f this world; for the kingdom of noble thought and affection is
in this world and beyond it, and the real and ideal are at peace within
its bounds.

* * * * *

In the divided task of Margaret's biography it was given to James
Freeman Clarke to speak of that early summer of her life in which these
tender and intimate relations had their first and most fervent
unfolding. The Harvard student of that day was probably a personage very
unlike the present revered pastor of the Church of the Disciples. Yet we
must believe that the one was graciously foreshadowed in the other, and
that Margaret found in him the germ of what the later world has learned
so greatly to respect and admire.

The acquaintance between these two began in 1829, and was furthered by a
family connection which Margaret, in one of her early letters, playfully
characterized as a cousinship in the thirty-seventh degree.

During the four years immediately following, the two young people either
met or corresponded daily. In explaining the origin of this friendship,
Mr. Clarke modestly says:--

"She needed a friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express
the ideas which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted
me for this friend; and to me it was a gift of the gods, an influence
like no other."

This intercourse was at first on both sides an entertainment sought and
found. In its early stages Margaret characterizes her correspondent as
"a socialist by vocation, a sentimentalist by nature, and a Channing-ite
from force of circumstance and of fashion." Further acquaintance opened
beneath the superficial interest the deeper sources of sympathy, and a
valued letter from Margaret is named by Mr. Clarke as having laid the
foundation of a friendship to which he owed both intellectual
enlightenment and spiritual enlargement. More than for these he thanks
Margaret for having imparted to him an impulse which carried him bravely
forward in what has proved to be the normal direction of his life.
Although destined, after those early years of intimate communion, to
live far apart and in widely different spheres of labor and of interest,
the regard of the two friends never suffered change or diminution.

And here we come upon a governing feature in Margaret's intercourse with
her friends. She had the power of leading those who interested her to a
confidence which unfolded to her the deepest secrets of their life. N