MARGARET said the Seeker represents the Spirit of the Age. He never sinned save by yielding, and yet he was emphatically _saved by grace_. It was difficult to see what Goethe meant until he got to the Tower of the Middle Ages. That made all clear. CHARLES WHEELER said, the reader would a great deal rather that Faust went to the Devil than not! MARGARET defended Goethe’s way of exhibiting character, of which Wilhelm Meister was an instance. Goethe said to himself, What should I do with a hero in such rascally society? Meister preferred the Brahmal experience. E. P. P. asked if this moral indifference was well? MARGARET replied, that it was just as frightful as any other Gorgon. If we are to have a purely intellectual development, it was well for a man like Goethe to represent it. To choose fairly between evil and good, the intellect must regard both with indifference. Somebody asked how the Gorgon’s head came to be on the Ægis of Minerva? If Apathy is the Gorgon, surely Wisdom needs it! Then we began to talk about Theseus in connection with Tartarus. Why should he sit forever on a stone? MARGARET thought he represented reform! MR. MACK said reform checked itself by its own fanaticism. WHEELER, in this connection, asked after the Greek notion of accountability. MARGARET did not think the Greeks had any. WHEELER assured her to the contrary, and told anecdotes to prove it. He spoke of the fatal transmission of guilt in one family, generation after generation. MARGARET said the Greeks never rejected facts. IDA RUSSELL spoke of the last King of Athens, Codrus, supposed to have been punished for the crimes of his ancestors. WHEELER said that when the Greeks killed some ambassadors, they felt so sure that Heaven would avenge the sin that they sent two citizens to expiate it; but Darius, to whom they were sent, refused to release the Greeks from their impending doom. MARGARET said the moment such a supposition was started, there were plenty of facts to sustain it. Orestes is the purified victim of his family. The old Greeks had made no complete statement of their destiny or their accountability. E. P. P. said they had made it in art. C. W. HEALEY. April 16, 1841. VIII. MERCURY AND ORPHEUS. _April 22, 1841._ MARGARET said it surprised her that young men did not seek to be Mercuries. She said that one of the ugliest young men that she knew had become so enraptured with one of Raphael’s Mercuries, that he confessed to her that he was never alone without trying to assume its attitude before the glass. She said she could not help laughing at the image he suggested, an ugly figure in high-heeled boots and a strait-coat in the act of flying, commissioned with every grace from Heaven to men! but she respected the feeling, and thought every sensitive soul must share it.