all a cold autumn day." And with this unlooked-for
brightness passed into her soul "a beam from its true sun," whose
radiance, she says, never departed more. This sudden illumination was
not, however, an unreasoning, unaccountable one. In that moment flashed
upon her the solution of the problem of self, whose perplexities had
followed her from her childish days. She comprehended at once the
struggle in which she had been well-nigh overcome, and the illusion
which had till then made victory impossible. "I saw how long it must be
before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and
space and human nature; but I saw also that it must do it. I saw there
was no self, that selfishness was all folly, and the result of
circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I
suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was
mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I
was for that hour taken up into God.... My earthly pain at not being
recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of
passionate sorrow, and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have
seemed temporary ever since."

The progress of this work already brings us to that portion of
Margaret's life in which her character was most likely to be judged of
by the world around her as already determined in its features and
aspect. That this judgment was often a misjudgment is known to all who
remember Margaret's position in Boston society in the days of her
lessons and conversations. A really vulgar injustice was often done her
by those who knew of her only her appearance and supposed pretensions.
Those to whom she never was a living presence may naturally ask of
those who profess to have known her, whether this injustice did not
originate with herself, whether she did not do herself injustice by
habitually presenting herself in an attitude which was calculated to
heighten the idea, already conceived, of her arrogance and overweening
self-esteem.

Independently of other sources of information, the statements of one so
catholic and charitable as Mr. Emerson meet us here, and oblige us to
believe that the great services which Margaret was able to render to
those with whom she came into relation were somewhat impaired by a
self-esteem which it would have been unfortunate for her disciples to
imitate. The satirists of the time saw this, and Margaret, besides
encountering the small-