Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/76

Rh themselves to him at his dreamy fireside or in his haunted studio. The spirit of the age, in its highest extreme, was upon him, and the wave of supervital aspiration swept him, as it did Channing and Emerson, beyond the region of the visible and sensible. At that day, and for ten years later, one might occasionally have seen in some street of Boston a fragile figure, and upon it a head distinguished by snowy curls and starry. eyes. Here was the winter of age; here the perpetual summer of the soul. The coat and hat did not matter; but they were of some quaint, forgotten fashion, out-lying the vision as belonging to the past. You felt a modesty in looking at anything so unique and delicate.

I remember this vision as suddenly disclosed out of a bitter winter's day. And the street was Chestnut Street, and the figure was Washington Allston going to visit the poet Richard II. Dana. And not long afterwards the silvery snows melted, and the soul which had made those eyes so luminous shot back to its immortal sphere.

But, to leave the man and return to the artist. Washington Allston's real merit was too great to be seriously, obscured by the over-sweep of imagination to which he was subject. His best works still remain true classics of the canvas ; but the spirit which, through them seemed to pass from his mind into that of the public, has not to-day the recognition and commanding interest which it then had.

Margaret had expected, as she says, to be greatly a gainer by her study of this exhibition, and had been somewhat disappointed. Possibly her expectations regarded a result too immediate and definite. Sights and experiences that enrich the mind often do so insensibly. They pass out of our consciousness; but