Margaret said history reconciled us to life, by showing that man had redeemed himself. Genius needed that encouragement.
Not Genius, Sophia Ripley thought; common natures needed it, but Genius was self-supported.
Margaret said it might be the consolation of Genius.
Mrs. Russell asked why Miss Fuller found so much fault with the present.
Margaret had no fault to find with it. She took facts as they were. Every age did something toward fulfilling the cycle of mind. The work of the Greeks was not ours.
Sophia Ripley asked if the mythology had been a prophecy of the Greek mind to itself, or if the nation had experienced life in any wide or deep sense.
Margaret seemed a little out of patience, and no wonder! She said it did not matter which. The question was, what could we find in the mythi, and what did the Greeks mean that we should find there. Coleridge once said that certain people were continually saying of Shakespeare, that he did not mean to impart certain spiritual meanings to some of his sketches of life and character; but if Shakespeare did not mean it his Genius did: so if the Greeks meant not this or that, the Greek genius meant it.
In relation to the progress of the ages, James F. Clarke said that the story of Persephone concealed in the bowels of the earth for half the year seemed to him to indicate something of their comparative states. Persephone was the seed which must return to earth before it could fructify. Thought must retire into itself before it can be regenerate.
Margaret was pleased with this, more especially as in the story of the Goddess it is eating the pomegranate, whose seed is longest in germinating, which dooms her to the realm of Pluto.