THE MEANING OF THE LIVES THAT HAVE MODIFIED
PUBLIC OPINION.

WE have considered the controlling influence exercised by consolidated public opinion concerning women. We have asked from what sources this opinion was derived. We have now to consider some individual lives which have set it at defiance, and in that way done something towards its reconstruction.

Mary Wollstonecraft is chiefly known in this country as the wife of Godwin, and the author of a "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." This book is often accused of the most irreligious and libertine tendencies; and, for many years, her name stood in my own mind as the representative of an unfortunate woman of genius, unbalanced in character, and only to be remembered by the obstacles she had laid in the path of her sex. I turned instinctively from the idea I had somehow conceived of her; nor was it till a singular literary fact, the exponent of her individual power, arrested my attention, that I was tempted to take up the "Rights of Woman."

In making a rapid survey of English literature, to ascertain how many women had made a decisive mark upon it, and how many works had been published especially bearing upon woman's advancement, I at first experienced a bitter disappointment. Upon approaching the year 1800, however, I found a stream of literature rushing in, for which I could not account. It united many rivulets of thought and life. Some volumes were heavy and oppressive in a double sense; some were light as pamphlets; some consisted of translations from other languages; some were biographies; many were attempts at reconstruction on a rotten foundation; others, an attempt at the rebuilding of society from its very base. But these works all bore the same stamp, an impress powerful, but healthy. It seemed as if one thought had animated all these workers who had taken society by surprise; for the prejudice and bigotry they must have aroused had left no corresponding trace. The prefaces generally began, "On account of the interest lately excited," "The public mind seeming now to be interested;" and I read very few volumes before I discovered that the power which had aroused and interested was no other than Mary Wollstonecraft's "Rights of Woman."

These books ranged onward from 1790, and the force of the influence was not spent for twenty years. Among them, I recall, at this moment, Dr. Alexander's "History of Women" in two quarto volumes; Matilda Betham's "Biographical Dictionary," an honest, if not a valuable, attempt to supply a want still felt in English literature; and Cotton's translation of the mathematical works of Maria Agnesi. These were born of a common mother. I read the "Vindication," therefore, with persistent care; looking with fruitless question for the second and third volumes that were promised. Could this be the book which had been so abused for half a century? The American edition had been published before garbling became the fashion; but I took pains to collate it carefully with the English. It was all in vain. I found only a simple, determined, eloquent plea for a proper education for women, urged on social, moral, and religious grounds; an earnest protest against Rousseau and Dr. Gregory; and a demand that men should be subject to the same moral laws as women. Very revolutionary this! Reprint it, under modern sponsorship, and you would find it perhaps too heavy to read. It would only repeat what you all know, and you would miss the fanatical spice of our later speech. Yet this book was so much needed when it appeared, that it acted on the under-current of English thought and life like a subsoil plough, and brought all manner of abominations to the surface. The preface alone contains any allusion to woman's political rights. If is dedicated to Talleyrand, who, in publishing a pamphlet on national education, had admitted the inconsistency of debarring women from their exercise. From this preface, the world took fright, and we may judge in what manner she intended to follow up her plea for education. Let me quote a few passages. "I earnestly wish," she says, "to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consist. I wish to persuade women to acquire strength both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, 'susceptibility of heart,' 'delicacy of sentiment,' and 'refinement of taste,' are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt."—"An air of fashion is but a badge of slavery."—"It follows," she says farther on, "that women should either be shut up, like Eastern princesses, or educated in such a manner as to think and act for themselves."—"Suppose a woman trained to obedience, married to a sensible man, who directs her judgment, without permitting her to feel the servility of her position. She cannot ensure the life of her protector. He may die, and leave her at the head of a large family."—"It is not empire, but equality, woman should contend for. When women are sufficiently enlightened to discover their real interests, they will be very ready to resign all those prerogatives of love which are not mutual for the calm satisfactions of friendship and the tender confidence of habitual esteem. Before marriage, they will not assume any insolent airs, nor afterwards abjectly submit; but, endeavoring to act like reasonable creatures in both relations, they will not be tumbled from a throne to a stool."

This is the character of the whole book. It contains nothing more subversive of morality than these words. You cannot do better than read it, and receive, as I did, a lasting lesson on the folly of prejudice. As a work of art, it is irregular in method, and impulsive in execution; facts not to be wondered at, since it was written and printed in the brief space of six weeks. Dr. Channing once wrote of her: "I have lately read Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous works. Her letters towards the close of the first volume are the best I ever read. They are superior to Sterne's. I consider her the greatest woman of the age. Her 'Rights of Woman' is a masculine performance, and ought to be studied by her sex; the sentiments are noble and generous."

What, then, was the character of the woman? Was it as strong and generous as the sentiments she advocated? Her life broke down some social barriers, and, though noble and heroic when viewed from within, looks hampered and unsatisfactory from the common stand-point. Godwin has erected an exquisite monument to her memory, in a sketch written soon after her decease. Mary Wollstonecraft was born near London in the year 1759. She came into an unhappy and uncongenial home. Her father was a passionate tyrant; her mother, compelled to submit to his caprice, became like every other slave, a tyrant where she had the power, and ruled her children with a rod of iron. By defending her mother from her husband's violence, Mary early extorted some degree of affection from the one, and respect from the other. Her father had some property, which he seems to have squandered by frequent changes of abode; and a day school at Beverley, in Yorkshire, gave her her principal advantages of education. An eccentric clergyman at Hoxton, named Clare, added some farther instruction. Under his roof, she formed an intimacy with Frances Blood, destined to influence her whole life. This girl was remarkably accomplished, and, at the age of eighteen, supported her father and mother and their family of younger children. She was delicately neat and proper in all she did; and her influence was of the greatest benefit to Mary, who had often desired to assist her family, but was deterred by the helpless condition of her mother. She now went as companion to a family at Bath, but soon relinquished the position, on account of her mother's serious illness. Mrs. Wollstonecraft was exacting and troublesome. Mary nursed her with devoted care, but, after her death, bade a final farewell to her father's roof. His affairs had become wretchedly involved; and, with Fanny Blood and her two sisters, she proceeded to open a day school. At first, she had looked upon Fanny as her superior, but her own force of character soon found its rightful position. The health of her friend broke down under her unnatural burden, and Mary's devotion to her for years was beautiful to see. Her marriage and removal to Lisbon, in a vain search for health, soon put this devotion to the test.

At this point, Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation was unsullied. She was an admirable manager, an efficient and successful teacher; yet, when Fannie became seriously ill, she did not hesitate to risk her only means of support, the prosperity of her school, to go to her. Her friend, Dr. Price, the Unitarian minister, and Mrs. Burgh, were annoyed at what they considered a quixotic devotion; but they supplied her with money, and she went. A few days closed in death an intimacy of more than ten years, which had been, until this time, Mary's tenderest interest in life. On her way home, her moral energy saved the lives of a French crew in a sailing vessel which she encountered, just about to founder. Her school had suffered by her absence; and the pressing necessities of Fanny's family, in which she still took an interest, induced her to have recourse to literature. The first ten pounds received from her "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters" went to their relief. Nothing can be sadder than to see a young girl placed as Mary Wollstonecraft now was,—compelled to fulfil the duties of a father and mother to younger brothers and sisters. The position is unnatural. Gratitude might be expected, but envy is more often felt. The personal advantages sought for their sakes, and not to be transferred except as a pecuniary profit, she is supposed to seek for her own. Affection partly yields, and enthusiasm does not replace it; while she is urged by necessities which make it difficult to bear the errors and intractabilities of those she is providing for. Still loving, and desiring to provide for her sisters, Mary thought it better to live apart from them, and accepted a temporary position as governess in Lord Kingsborough's family. When they left England, she went to Bristol, and published a novel, which, founded on her ten years of friendly devotion, took the highest rank as a work of sentiment. The next three years were spent in her own house, in London, in the active service of the publisher, Johnson. She translated from French, German, and Italian, wrote several books for children, and took a large share in the conduct of the "Analytical Review."

Her translation of Salzman's "Elements of Morality" led to an interesting correspondence with its author, who repaid the service, subsequently, by translating into German her "Rights of Woman." These occupations, if they did little towards the discipline of her powers, served to rouse her from the dejection into which the death of her friend had plunged her. Her earnings were now devoted to her own family. One sister she kept at Paris for two years to qualify her as a governess; another she placed as parlor-boarder at a London school. Her brother James she sent to Woolwich; afterward procuring for him a position in the navy, where he soon rose to be a lieutenant. Her favorite, Charles, she placed with a farmer for instruction; and then fitted him out for America, where he grew wealthy on the basis she provided. This brother must have left a large family in the State of New York. Her brothers and sisters thus established, she attempted to rescue a support for her father from his broken and confused fortunes. This proving impossible, he was supported by her own labor, until his death. The very great demands made upon her by such natural obligations did not prevent her from assuming others. She adopted for her own the child of a dead friend, the niece of John Hunter. Her brilliancy, her personal beauty, her unselfish devotion, could not fail to win for her many loving friends; and among them the French Revolution found her. The work which first gave her her proper literary rank was her answer to Burke's Reflections upon that movement. She wrote rapidly: her pamphlet was the first of the many that appeared, and obtained extraordinary success. The public applause warmed her, and her next production was her celebrated "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." The startling energy with which she exploded the system of gallantry, a miserable relic of the Stuart courts, roused the popular indignation. It was hard to reconcile the vigor of her rebuke to the tender sentiment which trembled through the book, and also to the impression produced by Mary herself, lovely in person, and, in the most engaging sense, feminine in her manners. Her intimacy with the historical painter, Fuseli, followed. He was a man of powerful genius and strong prejudices. His influence upon Mary, if it was sometimes refreshing, could not always have been beneficial. The reader of Haydon's Autobiography will remember this man. A wider knowledge of the world would have protected her from his influence: as it was, she pursued the intimacy with unsuspecting delight; for Fuseli was a contented husband, and his wife was her friend. She was now in her thirty-second year; she had arrived at a period when domestic happiness of some sort becomes essential to the strongest woman. The fullest-fruited laurel then withers before her eyes, if it has not taken root at her own hearth. At the close of the year 1792, Mary took refuge in Paris from the chagrin and restlessness which began to oppress her. Her years of toil had left her sad and lonely: she needed to rest for a little while in human affection. She could not even write to her own satisfaction; for her morbid fatigue led her to reproduce Fuseli's cynicism, and she dared not trust herself. She entered the best circles of Parisian society, and became intimate with the leaders of the Revolution. In four months after her arrival occurred the most untoward event of her life,—her marriage to a worthless American named Gilbert Imlay; a name rescued from oblivion only by his temporary attachment to her. I say her marriage, for Imlay offered himself in marriage, and was accepted as a husband; but, taking advantage of a custom not unusual at Paris in those disorderly times, Mary refused to consummate the legal forms. Mr. Imlay had no property. Mary had a large family to support; and she neither wished to become answerable for his debts, nor to make him responsible for hers. She took the name of Imlay; and, expecting to follow her brother to America, she obtained from our ambassador at Paris a certificate of American citizenship, to serve as a temporary protection. In order that you may comprehend the precise significance which this step had in that place and at that time, let me remind you, that Helen Maria Williams, her personal friend, and the ward of Dr. Rees of cyclopedic memory, was married in the same way to a Mr. Edwards, then in Paris. She was a well-known writer of that period; and we are still indebted to her for some of the best hymns sung in our churches,—among them, that well-known hymn, beginning, "While thee I seek, protecting Power." But her husband was worthy of the trust she had reposed in him, and she never turned a ready pen against the follies of society: so her character has never stood in the public stocks.

It will be impossible to consider Mary's attachment to Imlay in any degree rational, if we look only at her character, and keep out of sight her peculiar personal history.

The dawdling inefficiency and brutal temper of her father had disgusted her alike with "men of spirit" and "men of straw." In her husband, she saw, as she thought, a certain democratic manliness; and his daring speculations seemed to be inspired by courage and genius. The affections which had been roused by her admiring intercourse with Fuseli kindled gladly on this new shrine, where no social duty, nor stern sense of personal honor, contended against her warming fancy. For the first time in her life, she found herself happy; and happiness gave her back the beauty of early youth. She was playful, gentle, sympathetic. Her eyes had new brightness, her cheeks new color, and the bewitching tenderness of her smile fascinated the very women who approached her. She had been married eighteen months, her love braving all the trials that must have come, when Imlay left her for London. She had expected his quick return; but delay followed delay, and Mary passed a year with a new-born child, learning, by slow and painful degrees, that she had trusted this man beyond his worth. At last, he sent for her to London, where his misconduct affected her mind to such an extent, that she twice attempted her own life, and was rescued the second time with difficulty. As soon as she recovered from the fever which had induced delirium, her native strength told her what she ought to do. Imlay had business in Norway, which required a confidential and judicious agent. She determined to take this upon herself; and hoped, by absence and success, to regain the affection she had lost. The man was, in no sense, worthy of her. On her return, she tried, for the sake of their child, to remain in the same house with him. It was not possible; and, very soon, a final separation took place. It would have taken place long before, but that Imlay was a man who could not wholly escape from a fascination he had once felt. After he became involved in low connections, he could never re-enter her presence, without resuming, for the time, the sympathetic delicacy befitting her lover. During all this time, Mary had occupied herself with literary work. She never spoke of Imlay, and would allow no one to blame him in her presence. Conscious of her own upright intentions, it must have been no small mortification to find her insight and generosity baffled. She felt that she was herself to blame for having placed an impulsive man in a position to which he was wholly unequal. She was everywhere received and treated as a married woman, and lost none of the respect and affection she had well deserved. In April, 1797, she was married to Godwin, the author of "St. Leon;" and this marriage deprived her of two new friends, whom she held very dear. Godwin was so artless, that he imagined his wife's social position would be improved by an honorable marriage; but it obliged Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Siddons to admit that the nature of her marriage to Imlay allowed her to take her divorce into her own hands.

Wonderful inconsistency of society, which, having interpreted truly her upright nature through years of desertion, now condemned her,—whether for her first wrong step, for assuming her own divorce, or for loving a man of undoubted probity, who could tell? A short year of undisturbed happiness followed, when the birth of their only child—the late Mrs. Shelley—suddenly put an end to her life.

A beautiful memorial survives her, in these words of her husband. "This light," he says, "was lent me for a very little while, and it is now extinguished for ever. The strength of Mary's mind lay in her intuition. In a robust and unwavering judgment of this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft. When it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenuous mind. In this sense, my oscillation and scepticism were often fixed by her boldness." I am very well aware how much courage is required of any woman who shall seem to defend Mary Godwin from the popular conception of her. I know that the woman should herself be spotless who would attempt to rectify that conception, yet two circumstances seem to compel explanation. In the first place, there is no question, that if the views of woman which are now beginning to move society originated with her scholarly, republican friend, Mrs. Catharine Macaulay, yet the fire and eloquence of Mary's own words were needed to give them currency. Society has been just so far as this, that it has identified her with the subject of "Woman's Rights;" and all of us who are carried forward by a momentum which she imparted, must desire to understand the nature of the impulse which controls us.

In the second place, Godwin's short Life of her has been long out of print, and has now become very rare; and I have not been able to find a single encyclopÆdia or biographical dictionary which gives the facts correctly. Turn to them, and you will find that Mary Wollstonecraft had a criminal but fruitless attachment for Fuseli; that she formed another, of the same kind, for an American, who deserted her. I brand these statements as malicious falsehoods, carelessly repeated now that they have been long exploded: and, as I write these statements, the tears rush to my eyes; for where are the descendants of the brothers and sisters whom she reared? where are the kindred of Fannie Blood and John Hunter, whose lives her generous efforts gladdened? Nay, might not one man of the drowning crew she forced the captain of her ship to rescue, speak a noble word in her behalf? I have narrated her life with some detail, for you must understand the facts upon which you pass judgment; and these details are many of them gathered from private sources.

To understand the strength of the prejudice against Mary Wollstonecraft, you should see that from all the autobiographies of the period her name is excluded; as if the friends of those who had been intimate with her while living, would not permit the association of names after death. I have said, that, until her marriage to Godwin, she kept her place in English society; and women of the most sensitive propriety, such as Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Inchbald, admitted her to their intimacy. How, then, did such a prejudice grow up? It was probably forming in the popular mind while she was happy in the affection of her friends; and, the moment they found it conventionally needful to sacrifice her, the outbreak was unrestrained. In the first place, she was an ardent republican; a thing no less antagonistic to English feeling in her day, than we have seen it prove in ours. In the second, she was a Unitarian; and Unitarians were radicals in politics as well as in religion. In the third place, being a republican, and a resident of Paris in its troubled times, she was supposed to share the disorder of its morals; an impression which her attempted suicides no doubt confirmed.

We shall not share in this country in any prejudice which republicanism or Unitarianism excited. We are, I trust, ready to admit that an attempt at suicide could only come with delirium, for which she would be as free from responsibility as for a typhoid fever or an Asiatic cholera. What we have to do, then, is to understand her relation to the laws of marriage, and to see how far her second marriage can be justified. When she met Imlay at Paris, I do not think she had ever considered the social bearing of these laws, except so far as her mother's experience had pained her. That experience made her willing to do what other women about her were doing, with no bad result that she could see, to keep herself free from pecuniary entanglement. In one way, this was prudent; in an other way, it was extremely imprudent; and the imprudence touched a more vital point than the prudence: but that it was never considered criminal by wise and candid judges, that she was never compromised in any relation up to this, the intimacies we have recorded prove. Had she been a weak, immoral woman, she would have continued to live with Imlay for her child's sake, but availing herself of the shelter of a connection from which she recoiled. At this moment, she wrote to her husband, "Your reputation shall not suffer. I shall never have a confidant. I am content with the approbation of my own mind; and, if there be a Searcher of hearts, mine will not be rejected." And again: "My child may have reason to blush for her mother's want of prudence; but she shall never despise me." These are not the words of a weak or irreligious woman. So far, then, all was well, except that society had no efficient outlawry for the man who had deserted her. She still occasionally met him, but bore the unexpected trial, when it came, with dignity and sweetness. When Godwin sought her in marriage, he knew, of course, that no legal ties bound her. Mary saw no harm in using the liberty that remained to her. "Why could she not have remained single?" said the world; but had the world been so just and kind to her, that we could expect her to resist the influence of a generous and courageous love? Had she lived in this country, and been divorced by the laws of Indiana, society would have been silent; but the real evil would have been the same.

"Never did there exist a woman," said her husband, "who might with less fear expose her actions, and call upon the universe to judge them." I believe this to be true so far as her own relations were concerned; and I believe, that, by her second marriage, she meant to exercise a right of protest against existing laws, which two of the most gifted children of the nineteenth century have exercised again in our own time with emphasis. It requires a philosophic mind to see the relation of the individual to the state: heroic, indeed, is the spirit which, perceiving it, braves the common expectation by a defiant life. On the other hand, it is by no prejudice that we demand this account of each person's private affairs. It is a demand born of an ill-defined, dimly entertained, but still a just idea of the relations of God, the family, and the state. I ought not to say so much, without adding that no one in this country can adequately judge of the pressure of the marriage laws as they still exist in England. What is resisted, is, in most instances, what no American woman would be expected to bear; but for England, as for this country, I rest in the confident hope that a right adjustment of woman's relation to society will change healthfully all existing legislation. Such legislation as that of Indiana does not seem to me an advance, although it may have been demanded by an advancing public sentiment.

I have said this honestly, with a tender pity in my heart, to clear the memory of a much-abused woman. Does any one ask me if I would justify the position in which she stood? I answer, frankly, No. We do not live to ourselves alone; and if we are ever tempted to take a step against the moral convictions of the world, believing that we can do as we will with our own, one would think the possibility that children may be born to inherit the obloquy we excite, without themselves deserving it, would be enough to deter any right-minded woman. No love or care, or abject self-sacrifice, can reconcile a child to the stain of illegitimacy. "What does the Lord thy God require of thee?"—"To do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly." It is not walking humbly to set up our own conception of fitness against the accumulated experience of mankind. Still farther: It is of very little importance what others may think of us, when we are acting conscientiously; but what we think of others, our own mood of mind towards God and man,—that is of the very greatest.

The influence of the "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was greatly aided by the efforts of Mr. Day, and of Maria Edgeworth, whose literary career began about the time of its publication. Following closely upon these, and so nearly parallel in effort, and equal in varied ability, that we hardly know in what order to name them, are Lady Morgan, Harriet Martineau, and Mrs. Jameson. Sydney Morgan, sitting alone at the age of fourscore in her tiny house at Dublin, filled like a museum with the accumulation of her years of travel, projecting the publication of her last work, was lately, like Mrs. Somerville at Florence, a pensioner of Queen Victoria. But, from the hour of her first appearance as the author of the "Wild Irish Girl," she has exercised a generous womanly influence. Under the disguise of novels, books of travel, and the like, she has published an immense number of volumes, filled with information which may be a little too crowded for convenience, but always accurate, always original, and, for the most part, received from historic sources, in personal intercourse. Her warm hatred of tyranny made friends for her, wherever she went. When a young girl, she took up the cause of her own country with a vehemence which won the liberal party, and made her fashionable before she was approved. "The wild Irish girl" and her harp were essential to the success of every entertainment; and invitations lay two or three deep for every evening. She entered society with beauty, wit, and prestige. She might have done what she would. She chose to remain faithful to unpopular opinions. After her marriage to Sir Charles Morgan, they went, for economical reasons, to the Continent, where they eventually spent many years. In France, Lafayette, SÉgur, DÉnon, and L'Aguisseau were her intimate friends; and in the salon of the Princess de Salm she was always a welcome guest. In Germany, Flanders, and Italy, not only the liberal youth, but the learned eld, crowded her apartments, gave her minute information, and became devoted cicerones. The friendship of cardinals and princes did not dim her natural democracy of view; and her last words were as true to liberty as her first. Her works on France and Italy were proscribed in both countries; yet "Young France" and "Young Italy" contrived to obtain and read them. She came into fashion in Paris whenever the Bourbons went out; and, when she dined with Rothschild, his famous cook acknowledged her friendship for the people in autographs of spun sugar! "We shall meet at the breakfast of the Austrian ambassador," said a Parisian fop, as he made his bow. "Not we," she laughed in answer: "it would be as much as his place is worth to ask me." Wherever she went, and whatever she did, her ears were always open to a woman's name; and, with the most loyal interest, she gathered up every thing relating to their lives, their influence, and their disabilities. What she was told as gossip, was retained, studied out, and digested, before, with the piquancy of a French woman and the warmth of an Irish, it was given to the world. The first two volumes of her "History of Woman" do not touch a period of universal interest; but, had she been able to complete the work, it would have exhausted the subject. In the BÉguine, she says: "Women meddle with politics as well as tent-stitch, and, like Madame de Maintenon, bring their work-bags to the Privy Council, and direct the affairs of Europe while they trace patterns for footstools. The influence of woman will ever be exercised directly or indirectly in all good or evil. It is a part of the scheme of nature. Give her, then, such light as she is capable of receiving. Educate her, whatever her station, for taking her part in society. Her ignorance has often made her interference fatal; her knowledge, never." The cordial sympathy of her husband has made Lady Morgan's life beautiful. His legal knowledge and antiquarian taste added their own charm to whatever she undertook.

How great and worthy is the literary position of Harriet Martineau, we all know. Its retro-actionary influence in favor of the ability and freedom of her sex is what we are to indicate here. For whatever immediate purpose she writes, her words bear indirectly on the widest womanly emancipation. May this remark stimulate your curiosity, and keep you on the alert for pregnant sentences! Such sentences tell more of the progress of human thought than some of us suspect: they indicate its natural, habitual poise. "Women especially," she writes, "should be allowed the free use of whatever strength their Maker has seen fit to give them. It is essential to the virtue of society, that they should be allowed the freest moral action, unfettered by ignorance, and unintimidated by authority; for it is an unquestioned and unquestionable fact, that, if women were not weak, men would not be wicked, and that, if women were bravely pure, there would be an end of the dastardly tyranny of licentiousness." This passage will have all the more power over observant readers, because it occurs unexpectedly, and marks the opportunity seized to speak a necessary if unwelcome truth.

What noble service Mrs. Jameson rendered in the field of art or letters did not leave her indifferent to the interests of her sex. She was placed in circumstances to make her see quickly and feel deeply all that relates to womanly position and development. An early martyr to the prejudices of society; married, I think at sixteen, to a man far beyond her own rank in life, who left her at the altar,—she bore the title of wife, and led the life of a celibate: but her first word for her sex was as strong and true as her last, while her own path lay between lines of living fire. Only lately did we hear of her as a lecturer and reformer; but, nearly thirty years ago, we might have cut from her pages the following words: "We are told openly by moralists and politicians, that it is for the general good of society, nay, an absolute necessity, that one-fifth part of the female sex should be condemned as the legitimate prey of the other, predoomed to die in reprobation in the streets, in hospitals, that the virtue of the rest may be preserved, and the pride and the passions of men both satisfied. But I have a bitter pleasure in thinking, that this most base and cruel conventional law is avenged upon those who made and uphold it; that here the sacrifice of a certain number of one sex to the permitted license of the other is no general good, but a general curse, a very ulcer in the bosom of society." Can you guess how brave and pure a woman was needed to write those words? All the indirect tendency of her works is in keeping with them; and we recognize the same voice, as she said in a later lecture:—

"When female nurses were to be sent to the Crimea, there was to be met the mockery of the light-minded, the atrocious innuendoes of the dissolute, the sneers of the ignorant, and the scepticism of the cold. I have seen men who deem it quite a natural and proper thing that women—some women at least—should lead the life of a courtesan, put on a look of offended propriety at the idea of a woman nursing a sick soldier. I have seen men—ay, and women too—who deem it a matter of course that our streets should be haunted by contagious vice, disgusted at the idea of women turning apothecaries and hÔpitaliÈres. And, worse than all, I have heard men—and women too—who acknowledge the gospel of Christ, who call themselves by his name, who believe in his mission of mercy, disputing about the exact shade of orthodoxy in a woman who had offered up every faculty of her being at the feet of the Redeemer."[10]

Remember that these words were spoken where they belonged, in the very heart of Belgravia, to the very people who deserved them, and respect the brave purity which compelled lips as well as pen to utterance. It would scarce be honest not to say, in this connection, that Mrs. Jameson took some pains, so long as she lived, to separate herself from the American Woman's-Rights party—a party, it may be, only represented to her by the vulgar pretension of travelling Bloomers. Some of us take comfort in remembering how much more easily the misrepresentations of the press, or the intrusions of unfit subjects on womanly discussion, will float across the wide Atlantic, than our weightier works. When she said, in the same breath, concerning a decree of the French Consulate, "I confess, I should like to see a decree of our Parliament beginning with a recognition that women do exist as a part of the community, whose responsibilities are to be acknowledged, and whose capabilities are to be made available, not separately, but conjointly with those of men," we know that she worked for us and with us, and forgive the want of recognition in gratitude for the real service.

Mrs. Gaskell has perhaps done more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte BrontÉ, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned in that instance without a hearing, she could never afterwards feel the elastic pleasure which was natural to her in composing and printing; and, for three long years afterwards, never touched her pen. I would not allude to this subject, if every notice of her, since her death, had not done so; repeating the old censure, as a matter of course. Here in America, we exculpate her. The public was wrong, in the first place, inasmuch as it has come to demand biography before biography is possible. The publisher was wrong, in the second; for he ought to have known, and could easily have ascertained, how plain a statement the English law would permit. The public was still further wrong, when it attributed misapprehension and carelessness to a woman whom it very well knew to be incapable of either. I, for one, shall never forgive nor forget the officious censure given by one who must have known that the legal apology tendered, in Mrs. Gaskell's absence, to protect her pecuniary interests, had the unfortunate effect to put her in a position where explanation and self-defence were alike impossible. Mrs. Gaskell had deserved the steady confidence of the public.

I have kept till the last the name of Fredrika Bremer, whose good fortune it was to secure lasting benefits to her sex. God sent to her early years dark trials and privations. Her father's tyrannical hand crushed all power and loveliness out of her life. At first, she rebelled against her sufferings; but, when he died in her girlhood, she was able to see that they lent strength to her efforts for her sex. It was the rumor of what we are doing in this country for women that first drew her hither. It is not the fashion for Miss Bremer's friends fully to recognize her position in this respect. I owe my own convictions on the subject of suffrage to the reflections she awakened. When I told her that my mind was undecided on this point, she showed her disappointment so plainly, that I was forced to reconsider the whole subject. Miss Bremer did not hurry her work: she had a serene confidence that she should be permitted to finish what she had begun. She secured popularity by her cheerful humor, her genuine feeling, her true appreciation of men, and her insight into the conditions of family happiness, before she made any direct appeal against existing laws. Those who will read her novels thoughtfully, however, will see that she was, from the first, intent upon making such an effort possible. From the beginning, she pleaded for the social independence of wives; asked for them a separate purse; showed that woman could not even give her love freely, until she was independent of him to whom she owed it. To a just state of society, to noble family relations, entire freedom is essential.

Under her influence, females had been admitted to the Musical Academy. The directors of the Industrial School at Stockholm had attempted to form a class, and Professor Quarnstromm had opened his classes at the Academy of Fine Arts to women. Cheered by her sympathy, a female surgeon had sustained herself in Stockholm; and Bishop Argardh indorsed the darkest picture she had ever drawn, when he pleaded with the state to establish a girls'-school. It was at this juncture that Miss Bremer published "Hertha." This book was a direct blow aimed at the laws of Sweden concerning women. By this time, she had herself become, in Sweden, what we might fitly call a "crowned head." She was everywhere treated with distinction; and her sudden appearance in any place was greeted with the enthusiasm usually shown by such nations only to their princes. She said of her new book, "I have poured into it more of my heart and life than into any thing which I have ever written;" and verily she had her reward. She was at Rome, two years after,—in 1858,—when the glad news reached her, that King Oscar, at the opening of the Diet, had proposed a bill entitling women to hold independent property at the age of twenty-five. All Sweden had read the book which moved the heart of the king; and the assembled representatives rent the air with their acclamations.

In the following spring, the old University town of Upsala, where her friend Bergfalk occupies a chair, granted the right of suffrage to fifty women owning real estate, and to thirty-one doing business on their own account. The representative whom their votes went to elect was to sit in the House of Burgesses. Miss Bremer was not ashamed to shed happy tears when this news reached her. If she had ever reproached Providence with the bitter sorrow of her early years, she was penitent and grateful now. Then was fulfilled the prophecy which she had uttered, as she left our shores, "The nation which was first among Scandinavians to liberate its slaves, shall also be the first to emancipate its women."

This is not the place to unfold the delicate sheaths of meaning with which flower-like Robert Browning invests his thought; but the man who wrote the "Blot on the Scutcheon," and the exquisite sketch of "Pippa Passes," has done such justice to the sex, and so far helped the cause of right feeling and right thinking in respect to some of the most delicate problems that concern it, that we are compelled to speak of him gratefully. His marriage, too, is still fragrant; a full-fruited flower of promise to the world, which makes us see the best things possible, and believe that the time is coming when man and woman will not seldom stand before the altar as equal and individual, yet sacredly one. To Elizabeth Browning, to whom was given in her life that place of pre-eminence among women which Shakespere must always hold among men, we owe grateful thanks, for the scholarly achievement, the conscientious study, the womanly zeal, which distinguished all her work. When theology sometimes wrestled with poetry in her speech, we translated it into a freer tongue, and thanked her all the same. In "Aurora Leigh" she stabbed every conventional falsity to the heart, and held the ear tenaciously till she had delivered all her oracle.

The woman who wrote these words counsels us from her grave; and, taught by her, we do not hesitate to say,—

Yet these were all to a certain extent indirect influences. Can I utter without trembling the two names which sit upon the thrones of female power in the Old World and the New? I mean Charlotte BrontÉ and Margaret Fuller. I wish I could confer a proper emphasis upon my words, when I say that the publication of "Jane Eyre" formed the chief era in the literature of women since that literature began. Into it was compressed all the feeling and experience of a very remarkable life,—feeling and experience entertained without the smallest sense of responsibility to the conventional world. The life of the author touched the restrictions of society, as the spheral curves touch the tangents which square them, so slightly as never to impair its wonderful individuality. Who would not seek a wife like Jane Eyre? Who does not rejoice in the smallest detail of that sparkling and varied courtship? Think of those words of Rochester, when, holding her with the grasp of a madman, he says, "Never was any thing at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand. I could bend her with my finger and thumb. And what good would it do, if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye; consider the wild, resolute, free thing looking out of it, defying me with more than courage,—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it, the savage beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only set the captive free. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven, before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit, with will and energy and virtue and purity, that I want, not alone your brittle frame."

And from what literature, of ancient or modern growth, shall we match Jane's answer, when passion presses, crying, "Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?"

"I care for myself," is the indomitable reply: "the more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained, I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold by the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad, as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation. They are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. Stringent are they? Inviolate they shall be. If, at my individual convenience, I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth, so I have always believed; and, if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count. Pre-conceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by. There I plant my foot!"

Other women have been brave and pure, but this woman was an Abdiel. Never had she faltered in her life, never encountered a sham but to crush it. We did not know what freedom meant, till we had this book. Its advent was an era, not merely in the literature, but in the life, of woman. Its welcome, so profound, so stirring, betrayed the secrets of womanly nature. Do you remember how you sat and discussed this book, far into the night?—how you wondered whether man or woman wrote it?—how the women it enfranchised looked their scorn when you suggested the first possibility?—how your temper and feeling, and sense of justice, were roused by it? All this was because a life resolute and free poured itself out between those covers. A woman delicate, cleanly, quaint, secured the polished purity of every page. Will you start, if I ask you who ever stated the Woman's-Rights' argument with the serene force of the little lace-mender in the "Professor"? Do you not envy her and her husband the happy English home secured by their united labors? Ah! when she gave us later that exquisite miniature of her sister Emily which she called "Shirley," that noble bit of Rubens color which she named "Villette," the same flood of womanly thought and feeling poured through the prayer,—the same flood, though we no longer started as when we first heard society's signal gun, and saw her whole fleet hoist the flag of distress. Women ought to buy that old stone house upon the hillside, set in among the tombs, and framed in purple heather. The lives which began and ended there have hedged it in with laurels. Read this life and these works, and learn what fortunes hang upon a noble living. Read them, that you may learn how to cheer the world with what is natural and dignified, to do your Master's work, regardless of narrow criticism or still disdain. The host of imitators who stand about Charlotte BrontÉ's still-open grave are the best tribute to the power that went out from her,—a power tempered by the sweetest personal graces, by a housekeeping delicate and pure and tasteful, which never lets us dream of Jane in her school at Morton, of Shirley in her peach-room parlor, of the lace-mender at the professor's desk, or Lucy Snowe in the first class of Paul Emanuel, as otherwise than brilliant in cleanliness and order. I turn reluctantly from a life so well known, and now, thank God, beginning to be so well understood.

I do not treat of Margaret Fuller as a literary power; for, whatever may be her rank in this respect, she does not exert a tithe of the influence in this way, which attaches to the idea of her as a person, to herself as the centre of the radiant and shining group of women who were known as "Margaret's friends."

Her "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" is a scholarly, refined, and noble plea for the freedom of her sex. In point of ability, no book can be named with it, if we except that of Madame d'HÉricourt. It has an advantage over that of Mary Wollstonecraft, in being, so far as the author could make it, a complete statement; but it is written so much more from the stand-point of thought and feeling, that it has had a far more limited influence. There is not a word in the "Vindication" which the most simple might not read as he ran, and, reading, understand; but much of the "Nineteenth Century" depends upon a critical scholarship, and an evasive delicacy of sentiment and thought, which elude the common grasp. Precious passages have become axioms. "Let her be a sea-captain, if she will," has a power in both hemispheres; for it has been justified to learned and simple, by Captain Betsy, of the Scotch schooner, "Cleotus," and the sweet and noble woman who so lately carried an American ship round Cape Horn. The life of Margaret Fuller is in everybody's hands; but not even Boston women appreciate her personal influence. Who else could be expected to understand it? Her very existence was a stimulus to endeavor; and hundreds of women become practical "Exaltadas," because they saw the position she was permitted to hold. "I always know a Boston woman," said a rough German miner to me, beyond Lake Huron: "she always has Margaret Fuller's stamp upon her;" and I felt that his words were true. We have missed her sadly since she was taken from us. Ever memorable will be the "Life and Writings," which revive our memories better than they satisfy our demands. "It will be seen," she once wrote, "that my youth was not unfriended, since those great minds came to me in kindness." We have not been unfriended either, since she was permitted to come to us. If I were to characterize her in two words, it would be as "Truth-teller and Truth-compeller." She not only spoke what she thought, in her own way, let it be abrupt or gentle, but she compelled us to do the same. There was something in her presence which tore away all disguises: even unconscious pretension could not bear it. We were soon made to feel whether we had any right to our own thoughts. "What I especially admired in her," says Dr. Hedge, "was her intellectual sincerity. Her judgments took no bribe from her sex or sphere, nor from custom nor tradition nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was, not what should be believed, nor what ought to be true, but what is true. Her 'yes' and 'no' were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unsuspected dissent from the commonplaces of popular acceptation."

"Truth-teller and Truth-compeller,"—the words seem to fall like the shadow of Omnipotence, a noble fillet for a woman's forehead. What a noble character that must have been, which inspired the remark made after her marriage:—

"Her life, since she went abroad, is wholly unknown to me; but I have an unshaken trust, that what Margaret did she can defend." An "unshaken trust,"—such words are a challenge to all noble living. In great and small matters, we are told, she was a woman of her word, and so gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort which flows from plaindealing. "I walk over burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet, yet nothing but truth will do," she says; and again, in a letter to a friend: "My own entire sincerity in every passage of life gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions."

I enlarge upon this trait of character, for I think it Margaret's due. Everybody here knows her reputation as a scholar: few know her character as a woman. In beautiful keeping with this trait was her letter to Miss Martineau, after the publication of her book upon this country.

"When Jouffroy writes his lectures," she says, "I am not conversant with all his topics; but I can appreciate his lucid style and admirable method. When Webster speaks on the currency, I do not understand the subject; but I do understand his mode of treating it, and can see what a blaze of light flows from his torch. When Harriet Martineau writes about America, I often cannot test that rashness and inaccuracy of which I hear so much; but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness and patient investigation is found throughout the book; and I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend.

"I have thought it right to say all this to you, since I feel it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear that I must lose you. If your heart turn from me, I shall still love you; and I could no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had not spoken out."

What a noble pattern in that letter for us all! The electric power of her womanhood, which claimed the inmost being of every one with whom she came in contact, I can best express in the words of Emerson:—

"She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. She had drawn to her every superior young man or woman she had ever met; and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy. She extorted the secret of life which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow, and thus she had the best of those she saw. She lived in a superior circle; for people suppressed all their commonplaces in her presence. Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companion, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives."

When we remember this wealth of sympathy and appreciation, is it not sad to hear her say, no one ever gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a full confession?—that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would no doubt be tedious to such as she conversed with?

A bitter reproach to us women, certainly. What better could we do than listen, while she embellished her thought with all wealth and variety possible? And I quote the saying, because hers are not the only noble lips which have a right to repeat it. Could we but be patient listeners! In that way, we might educate powers of expression, and become possessed of wealth of which we have very little idea. What does such a saying record,—her egotism or our selfishness, her insatiable demand or our bankruptcy? We may well confess to mortification when we read; but it is not felt for her. Very beautiful is the conception of this Memoir of Margaret, this triune testimony of independent minds. We should be more grateful for the analytical skill shown in Emerson's contribution, did it not bear witness to power, rather than appreciation. We see, though he could not, what Margaret missed in her friend. She could not exempt the finest thinker she knew from the customary tribute; but he could not pay her in current coin,—only in some native ore, which it cost her much to make available at need. Some time may women write the lives of women! Why not warm thy scalpel, O philosopher! out of regard to what was once tender, quivering, human flesh? Rumor and prejudice carried the news of Margaret's faults far enough while she was living: what we need now is to send on the same wave the most abundant and satisfying proof of her goodness and genius. When great men speak of her, they should speak grandly, and find for what vulgar natures must misconceive, the noble and generous interpretation. I do not mean that SHE would have shrunk from the boldest statement of the truth. It was in her to invite it. "She could say," says Emerson, "as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, he appreciates me;" and he refers this saying to the "mountainous me" of hereditary organization, italicizing the offending monosyllable. But, in Margaret's mind, the emphasis lay quite as often on the word appreciates; and the statement was of a psychological fact, a superiority to vulgar prejudice, which laid some claim to her generous estimate in return. Ah! when those we love are gone for ever, their faults drop away, like the garment, which was of the earth, earthy; but to great and noble words, to heroic and womanly living, God has given a power of blessing far beyond the grave. We lost her at a moment when we could ill bear it,—when, instructed by the noble sympathies of Mazzini, softened by her own sweet and tender ministrations in Italian hospitals, revealed at length in loving beauty by a wife's and mother's experience, she might have come home the woman she had often made us dream of. We see the shadow of it all in that little picture which once hung on the walls of the Boston AthenÆum; and, God willing, we shall yet encounter the glad reality beyond the reach of tempests, beyond the need of wreck, lifted into true deserving of so great a privilege on the broad ocean of an Infinite Love!

Florence Nightingale is no exception in the history of her sex, only a consummate flower of its daily bloom. Ever since the commencement of the Christian era, whole armies of women have devoted themselves, not for a few years only, like Florence Nightingale, but for their whole lives long, to the same painful duties,—women who organized their bands with an efficiency and thoroughness, felt to this very day, and which made them the competent instructors of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. The holiest vocation fails to instruct the unprepared mind. The soil of the nineteenth century is fallow; but in the year 385 a saintly woman traversed those same Crimean shores. Of her it was written:—

"She was marvellous debonaire and piteous to them that were sicke and comforted them, and served them right humbly, and gave them largely to eat, such as they asked; but to herself she was hard in her sickness and scarce, for she refused to eat flesh, how well she gave it to others, and also to drink wine. She was oft by them that were sicke, and she laid the pillows aright and in point, and she rubbed their feet, and boiled water to wash them; and it seemed to her that the less she did to the sicke in service, so much the less service did she to God, and deserved the less mercy; therefore she was to them piteous, and nothing to herself."

The Church canonized this woman, who carried her own substance to the work in which the British Government sustained Florence Nightingale so many centuries later; but the public mind was not prepared, so the world has never rung to the name of Santa Paula.

Florence Nightingale's most heroic service lay in breaking open the storehouses at Scutari. It may have cost her very little, but at that moment the force of accumulated character made itself felt. An everlasting reproach to all cowards of circumlocution offices, the duty not a single commissioned officer had courage to assume has gently crowned the woman with the woven suffrages of the world.

The name of Mary Patton has with us also a true educational power. There was no obstacle nor vulgar prejudice which this heroic girl was not called to combat. Not twenty years old, with two little children clinging to her skirts, and the great primal sorrow of her sex overshadowing her afresh, with her husband bereft of reason, and neither nurse nor physician at hand, she kept the ship's reckoning, overpowered a mutinous mate, and carried her vessel triumphantly in to the destined port.

The author of "John Halifax" has so laid us under obligation by work faithfully done, that it seems worth while to indicate the inconsistencies which warp her "Thoughts about Women."

She speaks of the "Woman's-Rights movement" in this country, as if it were a movement to force women into a certain position, instead of an effort to set them free, to the end that they may ascertain whether they have any capacity for it. She sneers at letters and account-books kept by women; and we read her words in a country where women are widely and creditably established as book-keepers, and where they hold classes to instruct others in accounts! She tells us that more than one-half of English women are obliged to provide for themselves; and gives a noble example of two young women, who, on their father's death, continued to carry on a disagreeable business, to keep books, manage stock, and control agents. They sustained a delicate mother in ease, and never once compromised their womanhood. What became of the womanly unfitness for letters and accounts in that case? She speaks of the contemptible and unwomanly habit of beating down, and says that men are less prone to it than women. Who keeps the purse-strings of a family? Who condemn women to the practical ignorance which makes them too uncertain of values to turn at once from a manifest overcharge?

But, sadder still, this woman brings against her sex the two grave charges of common falsehood and disloyalty in friendship. We may pity her for a social experience which seems to her to justify the statement; but let us never repeat the libel. Let Margaret Fuller answer it, not only by a life of radiant truth, but by the words in which she speaks of the honor of which young hearts are capable, and the secret of her own young life voluntarily kept by forty girls.

In her chapter on "Lost Women," Miss Muloch does grateful service when she draws attention to those who choose to dwell in the very gutters of idle gossip and filthy scandal, who soil their lips and tongues while they take selfishly faithful care of their reputations. This word needed to be spoken. Better for a woman, that she should be a cast-away in a city refuge, with a mind comparatively pure, than a woman in high society, capable of catching or uttering the vile "double entendre," always on the lookout for a possible vulgarism, wringing decency out of human life as if it were only a wet napkin, and sceptical of the purity and innocence she has not yet found in her own heart.

In estimating the influences which modify public opinion concerning women, I am not willing to be silent concerning the popular idea of love. It is a common thing to hear it said, with a sort of sneer, that no man ever died for love,—as if it were a quite romantic and in nowise discreditable thing that many women should!

Creditable and discreditable elements may enter into the assumed fact as it regards man; but if he does not die for love because he more thoroughly acknowledges his responsibility, keeping God in his right place above, and his own heart and its idols in their right place below, then we may drop the unwomanly sneer, and go and do likewise.

I shall have little hope for woman, till she learns to feel that to die for love is not so much a pitiful as a disgraceful thing; that it proves of itself that God was never to her what he should have been; that life had no aim so holy as the weak indulgence of a sentiment or a passion, or some generous longing for some duty God did not set before her; that all the world's work and society's ambition was hidden from her by a desire for personal happiness, spread like a film over her moral vision.

No better education do I claim for woman than her entire self-possession, the ultimate endowment of all the promise she carries in her nature. "The great law of culture," says Carlyle, "is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; and show himself in his own shape and stature, be they what they may."—"The excellent woman," writes the Hindoo in Calcutta, "is she who, if the father dies, can be father and provider to the household."

"Who," says Count Zinzendorf in Germany,—"who but my wife could have been alternately servant and mistress without affectation and without pride? Who could have maintained like her, in a democratic community, all outward and inward distinctions? Who, without a murmur, would have met such peril? Who could have raised such sums of money, and acquitted them on her own credit?"

To such women I think men will always offer generous help; and, even if they did not, there are props of God's own disposing. Let woman once reject the absurd notion that she was created for happiness, let her constitute herself instead a creator of it, let her accept with joy the fact that this is a working-day world; then she will no longer strive to escape from labor, discipline, or sorrow, but will gladly hail each in its turn as part of God's appointed teaching, a shadow crossing the sunshine to show that it is bright. Perhaps such a life is not easy, perhaps many feet must falter on such a path; but, indicating what I earnestly believe to be the will and way of God for us all, I earnestly entreat you to enter and walk therein. Some words written by John Ruskin upon Art seem to me to have such force in this connection as to make it justifiable to quote them.

Speaking of a painter who could only paint the fair and graceful in landscape, he says:—

"But such work had, nevertheless, its stern limitations, and marks of everlasting inferiority. Always soothing and pathetic, it could never be sublime, never freely nor entrancingly beautiful; for the man's narrow spirit could not cast itself freely into any scene. The calm cheerfulness which shrank from the shadow of the cypress and the distortion of the olive, could not enter into the brightness of the sky they pierced, nor the softness of the bloom they bore. For every sorrow that his heart turned from, he lost a consolation. For every fear which he dared not confront, he parted with a portion of his manliness. The unsceptred sweep of the storm-clouds, the fair freedom of glancing shower and flickering sunbeam, sunk into sweet rectitudes and decent formalisms; and, before eyes that refused to be dazzled or darkened, the hours of sunset wreathed their rays unheeded, and the mists of the Apennines spread their blue veils in vain."

Imagine these words written metaphorically of your own inner lives, and accept the lesson they convey. Be earnest to inherit the whole of human life. Insist on turning the golden shield, till you have, not merely the iron lining full in view, but whatsoever Medusa's head the Divine hand has traced thereon.

See how many women have excelled in literature and art, in philosophy and science, within the present century. Their literary contributions owe their popularity to intrinsic excellence: they have sought and found the light of day, without the pompous recommendations of institutions, or the forced encouragement of a clique. There is no limit to womanly attainment, other than the force of womanly desire. BihÉron, destined to become an anatomist, becomes one, whether the college of dissectors smile or frown. Wittembach, versed alike in the mysteries of ancient tongues and modern physics, becomes the counsellor of the wisest men of her time, without neglecting her pantry or her needle. There is no excuse for neglecting any home duty for the most desirable foreign pursuit. Let buttons and shirt-bosoms have their day, the lexicon or grammar its own also. Let the dinner-table be carefully spread; the food, not only well cooked, but gracefully laid,—before we seek the more precious nutriment of culture: and this, not so much because any one has a right to say it shall be so, as out of our own tender regard to the needs of others, and a desire, through every possible self-sacrifice, to make the common road easier, and turn recreant public opinion to its proper vent. Let a neatness as exquisite, as womanly and as polished as that of Charlotte BrontÉ, pervade not only our homes, but consecrate our own personal appearance; then may we safely wear the livery of schools. It may be double-dyed in indigo; yet, with this accessory, no man will assert that it is unbecoming, no woman have need to comfort her own ignorance by an unsisterly sneer.

If God intends woman to walk side by side with man wherever he sees fit to go, the movement now beginning must materially develop civilization. Finer elements will be poured into the molten metal of society; and, when the next cast is taken, we shall see sharper edges, bolder reliefs, and a finer lining, than we have been wont. Nor shall we miss the gentler graces. The classical world bitterly mourned the young and gifted lecturer, Olympia Morata; but not with the broken-hearted agony of the husband whose strength and life she had always been. Clotilda Tambroni was crowned, not only with the laurels of a Greek professorship, but with modesty and every virtue.

It was the tender appreciation of the WOMEN of Bologna that erected a stately monument to Laura Veratti.

In England, a woman writes admirable tales to endow a bishopric in a distant land. In our country, it was a pleasant omen, that the woman who first made literature a profession was urged to it, neither by scholarly taste nor an eccentric ambition, but to fulfil a mother's duty to four orphan children. Her literary career is not yet closed; and, though not lofty in its range, has been steadily pursued, and deserves the regard which it has won.

The names of Sedgwick, Sigourney, Kirkland, and Child suggest womanly excellences first of all. Let us pay the debt we owe these women, by following hopefully in the paths they have opened, till we create a public opinion without reproach.

---