asunder my life, to leave it a poor black chrysalid behind. And yet this last is too true of me.’
She describes a visit made in May, 1844, at the house
of some valued friends in West Roxbury, and adds:
‘We had a long and deep conversation, happy in its
candor. Truth, truth, thou art the great preservative!
Let free air into the mind, and the pestilence cannot
lurk in any corner.’
And she uses the following language in an earnest
letter to another friend: —
‘My own entire sincerity, in every passage of life, gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions.’
‘Reading to-day a few lines of ——, I thought with
refreshment of such lives as T.’s, and V.’s, and W.’s, so
private and so true, where each line written is really the
record of a thought or a feeling. I hate poems which
are a melancholy monument of culture for the sake of
being cultivated, not of growing,’
Even in trifles, one might find with her the advantage
and the electricity of a little honesty. I have had from
an eye-witness a note of a little scene that passed in
Boston, at the Academy of Music. A party had gone
early, and taken an excellent place to hear one of
Beethoven’s symphonies. Just behind them were soon
seated a young lady and two gentlemen, who made an
incessant buzzing, in spite of bitter looks cast on them
by the whole neighborhood, and destroyed all the musical
comfort. After all was over, Margaret leaned across
