of the German masters.

I remember another, whom every muse inspired, skilful alike with the
pencil and the pen, and by whom both were almost contemned for their
inadequateness, in the height and scope of her aims.

'With her,' said Margaret, 'I can talk of anything. She is
like me. She is able to look facts in the face. We enjoy the
clearest, widest, most direct communication. She may be no
happier than ----, but she will know her own mind too clearly
to make any great mistake in conduct, and will learn a deep
meaning from her days.'

'It is not in the way of tenderness that I love ----. I prize
her always; and this is all the love some natures ever know.
And I also feel that I may always expect she will be with me.
I delight to picture to myself certain persons translated,
illuminated. There are a few in whom I see occasionally the
future being piercing, promising,--whom I can strip of all
that masks their temporary relations, and elevate to their
natural position. Sometimes I have not known these persons
intimately,--oftener I have; for it is only in the deepest
hours that this light is likely to break out. But some of
those I have best befriended I cannot thus portray, and very
few men I can. It does not depend at all on the beauty of
their forms, at present; it is in the eye and the smile, that
the hope shines through. I can see exactly how ---- will look:
not like this angel in the paper; she will not bring flowers,
but a living coal, to the lips of the singer; her eyes will
not burn as now with smothered fires, they will be ever
deeper, and glow more intensely; her cheek will be smooth, but
marble pale; her gestures nobly free, but few.'

Another was a lady who was devoted to landscape-painting, and who
enjoyed the distinction of being the only pupil of Allston, and who,
in her alliance with Margaret, gave as much honor as she received, by
the security of her spirit, and by the heroism of her devotion to her
friend. Her friends called her "the perpetual peace-offering," and
Margaret says of her,--'She is here, and her neighborhood casts the
mildness and purity too of the moonbeam on the else parti-colored
scene.'

There was another lady, more late and reluctantly entering Margaret's
circle, with a mind as high, and more mathematically exact, drawn by
taste to Greek, as Margaret to Italian genius, tempted to