power, and the excitement which the presence of living persons brought, gave all her faculties full activity. ‘After all,’ she says, in a letter, ‘this writing is mighty dead, Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything — not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the mind!’
Again, in 1832: —
‘Conversation is my natural element. I need to be
called out, and never think alone, without imagining
some companion. Whether this be nature or the force
of circumstances, I know not; it is my habit, and
bespeaks a second-rate mind.’
I am disposed to think, much as she excelled in general
conversation, that her greatest mental efforts were made
in intercourse with individuals. All her friends will
unite in the testimony, that whatever they may have
known of wit and eloquence in others, they have never
seen one who, like her, by the conversation of an hour
or two, could not merely entertain and inform, but make
an epoch in one’s life. We all dated back to this or that
conversation with Margaret, in which we took a
complete survey of great subjects, came to some clear view
of a difficult question, saw our way open before us to a
higher plane of life, and were led to some definite
resolution or purpose which has had a bearing on all our
subsequent career. For Margaret’s conversation turned,
at such times, to life, — its destiny, its duty, its prospect.
With comprehensive glance she would survey the past,
and sum up, in a few brief words, its results; she would
then turn to the future, and, by a natural order, sweep
