She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain.  She read and wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better when she was ill.  Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her powers.  A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies.  There were other peculiarities of habit and power.  When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis.  These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in recent years.

She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, ‘A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart, is an evil lot.’  In some verses which she wrote ‘To the Moon,’ occur these lines:—­

  ’But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
  A human secret, like my own, I trace;
  For, through the woman’s smile looks the male eye.’

And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac’s, “Le Livre Mystique,” in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot.

Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious, and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would carry, and to draw advantage from it.  ‘Attica,’ she said to a friend, ’is your province, Thessaly is mine:  Attica produced the marble wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.’

    ’I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and
    leap, blind force for the sake of force.’

* * * * *

    ’Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of
    Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half
    unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.’

* * * * *

’Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods.  The more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at giving out thought and life in regulated rations,—­the more I weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without props and sedan chairs.’

TO R.W.E.

’Dec. 26, 1839.—­If you could look into my mind just now, you would send far from you those who love and hate.  I am on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my naughtiest moods.  Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter, describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this might destroy