I fear the remark already made on that susceptibility to details
in art and nature which precluded the exercise of Margaret's sound
catholic judgment, must be extended to more than her connoisseurship.
She _had_ a sound judgment, on which, in conversation, she could fall
back, and anticipate and speak the best sense of the largest company.
But, left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the
victim of Lord Bacon's _idols of the cave_, or self-deceived by her
own phantasms. I have looked over volumes of her letters to me and
others. They are full of probity, talent, wit, friendship, charity,
and high aspiration. They are tainted with a mysticism, which to me
appears so much an affair of constitution, that it claims no more
respect than the charity or patriotism of a man who has dined well,
and feels better for it. One sometimes talks with a genial _bon
vivant_, who looks as if the omelet and turtle have got into his eyes.
In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment
of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world.
This is easily felt in ordinary women, and a large deduction is
civilly made on the spot by whosoever replies to their remark. But
when the speaker has such brilliant talent and literature as Margaret,
she gives so many fine names to these merely sensuous and subjective
phantasms, that the hearer is long imposed upon, and thinks so precise
and glittering nomenclature cannot be of mere _muscae volitantes_,
phoenixes of the fancy, but must be of some real ornithology, hitherto
unknown to him. This mere feeling exaggerates a host of trifles into a
dazzling mythology. But when one goes to sift it, and find if there be
a real meaning, it eludes search. Whole sheets of warm, florid writing
are here, in which the eye is caught by "sapphire," "heliotrope,"
"dragon," "aloes," "Magna Dea," "limboes," "stars," and "purgatory,"
but can connect all this, or any part of it, with no universal
experience.
In short, Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism. That
dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make
respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that
of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more
stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or
than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors,
of wonderful gleams,--so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and
stimulated thought, and communicated mental activity to all who
approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her
fancy, and she made numerous mistakes. Her integrity was perfect, and
she was led and followed by love, and was really bent on truth, but
too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy.