lizing spirit of the lonely and passionate
girl. She found the first angel of her life: heaven was opened; and
the image of the fair stranger, who soon vanished beyond the sea, was
an intoxicating vision in her brain, full of light and perfume, for
many a year. In her later life, Margaret formed impassioned
connections with a great many superior girls, who were drawn to her
by an affinity for her overflowing powers of intellect, feeling, and
aspiration. The last on the list of her friendships was the noble
Marchioness Arconati, in Italy. The entire intercourse of these two
women forms a chapter of devoted warmth and frankness. Through all
her life, Margaret felt the necessity for intense relations of
affection with the worthiest persons she met. One of her biographers
says, "Her friendships wore a look of such romantic exaggeration that
she seemed to walk enveloped in a shining fog of sentimentalism. Yet,
in fact, Truth at all cost was her ruling maxim. Her earnestness to
read the hidden history of others was the gauge of her own emotion."

This prayer was found among the papers written in her earlier life:
"Father, I am weary. Re-assume me for a while, I pray thee. Oh, let
me rest awhile in thee, thou only Love! In the depth of my prayer, I
suffer much. Take me only awhile. No fellow-being will receive me. I
cannot pause: they will not detain me by their love. Take me awhile,
and again I will go forth on a renewed service. I sink from want of
rest; and none will shelter me. Thou knowest it all. Bathe me in thy
Love." Emerson says of her, "Her friendships, as a girl with girls,
as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had
passages of romantic sacrifice and of ecstatic fusion, which I have
heard with the ear, but could not trust my profane pen to report." At
the close of her life, amidst the ruins of Rome, she wrote, "I have
been the object of great love, from the noble and the humble: I have
felt it towards both. Yet I am tired out, tired of thinking and
hoping, tired of seeing men err and bleed. Coward and foot-sore,
gladly would I creep into some green recess, where I might see a few
not unfriendly faces, and where not more wretches should come than I
could relieve. I am weary, and faith soars and sings no more. Nothing
good of me is left, except, at the bottom of the heart, a melting
tenderness."

The Duchess of Orleans, that Helen of Mecklenburg who married the
eldest son of Louis Philippe, was