as my own," says Margaret,
"in the circle of my acquaintance as distinguished from my intimates."

Beneath the same roof Margaret found Chopin, "always ill, and as frail
as a snow-drop, but an exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked
his talking scarcely less." The Polish poet, Mickiewicz, said to her,
"Chopin gives us the Ariel view of the universe."

Margaret had done her best while in London to see what the English stage
had to offer. The result had greatly disappointed her. In France she
found the theatre living, and found also a public which would not have
tolerated "one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone
which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion."

In Paris she says that she saw, for the first time, "something
represented in a style uniformly good." Besides this general excellence,
which is still aimed at in the best theatres of the Continent, the
Parisian stage had then a star of the first magnitude, whose splendor
was without an equal, and whose setting brought no successor. In the
supreme domain of tragic art, Rachel then reigned, an undisputed queen.
Like George Sand, her brilliant front was obscured by the cloud of doubt
which rested upon her private character,--a matter of which even the
most dissolute age will take note, after its fashion. And yet the
charmed barrier of the footlights surrounded her with a flame of
mystery. Whatever was known or surmised of her elsewhere, within those
limits she appeared as the living impersonation of beauty, grace, and
power. For Rachel had, at this time, no public sorrow. How it might fare
with her and her lovers little concerned the crowds who gathered
nightly, drawn by the lightnings of her eye, the melodious thunder of
her voice. Ten years later, a new favorite, her rival but not her equal,
came to win the heart of her Paris from her. Then Rachel, grieved and
angry, knew the vanity of all human dependence. She crossed the ocean,
and gave the New World a new delight. But in spite of its laurels and
applause, she sickened (Margaret had said she could not live long), and
fled far, far eastward, to hear in ancient Egypt the death-psalms of her
people. With a smile, the last change of that expressive countenance,
its lovely light expired.

Of the woman, Margaret says nothing. Of the artist, she says that she
found her worthy of Greece, and fit to be made immortal in its marble.
She did not, it is true, find in her the most t