'The less ideal perfection in the figure, the greater the reverence of the adorer. Was not this because spiritual imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence to unfold Olympic splendors?'
She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane erected in its place:--
'This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in which life's earliest experiences become glorified by our perfecting destiny?'
'In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose, a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice;--who can read that riddle?
'"Better is it," said Appollonius, "on entering a small shrine to find there a statue of gold and ivory, than in a large temple to behold only a coarse figure of terra cotta." How often, after leaving with disgust the so-called great affairs of men, do we find traces of angels' visits in quiet scenes of home.
'The Hours and the Graces appear as ornaments on all thrones and shrines, except those of Vulcan and Pluto. Alas for us, when we become so sunk in utilitarian toil as to be blind to the beauty with which even common cares are daily wreathed!'
And so on and on, with myth and allusion.
Next, Margaret spoke of the friends whose generosity had provided the decorations on her walls, and the illustrated books for her table,--friends who were fellow-students in art, history, or science,--friends whose very life she shared. Her heart seemed full to overflow with sympathy for their joys and sorrows, their special trials and struggles, their peculiar tendencies of character and respective relations. The existence of each was to her a sacred process, whose developments she watched with awe, and whose leadings she reverently sought to aid. She had scores of pretty anecdotes to tell, sweet bowers of sentiment to open, significant lessons of experience to interpret, and scraps of journals or letters to read aloud, as the speediest means of introducing me to her chosen circle. There was a fascinating spell in her piquant descriptions, and a genial glow of sympathy animated to characteristic movement the figures, who in varying pantomime replaced one another on the theatre of her fancy. Frost-bound New England melted into a dreamland of romance beneath the spice-breeze of her Eastern narrative. Sticklers for propriety might have found fault at the freedom with which she confided her friends' histories to one who was a comparative stranger to them; but I could not but note how conscientiousness reined in her sensibilities and curbed their career, as they reached the due bounds of privacy. She did but realize one's conception of the transparent truthfulness that will pervade advanced societies of the future, where the very atmosphere shall be honorable faith.