With a heartfelt
blessing, I dismissed them; but none stirred, and we all sat
for some moments, weeping. Then I went round the circle and
bade each, separately, farewell.'
PERSONS.
Margaret's Providence journals are made extremely piquant and
entertaining, by her life-like portraiture of people and events; and
every page attests the scrupulous justice with which she sought
to penetrate through surfaces to reality, and, forgetting personal
prejudices, to apply universally the test of truth. A few sketches
of public characters may suffice to show with what sagacious,
all-observing eyes, she looked about her.
'At the whig caucus, I heard TRISTAM BURGESS,--"The old
bald Eagle!" His baldness increases the fine effect of his
appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated, that
the contour of his very strongly marked head might be revealed
to every eye. His _personnel_, as well as I could see, was
fitted to command respect rather than admiration. He is a
venerable, not a beautiful old man.
'He is a rhetorician,--if I could judge from this sample;
style in woven and somewhat ornate, matter frequently wrought
up to a climax, manner rather declamatory, though strictly
that of a gentleman and a scholar.
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