or what
you consider absurd squeamishness in me. You may not acquiesce
in my view, but I think you will respect it _as_ mine and be
willing to act upon it so far as I am concerned.

'Genius seems to me excusable in taking the public for a
confidant. Genius is universal, and can appeal to the common
heart of man. But even here I would not have it too direct.
I prefer to see the thought or feeling made universal. How
different the confidence of Goethe, for instance, from that of
Byron!

'But for us lesser people, who write verses merely as vents
for the overflowings of a personal experience, which in every
life of any value craves occasionally the accompaniment of the
lyre, it seems to me that all the value of this utterance is
destroyed by a hasty or indiscriminate publicity. The moment
I lay open my heart, and tell the fresh feeling to any one who
chooses to hear, I feel profaned.

'When it has passed into experience, when the flower has gone
to seed, I don't care who knows it, or whither they wander. I
am no longer it,--I stand on it. I do not know whether this
is peculiar to me, or not, but I am sure the moment I cease
to have any reserve or delicacy about a feeling, it is on the
wane.

'About putting beautiful verses in your Magazine, I have no
feeling except what I should have about furnishing a room. I
should not put a dressing-case into a parlor, or a book-case
into a dressing-room, because, however good things in
their place, they were not in place there. And this, not in
consideration of the public, but of my own sense of fitness
and harmony.'

The next extract is from a letter written to me in 1842, after a
journey which we had taken to the White Mountains, in the company of
my sister, and Mr. and Mrs. Farrar. During this journey Margaret had
conversed with me concerning some passages of her private history and
experience, and in this letter she asks me to be prudent in speaking
of it, giving her reasons as follows:--

'_Cambridge, July 31, 1842._--... I said I was happy in having
no secret. It is my nature, and has been the tendency of my
life, to wish that all my thoughts and deeds might lie, as
the "open secrets" of Nature, free to all who are able to
understand them. I have no reserves, except intellectual
reserves; for to speak of things to those who cannot r