out to me
at first by another, instead of my coming unexpectedly upon
it of myself. All the great writers, all the persons who have
been dear to me, I have found and chosen; they have not been
proposed to me. My intimacy with them came upon me as natural
eras, unexpected and thrice dear. Thus I have appreciated, but
not been able to feel, Michel Angelo as a poet.

'It is a singular fact in my mental history, that, while I
understand the principles and construction of language much
better than formerly, I cannot read so well _les langues
meridionales_. I suppose it is that I am less _meridionale_
myself. I understand the genius of the north better than I
did.'

Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old poets,--for to
Ariosto she assigned a far lower place,--Alfieri and Manzoni, among
the new. But what was of still more import to her education, she had
read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost
exclusively,--Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above
all, GOETHE. It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her,
though her rich and busy mind never reproduced undigested reading,
that the last writer,--food or poison,--the most powerful of all
mental reagents,--the pivotal mind in modern literature,--for all
before him are ancients, and all who have read him are moderns,--that
this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled,
nor was there room for any other. She had that symptom which appears
in all the students of Goethe,--an ill-dissembled contempt of all
criticism on him which they hear from others, as if it were totally
irrelevant; and they are themselves always preparing to say the right
word,--a _prestige_ which is allowed, of course, until they do
speak: when they have delivered their volley, they pass, like their
foregoers, to the rear.

The effect on Margaret was complete. She was perfectly timed to it.
She found her moods met, her topics treated, the liberty of thought
she loved, the same climate of mind. Of course, this book superseded
all others, for the time, and tinged deeply all her thoughts. The
religion, the science, the Catholicism, the worship of art, the
mysticism and daemonology, and withal the clear recognition of moral
distinctions as final and eternal, all charmed her; and Faust, and
Tasso, and Mignon, and Makaria, and Iphigenia, became irresistible
names. It was one of