beauty, with eyes softly contemplative, yet lit with central
fires,' &c.

There were gems, too, and medallions and seals, to be examined, each
enigmatical, and each blended by remembrances with some fair hour of
her past life.

Talk on art led the way to Greece and the Greeks, whose mythology
Margaret was studying afresh. She had been culling the blooms of that
poetic land, and could not but offer me leaves from her garland. She
spoke of the statue of Minerva-Polias, cut roughly from an olive-tree,
yet cherished as the heaven-descended image of the most sacred shrine,
to which was due the Panathenaic festival.

'The less ideal perfection in the figure, the greater the
reverence of the adorer. Was not this because spiritual
imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence
to unfold Olympic splendors?'

She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the
first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane
erected in its place:--

'This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in
which life's earliest experiences become glorified by our
perfecting destiny?'

'In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose,
a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice;--who can read that
riddle?