but I understood these no better. It were long to tell
her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was
then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and,
later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve,
she had a determination of blood to the head. 'My parents,' she said,

'were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion
destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but
I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.'

She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She read and
wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better
when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her
powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of
nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me
that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who
were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between
laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other
peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one
side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits
or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain
science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in
recent years.

She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of
herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot.' In
some verses which she wrote 'To the Moon,' occur these lines:--

'But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye.'

And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of
Balzac's, "_Le Livre Mystique_," in which an equivocal figure exerts
alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of
the plot.

Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious,
and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would
carry, and to draw advantage from it. 'Attica,' she said to a friend,
'is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble
wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.'

'I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and
leap, blind force for the sake of force.'

* * * * *

'Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apar