"Her life, since she went abroad, is wholly unknown to me; but I have an unshaken trust, that what Margaret did she can defend." An "unshaken trust,"--such words are a challenge to all noble living. In great and small matters, we are told, she was a woman of her word, and so gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort which flows from plaindealing. "I walk over burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet, yet nothing but truth will do," she says; and again, in a letter to a 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." I enlarge upon this trait of character, for I think it Margaret's due. Everybody here knows her reputation as a scholar: few know her character as a woman. In beautiful keeping with this trait was her letter to Miss Martineau, after the publication of her book upon this country. "When Jouffroy writes his lectures," she says, "I am not conversant with all his topics; but I can appreciate his lucid style and admirable method. When Webster speaks on the currency, I do not understand the subject; but I do understand his mode of treating it, and can see what a blaze of light flows from his torch. When Harriet Martineau writes about America, I often cannot test that rashness and inaccuracy of which I hear so much; but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness and patient investigation is found throughout the book; and I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend. "I have thought it right to say all this to you, since I feel it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear that I must lose you. If your heart turn from me, I shall still love you; and I could no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had not spoken out." What a noble pattern in that letter for us all! The electric power of her womanhood, which claimed the inmost being of every one with whom she came in contact, I can best express in the words of Emerson:-- "She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. She had drawn to her every superior young man or woman she had ever met; and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy. She extorted the secret of life which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow, and thus she had the best of those she saw. She lived in a superior circle; for people suppressed all their commonplaces in her presence. Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companion, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives."