She found our own Crawford just completing a bust of his beautiful wife,
which is to-day a household treasure among her relatives. Margaret
preferred his designs to those of Gibson, who was then considered the
first of English sculptors. Among American painters she found Terry,
Cranch, and Hicks at work. She saw the German Overbeck surrounded by his
pictures, looking "as if he had just stepped out of one of them,--a lay
monk, with a pious eye, and habitual morality of thought which limits
every gesture."

Among the old masters, Domenichino and Titian were those whom she
learned to appreciate only by the actual sight of their paintings. Other
artists, she thinks, may be well understood through copies and
engravings, but not these. She enjoyed the frescos of Caracci with "the
purest pleasure," tired soon of Guercino, who had been one of her
favorites, and could not like Leonardo da Vinci at all. His pictures,
she confesses, "show a wonderful deal of study and thought. I hate to
see the marks of them. I want a simple and direct expression of soul."
For the explanation of these remarks we must refer the reader back to
what Mr. Emerson has said of Margaret's idiosyncratic mode of judgment.
Raphael and Michael Angelo were already so well known to her through
engravings, that their paintings and frescos made no new impression upon
her. Not so was it with Michael's sculptures. Of his Moses she says: "It
is the only thing in Europe so far which has entirely outgone my hopes."

But the time was not one in which an enthusiast like Margaret could be
content to withdraw from living issues into the calm impersonality of
art. The popular life around her was throbbing with hopes and
excitements to which it had long been unaccustomed. Visions of a living
Italy flashed through the crevices of a stony despair which had lasted
for ages. The prospect of representative government was held out to the
Roman people, and the promise was welcomed by a torchlight procession
which streamed through the Corso like a river of fire, and surging up to
the Quirinal, where Pius then dwelt, "made it a mound of light." The
noble Greek figures were illuminated, and their calm aspect contrasted
strongly with the animated faces of the Italians. "The Pope appeared on
his balcony; the crowd shouted their _vivas_. He extended his arms; the
crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction." Margaret says
that she had never seen anything finer.

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