Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that
seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the
quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed
everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In
the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know all the people
worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my
own.' In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth
of genius, and my curiosity in his future,--'O no, she was intimate
with his mind,' and I 'spoiled him, by overrating him.' Meantime,
we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle
superiorities.
I have heard, that from the beginning of her life, she idealized
herself as a sovereign. She told--she early saw herself to be
intellectually superior to those around her, and that for years she
dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her
parents' child, but an European princess confided to their care. She
remembered, that, when a little girl, she was walking one day under
the apple trees with such an air and step, that her father pointed her
out to her sister, saying, _Incedit regina._ And her letters sometimes
convey these exultations, as the following, which was written to
a lady, and which contained Margaret's translation of Goethe's
"Prometheus."
To ----.
1838.--Which of us has not felt the questionings expressed in
this bold fragment? Does it not seem, were we gods, or could
steal their fire, we would make men not only happier, but
free,--glorious? Yes, my life is strange; thine is strange. We
are, we shall be, in this life, mutilated beings, but there
is in my bosom a faith, that I shall see the reason; a glory,
that I can endure to be so imperfect; and a feeling, ever
elastic, that fate and time shall have the shame and the
blame, if I am mutilated. I will do all I can,--and, if one
cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom.
Your letters are excellent. I did not mean to check your
writing, only I thought that you might wish a confidence
that I must anticipate with a protest. But I take my natural
position always: and the more I see, the more I feel that it
is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen.
It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the
innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather
mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good
sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in
enumerating the merits of somebody, 'He appreciates _me_.' There
was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of
unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no
companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was
also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which
as yet had found no right channels. I remember she once said to me,
what I heard as a mere statement of fact, and nowise as unbecoming,
that 'no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a
full expression; that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such
wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to
such as she conversed with.'
Her impatience she expressed as she could. 'I feel within myself,' she
said,
'an immense force, but I cannot bring it out. It may sound
like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that
tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.'