"I was wearied out with mental conflicts. I felt within myself great power and generosity and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high."
Looking about in the church, she envied the little children for their sense of dependence and protection. She knew not, she says, "that none could have any father but God," knew not that she was "not the only lonely one, the selected Œdipus, the special victim of an iron law."
From this intense and exaggerated self-consciousness, the only escape was in fleeing from self. She sought to do this, as she had often done, by a long quick walk, whose fatigue should weary out her anguish, and enable her to return home "in a state of prayer." On this day this resource did not avail her.[{37}]
"All seemed to have reached its height. It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place, to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer."
The aspect of the outer world was in correspondence with these depressing thoughts.
"It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull and gray and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there. Sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path—there was no life else." Driven from place to place by the conflict within her, she sat down at last to rest "where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. All was dark, and cold, and still." Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds "with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day." And with this unlooked-for brightness passed into her soul "a beam from its true sun," whose radiance, she says, never departed more. This sudden illumination was not, however, an unreasoning, unaccountable one. In that moment flashed upon her the solution of the problem of self, whose perplexities had followed her from her childish days.[{38}] She comprehended at once the struggle in which she had been well-nigh overcome, and the illusion which had till then made victory impossible. "I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space and human nature; but I saw also that it must do it. I saw there was no self, that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God.... My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow, and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since."
The progress of this work already brings us to that portion of Margaret's life in which her character was most likely to be judged of by the world around her as already determined in its features and aspect. That this judgment was often a misjudgment is known to all who remember Margaret's position in Boston society in the days of her lessons and conversations. A really vulgar injustice was often done her by those who knew of her only her appearance and supposed pretensions. Those to whom she[{39}] never was a living presence may naturally ask of those who profess to have known her, whether this injustice did not originate with herself, whether she did not do herself injustice by habitually presenting herself in an attitude which was calculated to heighten the idea, already conceived, of her arrogance and overweening self-esteem.
Independently of other sources of information, the statements of one so catholic and charitable as Mr. Emerson meet us here, and oblige us to believe that the great services which Margaret was able to render to those with whom she came into relation were somewhat impaired by a self-esteem which it would have been unfortunate for her disciples to imitate. The satirists of the time saw this, and Margaret, besides encountering the small-shot of society ridicule, received now and then such a broadside as James Russell Lowell gave her in his "Fable for Critics." Of this long and somewhat bitter tirade a few lines may suffice as a specimen:—
"But here comes Miranda. Zeus! where shall I flee to?
She has such a penchant for bothering me, too!
She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva.
* * * * *
She will take an old notion and make it her own,
By saying it o'er in her sibylline tone;[{40}]
Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep,
By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;
And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,
When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.
* * * * *
Here Miranda came up and said: Phœbus, you know
That the infinite soul has its infinite woe,
As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl,
Since the day I was born, with the infinite soul."
These remarks, explanatory and apologetic, are suggested partly by Mr. Emerson's statements concerning the beginning of his acquaintance with Margaret, and partly by the writer's own recollections of the views of outsiders concerning her, which contrasted strongly with the feeling and opinion of her intimates.