Margaret’s works, collected after her death, are in four volumes: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Art, Literature, and the Drama; Abroad and at Home, and Life Without and Life Within.

A remarkable estimate of Margaret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published, among other extracts from his papers, by his son, has lately attracted much attention. The testimony of Hawthorne as to Margaret’s Italian life, of which he had no personal knowledge, has little value. But the conclusions of so keen a mind as to her character cannot be so easily dismissed; and this passage has been included among our extracts, that both sides of the shield may be seen. Certain of Hawthorne’s expressions go far to confirm the popular belief that Margaret’s character, as he saw it, furnished him with the hint or starting-point for his creation of Zenobia in ‘The Blithedale Romance.’

Lowell, in his stinging lines on Miranda, in ‘A Fable for Critics,’ speaks of her, “I-turn-the-crank-of-the-universe air,” and pronounces that “the whole of her being’s a capital I.” She is too often remembered thus, and only thus. Let us also picture her ministering in that “house of misery” where,—to quote lines written of another famous woman,—

“Slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.”

Her early training.

Premature development.

Spectral illusions.

Somnambulism.

My father instructed me himself. The effect of this was so far good that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak persons, as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented to me. My father was a man of business, even in literature; he had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated memories of success and good repute. He was, beside, well read in French literature, and in English, a Queen Anne’s man. He hoped to make me the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as the income of his profession enabled him to give me means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last generation, than the warning of physiologists will permit it to be with the next. He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible. Thus, I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus, frequently I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which, at the time, prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections of all kinds. As these again reacted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution.... No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling to retire. My aunts cried out upon the “spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever was—if brother could but open his eyes to see it—who was never willing to go to bed.” They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away, she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they come, till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again.... No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her “leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,” never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night.