it as a fault-there is so much in her of her kind. I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very

much; I never liked a woman better.

"She needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature and always with good intentions. She might have loved one man permanently if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly hardly a possibility of that for such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the objects of her affection, and several times. Also there may have been something of the Bacchante in her life, and of the love of night and storm, and the free raptures amid which roamed on the mountain tops the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the great mother. But she was never coarse, never gross; and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of winepress."

When Madame Sand uttered those simple words of welcome, "C'est vous," it seems almost as though there were intuitive recognition of a kindred spirit. Margaret herself has been described as having something of a Bacchante in her by one who had not then seen her description of Madame Sand.

Her meeting with the great French novelist took place during her European tour, a period which filled Margaret's excitable temperament with delight, and perhaps equally punished it with exhaustion. She was always a prey to intense nervousness; her headaches sometimes prostrated her utterly. Emerson says of her that her life was heaped into high and happy moments, between which lay a void. And yet she had the fancy, which is not quite peculiar to herself, that she could think best when in pain; and it is said that when cruelly prostrated she would keep those who attended her in a state be

tween laughter and tears by her witty sallies.

Her excitability was highly wrought upon by her visits to the old countries. Rome kept her awake all the time she was there. She took letters of introduction to the people of note in the places she went to, and has left many interesting accounts of the celebrities she met. Writing to Emerson, after meeting Carlyle in London, she gives a vivid account of this great man, for whom Edgar Allan Poe said she had what he called a "blind reverence.' In his critique upon her he accuses her of “ unjustifiable Carlyleisms"; and doubtless she had been much influenced both in thought and style by Carlyle; but she had passed through the phase of blind reverence before she met him, for she goes so far even as to allow that she had wearied of his writings.

"I meant to write on my arrival in London, six weeks ago but in three days I was in such a round of acquaintances that I had hardly time to dress, and none to sleep during all the weeks I was in London. I find myself much in my element in European society. It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal; but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in the water.

"Of the people I saw in London you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. C. came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be passed at their house.

"Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse-only harangues.

It is the usual misfortune of such marked men - happily not one invariable or inevitable-that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe. . . . Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness-no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror.

You do not love him perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith-the Siegfried melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near. He seems to me quite isolated-lonely as the desert. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself; then begins anew.

"It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie-Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanly fair.

"For a couple of hours he was talking about poetry; and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind. ..

She gives a quaint charactertouch of both Carlyle and Emerson, when, in writing to the latter, she tells him of how she had made Carlyle laugh by an anecdote, and says: "Carlyle is worth a thousand of you for that; he is not ashamed to laugh when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial human fashion."

We have treated Margaret as yet principally as a woman, endeavouring to seize her personality from amid the mass of recollections which her friends have given to the world. These recollections are often contradictory; but Emerson,

who has evidently endeavoured to put down his true impression of her, excuses this by saying that she herself varied from day to day. At one time she would appear to be devoid of some sense or intuition or belief. At the next interview she would seem to have leaped right on and taken up a new position. If her friends found it difficult to form a definite and consistent idea of her when alive, it is hard to expect them to do so when she is among them no longer. But this chameleon-like character of mind which may often

appear uncertain and unsatisfactory, yet may have been the very quality which justified her arrogance and sense of queenly power. She was conscious of a wide spiritual range of ability to move quickly in that region of spiritual thought and belief in which most people take up a fixed position, and are almost proud of being incapable of

movement.

As a journalist, as a critic, as one of the transcendental thinkers, and as the Countess d'Ossoli, we have yet to consider her.