it is the superficialness of
my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that
bore their proper fruit,--all present ate and were filled, and
there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is
it because of the superficial mind, or the believing heart,
that I can say this?'

* * * * *

'Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We lean upon
thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own. That is
knowledge, for that is love. Thought will never reach it.'

ART.

There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this
country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings.
The BOSTON ATHENAEUM,--on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may
the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!--added to
its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique
sculpture, in plaster;--the selection being dictated, it is said, by
no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses,
Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso
Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,--all
these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much
that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw
him, a benefit so pure and enduring.

To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last,
by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo. Here was old
Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification
given to all our dreams and readings. It was easy to collect, from the
drawing-rooms of the city, a respectable picture-gallery for a summer
exhibition. This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for
the studious, and a new home for the solitary. The Brimmer donation,
in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French
and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and
other masters. The separate chamber in which these collections were at
first contained, made a favorite place of meeting for Margaret and a
few of her friends, who were lovers of these works.

First led perhaps by Goethe, afterwards by the love she herself
conceived for them, she read everything that related to Michel Angelo
and Raphael. She read, pen in hand, Quatremere de Quincy's lives of
those two painters, and I have her transcripts and commentary before
me. She r