ay.

The interview, thus hastily sketched, may serve as a fair type of our
usual intercourse. Always I found her open-eyed to beauty, fresh for
wonder, with wings poised for flight, and fanning the coming breeze of
inspiration. Always she seemed to see before her,

"A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
And the invisible rain did ever sing
A silver music on the mossy lawn."

Yet more and more distinctly did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow
in her thought and speech, like the wail of an AEolian harp heard at
intervals from some upper window. She had never met one who could love
her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections
the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed.
Through the mask of slight personal defects and ungraceful manners,
of superficial hauteur and egotism, and occasional extravagance of
sentiment, no equal had recognized the rare beauty of her spirit. She
was yet alone.

Among her papers remains this pathetic petition:--

'I am weary of thinking. I suffer great fatigue from living.
Oh God, take me! take me wholly! Thou knowest that I love none
but Thee. All this beautiful poesy of my being lies in Thee.
Deeply I feel it. I ask nothing. Each desire, each passionate
feeling, is on the surface only; inmostly Thou keepest me
strong and pure. Yet always to be thus going out into moments,
into nature, and love, and thought! Father, I am weary!
Reassume 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. It is not that
I repine, my Father, but I sink from want of rest, and none
will shelter me. Thou knowest it all. Bathe me in the living
waters of Thy Love.'

VII.

THE FRIEND.

* * * * *

Yet, conscious as she was of an unfulfilled destiny, and of an
undeveloped being, Margaret was no pining sentimentalist. The gums
oozing from wounded boughs she burned as incense in her oratory; but
in outward relations she was munificent with sympathy.

'Let me be, Theodora, a bearer of heavenly gifts to my
fellows,'

is written in her journals, and her life fulfill