"My beloved supporter in those sorrowful hours, can I ever forget that to your treatment in that crisis of youth I owe the true life, the love of Truth and Honor?"
From these years of pedagogy and of patience we must now pass to the time when this bud, so full of promise, unfolded into a flower rare and wondrous.
The story of Margaret's early studies, and the wide reach of her craving for knowledge, already mark her as a creature of uncommon gifts. A devourer of books she had been from the start; but books alone could not content this ardent mind, at once so critical and so creative. She must also have life at first-hand, and feed her intelligence from its deepest source. Hence the long story of her friendships, so many and various, yet so earnest and efficient.
What the chosen associates of this wonderful[{23}] woman have made public concerning the interest of her conversation and the value of her influence tasks to the utmost the believing powers of a time in which the demon of self-interest seems to unfold himself out of most of the metamorphic flowers of society. Margaret and her friends might truly have said, "Our kingdom is not of this world,"—at least, according to what this world calls kingly. But what imperial power had this self-poised soul, which could so widely open its doors and so closely shut them, which could lead in its train the brightest and purest intelligences, and "bind the sweet influences" of starry souls in the garland of its happy hours! And here we may say, her kingdom was not all of this world; for the kingdom of noble thought and affection is in this world and beyond it, and the real and ideal are at peace within its bounds.
In the divided task of Margaret's biography it was given to James Freeman Clarke to speak of that early summer of her life in which these tender and intimate relations had their first and most fervent unfolding. The Harvard student of that day was probably a personage very unlike the present revered pastor of the Church of the Disciples. Yet we must believe that the one was graciously foreshadowed in the other, and[{24}] that Margaret found in him the germ of what the later world has learned so greatly to respect and admire.
The acquaintance between these two began in 1829, and was furthered by a family connection which Margaret, in one of her early letters, playfully characterized as a cousinship in the thirty-seventh degree.
During the four years immediately following, the two young people either met or corresponded daily. In explaining the origin of this friendship, Mr. Clarke modestly says:—
"She needed a friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express the ideas which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted me for this friend; and to me it was a gift of the gods, an influence like no other."
This intercourse was at first on both sides an entertainment sought and found. In its early stages Margaret characterizes her correspondent as "a socialist by vocation, a sentimentalist by nature, and a Channing-ite from force of circumstance and of fashion." Further acquaintance opened beneath the superficial interest the deeper sources of sympathy, and a valued letter from Margaret is named by Mr. Clarke as having laid the foundation of a friendship to which he owed both intellectual enlightenment[{25}] and spiritual enlargement. More than for these he thanks Margaret for having imparted to him an impulse which carried him bravely forward in what has proved to be the normal direction of his life. Although destined, after those early years of intimate communion, to live far apart and in widely different spheres of labor and of interest, the regard of the two friends never suffered change or diminution.
And here we come upon a governing feature in Margaret's intercourse with her friends. She had the power of leading those who interested her to a confidence which unfolded to her the deepest secrets of their life. Now came in play that unexplained action of one mind upon another which we call personal magnetism, and which is more distinctly recognized to-day than in other times as an element in social efficiency. It is this power which, united with intellectual force, gives leadership to individual men, and enables the great orator to hold a mighty audience in the hollow of his hand.