Margaret's love of beauty made her, of course, a votary of nature, but
rather for pleasurable excitement than with a deep poetic feeling.
Her imperfect vision and her bad health were serious impediments
to intimacy with woods and rivers. She had never paid,--and it is a
little remarkable,--any attention to natural sciences. She neither
botanized, nor geologized, nor dissected. Still she delighted in short
country rambles, in the varieties of landscape, in pastoral country,
in mountain outlines, and, above all, in the sea-shore. At Nantasket
Beach, and at Newport, she spent a month or two of many successive
summers. She paid homage to rocks, woods, flowers, rivers, and the
moon. She spent a good deal of time out of doors, sitting, perhaps,
with a book in some sheltered recess commanding a landscape. She
watched, by day and by night, the skies and the earth, and believed
she knew all their expressions. She wrote in her journal, or in her
correspondence, a series of "moonlights," in which she seriously
attempts to describe the light and scenery of successive nights of
the summer moon. Of course, her raptures must appear sickly and
superficial to an observer, who, with equal feeling, had better powers
of observation.
Nothing is more rare than a talent to describe landscape, and,
especially, skyscape, or cloudscape, although a vast number of
letters, from correspondents between the ages of twenty and thirty,
are filled with experiments in this kind. Margaret, in her turn, made
many vain attempts, and, to a lover of nature, who knows that
every day has new and inimitable lights and shades, one of these
descriptions is as vapid as the raptures of a citizen arrived at his
first meadow. Of course, he is charmed, but, of course, he cannot tell
what he sees, or what pleases him. Yet Margaret often speaks with a
certain tenderness and beauty of the impressions made upon her.