WOMAN.
THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
[Sidenote: Woman as a Gospel.]
“You girls and women don’t know your power. Why, Mary, you are a
living Gospel. You have always had a strange power over us boys. You
never talked religion much, but I have seen high fellows come away
from being with you as still and quiet as one feels when he goes
into a church. I can’t understand all the hang of predestination and
moral ability, and natural ability, and God’s efficiency, and man’s
agency, which Dr. Hopkins is so engaged about; but I can understand
_you_,—_you_ can do me good.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Holiness of woman.]
“But do you remember you told me once that, when the snow first fell,
and lay so dazzling and pure and soft all about, you always felt as
if the spreads and window curtains, that seemed white before, were
not clean? Well, it’s just like that with me. Your presence makes me
feel that I am not pure,—that I am low and unworthy,—not worthy to
touch the hem of your garment. Your good Dr. Hopkins spent a whole
half day, the other Sunday, trying to tell us about the beauty of
holiness; and he cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us
what it wasn’t; and what was _like it_, and wasn’t; and then he built
up an exact definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round;
and I thought to myself that he’d better tell’em to look at Mary
Scudder, and they’d understand all about it.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman ennobled by man’s love.]
Do you remember, at Niagara, a little cataract on the American side,
which throws its silver, sheeny veil over a cave called the Grot
of Rainbows? Whoever stands on a rock in that grotto sees himself
in the centre of a rainbow-circle, above, below, around. In like
manner, merry, chatty, positive, busy, house-wifely Katy saw herself
standing in a rainbow-shrine in her lover’s inner soul, and liked to
see herself so. A woman, by-the-bye, must be very insensible, who is
not moved to come upon a higher plane of being herself, by seeing how
undoubtingly she is insphered in the heart of a good and noble man.
A good man’s faith in you, fair lady, if you ever have it, will make
you better and nobler even before you know it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Power of real love.]
It is only now and then that a matter-of-fact woman is sublimated by
a real love; but if she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it
is for death to quench it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman’s veneration.]
If women have one weakness more marked than another, it is towards
veneration. They are born worshippers.... The fact is, women are
burdened with fealty, faith, and reverence, more than they know what
to do with; they stand like a hedge of sweet-peas, throwing out
fluttering tendrils everywhere for something high and strong to climb
by,—and when they find it, be it ever so rough in the bark, they
catch upon it. And instances are not wanting of those who have turned
away from the flattery of admirers to prostrate themselves at the
feet of a genuine hero who never wooed them, except by heroic deeds
and the rhetoric of a noble life.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mother-love for a son.]
None of the peculiar developments of the female nature have a
more exquisite vitality than the sentiment of a frail, delicate,
repressed, timid woman, for a strong, manly, generous son. There is
her ideal expressed; there is the outspeaking and outacting of all
she trembles to think, yet burns to say or do; here is the hero that
shall speak for her, the heart into which she has poured hers, and
that shall give to her tremulous and hidden aspirations a strong
and victorious expression. “I have gotten a _man_ from the Lord,”
she says to herself, and each outburst of his manliness, his vigor,
his self-confidence, his superb vitality, fills her with a strange,
wondering pleasure, and she has a secret tenderness and pride even
in his wilfulness and waywardness.... First love of womanhood is
something wonderful and mysterious,—but in this second love it rises
again, idealized and refined; she loves the father and herself united
and made one in this young heir of life and hope.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mothers’ inconsiderateness.]
But even mothers who have married for love themselves somehow so
blend a daughter’s existence with their own as to conceive that she
must marry their love and not her own.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Repression.]
Her large brown eyes had an eager joy in them when Mary entered;
but they seemed to calm down again, and she received her only with
that placid, sincere air which was her habit. Everything about this
woman showed an ardent soul, repressed by timidity and by a certain
dumbness in the faculties of outward expression; but her eyes had,
at times, that earnest, appealing language which is so pathetic in
the silence of inferior animals. One sometimes sees such eyes, and
wonders whether the story they intimate will ever be spoken in mortal
language.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman’s instinctive silence.]
Ah, that silence! Do not listen to hear whom a woman praises, to
know where her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most
earnest enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well whose name
she never speaks,—if she seems to have an instinct to avoid every
occasion of its mention,—if when you speak, she drops into silence
and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just so,
when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up
before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under
distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with
a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little
falsehood before you.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Idle talk.]
When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it flowed a steady stream, as when
one turns a faucet, that never ceases running till some hand turns it
back again.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Reverence the basis of faith.]
“Who cares?” said Candace,—“generate or unregenerate, it’s all one to
me; I believe a man dat _acts_ as he does. Him as stands up for de
poor,—him as pleads for de weak,—he’s my man. I’ll believe straight
through anyting he’s a mind to put at me.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mothers’ intuition.]
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No treatise on the laws
of nervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a better _rôle_ for
this morning, than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients
to break and ripple, by changing employments, that deep, deadly
undercurrent of thoughts which she feared might undermine her child’s
life.
OLDTOWN FOLKS
[Sidenote: Woman’s nature.]
It is a man’s nature to act, to do, and when nothing can be done, to
forget. It is a woman’s nature to hold on to what can only torture,
and live all her despairs over. Women’s tears are their meat; men
find the diet too salt, and won’t take it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Using knowledge.]
“My forte lies in picking knowledge out of other folks and using it,”
said Tina, joyously. “Out of the least little bit of ore that you dig
up, I can make no end of gold-leaf.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mothers’ work.]
“Ain’t the world hard enough without fightin’ babies, I want to know?
I hate to see a woman that don’t want to rock her own baby, and is
contriving ways all the time to shirk the care of it. Why, if all the
world was that way, there would be no sense in Scriptur’. ‘As one
whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,’ the Bible says,
takin’ for granted that mothers were made to comfort children and
give them good times when they are little.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The mother is every woman.]
“There’s no saying,” said Miss Mehitable, “you never know what you
may find in the odd corners of an old maid’s heart, when you fairly
look into them. There are often unused hoards of maternal affection
enough to set up an orphan asylum; but it’s like iron filings and a
magnet,—you must try them with a live child, and if there is anything
in ’em, you’ll find it out. That little object,” she said, looking
over her shoulder at Tina, “made an instant commotion in the dust
and rubbish of my forlorn old garret, brought to light a deal that
I thought had gone to the moles and the bats long ago. She will do
me good, I can feel, with her little pertnesses, and her airs and
fancies. If you could know how chilly and lonesome an old house gets
sometimes, particularly in autumn, when the equinoctial storm is
brewing! A lively child is a godsend, even if she turns the whole
house topsy-turvy.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Individuality.]
Tina had one of those rebellious heads of curls that every breeze
takes liberties with, and that have to be looked after, and watched,
and restrained. Esther’s satin bands of hair could pass through a
whirlwind and not lose their gloss. It is curious how character runs
even to the minutest thing,—the very hairs of our head are numbered
by it,—Esther, always and in everything self-poised, thoughtful,
reflective; Tina, the child of every wandering influence, tremulously
alive to every new excitement, a wind-harp for every air of heaven to
breathe upon.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A woman’s view.]
“The fact is, a man never sees a subject thoroughly till he sees
what a woman will think of it, for there is a woman’s view of every
subject, which has a different shade from a man’s view, and that
is what you and I have insensibly been absorbing in all our course
hitherto.”
PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
[Sidenote: Neighbor’s influence.]
Duty is never more formidable than when she gets on the cap and gown
of a neighbor.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Reserve.]
But it was not the little maiden’s way to speak when anything
thwarted or hurt her, but rather to fold all her feelings and
thoughts inward, as some insects, with fine gauzy wings, draw them
under a coat of horny concealment.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: True courage.]
That kind of innocent hypocrisy which is needed as a staple in the
lives of women who bridge a thousand awful chasms with smiling,
unconscious looks, and walk, singing and scattering flowers, over
abysses of fear, when their hearts are dying within them.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The reserve power of quietness.]
Pliable as she was to all outward appearances, the child had her own
still, interior world, where all her little notions and opinions
stood up, crisp and fresh, like flowers that grow in cool, shady
places. If anybody too rudely assailed a thought or suggestion she
put forth, she drew it back again into this quiet, inner chamber,
and went on. Reader, there are some women of this habit; there
is no independence and pertinacity of opinion like that of those
seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it is so easy to silence,
and so difficult to convince. Mara, little and unformed as she yet
was, belonged to the race of those spirits to whom is deputed the
office of the angel in the Apocalypse, to whom was given the golden
rod which measured the new Jerusalem. Infant though she was, she
had ever in her hands that invisible measuring rod, which she was
laying to the foundations of all actions and thoughts. There may,
perhaps, come a time when the saucy boy, who now steps so superbly,
and predominates so proudly in virtue of his physical strength and
daring, will learn to tremble at the golden measuring rod held in the
hand of a woman.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sweetness.]
“She’s got sweet ways and kind words for everybody, and it’s as good
as a psalm to look at her.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman’s life within.]
No man—especially one that is living a rough, busy, out-of-doors
life—can form the slightest conception of that veiled and secluded
life which exists in the heart of a sensitive woman, whose sphere is
narrow, whose external diversions are few, and whose mind, therefore,
acts by a continual introversion upon itself. They know nothing how
their careless words and actions are pondered and turned again in
weary, quiet hours of fruitless questioning. What did he mean by
this? and what did he mean by that?—while he, the careless buffalo,
meant nothing, or has forgotten what it was, if he did.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Girls’ confidences.]
“Come, now, can’t you jest tramp over to Pennel’s and tell Sallie I
want her?”
“Not I, mother. There ain’t but two gals in two miles square here,
an’ I ain’t a-goin’ to be the feller to shoo ’em apart. What’s the
use o’ bein’ gals, an’ young, an’ pretty, if they can’t get together
an’ talk about their new gowns an’ the fellers? That ar’s what gals
is for.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Maternal element in woman’s love.]
Her love for Moses had always had in it a large admixture of that
maternal and care-taking element, which, in some shape or other,
qualifies the affection of woman to man.
LITTLE FOXES.
[Sidenote: Tact.]
Some women are endowed with a tact for understanding human nature and
guiding it. They give a sense of largeness and freedom; they find a
place for every one, see at once what every one is good for, and are
inspired by nature with the happy wisdom of not wishing or asking of
any human being more than that human being was made to give. They
have the portion in due season for all: a bone for the dog; catnip
for the cat; cuttle-fish and hemp-seed for the bird; a book or review
for their bashful literary visitor; lively gossip for thoughtless
Miss Seventeen; knitting for grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and
gunpowder for Young Restless, whose beard is just beginning to
grow;—and they never fall into pets, because the canary-bird won’t
relish the dog’s bone, or the dog eat canary-seed, or young Miss
Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty’s review, or young Master Restless take
delight in knitting-work, or old grandmamma feel complacency in guns
and gunpowder.
Again, there are others who lay the foundations of family life so
narrow, straight, and strict, that there is room in them only for
themselves and people exactly like themselves; and hence comes much
misery.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Modern saints.]
Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping in ashes as
a means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a
woman once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes,
her scourges,—accept them, rejoice in them, smile and be quiet,
silent, patient, and loving under them,—and the convent can teach her
no more. She is a victorious saint.
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
[Sidenote: A help-meet.]
My wife resembles one of those convex mirrors I have sometimes seen.
Every idea I threw out, plain and simple, she reflected back upon
me in a thousand little glitters and twinkles of her own; she made
my crude conceptions come back to me in such perfectly dazzling
performances that I hardly recognized them.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A true home.]
How many, morally wearied, wandering, disabled, are healed and
comforted by the warmth of a true home! When a mother has sent her
son to the temptations of a distant city, what news is so glad to
her heart as that he has found some quiet family where he visits
often and is made to feel _at home_? How many young men have good
women saved from temptation and shipwreck, by drawing them often to
the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist—the wandering
genius who has lost his way in this world, and stumbles like a
child among hard realities,—the many men and women, who, while they
have houses, have no homes,—see from afar, in their distant, bleak
life-journey, the light of a true home-fire, and if made welcome
there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their
pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and
perfect work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not
seek to bolt the doors and draw the curtains; for they know not, and
will never know till the future life, of the good they may do by the
ministration of this great charity of home.
THE CHIMNEY CORNER.
[Sidenote: The art of home-making.]
She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married life who has
this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion can throw
back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details which
beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that which is
agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household matters to
make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated and refined
tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of unskilled
hands. From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will seduce
a man, even though the hair grow gray, and the merely physical charms
of early days gradually pass away. The enchantment that was about her
person alone in the days of courtship seems in the course of years
to have interfused and penetrated the _home_ which she has created,
and which in every detail is only an expression of her personality.
Her thoughts, her plans, her provident care, are everywhere; and the
_home_ attracts and holds by a thousand ties the heart which before
marriage was held by the woman alone.
THE MAYFLOWER.
[Sidenote: A perfect character.]
“Was she beautiful?” you ask. I also will ask one question: “If an
angel from heaven should dwell in human form, and animate any human
face, would not that face be lovely? It might not be _beautiful_,
but would it not be lovely?” She was not beautiful except after this
fashion.
How well I remember her, as she used sometimes to sit thinking, with
her head resting on her hand, her face mild and placid, with a quiet
October sunshine in her blue eyes, and an ever-present smile over her
whole countenance. I remember the sudden sweetness of look when any
one spoke to her; the prompt attention, the quick comprehension of
things before you uttered them, the obliging readiness to leave for
you whatever she was doing.
To those who mistake occasional pensiveness for melancholy, it
might seem strange to say that my Aunt Mary was always happy. Yet
she was so. Her spirits never rose to buoyancy, and never sunk
to despondency. I know that it is an article in the sentimental
confession of faith that such a character cannot be interesting. For
this impression there is some ground. The placidity of a medium,
commonplace mind is uninteresting, but the placidity of a strong
and well governed one borders on the sublime. Mutability of emotion
characterizes inferior orders of being; but He who combines all
interest, all excitement, all perfection, is “the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever.” And if there be anything sublime in the idea of
an Almighty Mind, in perfect peace itself, and, therefore, at leisure
to bestow all its energies on the wants of others, there is at least
a reflection of the same sublimity in the character of that human
being who has so quieted and governed the world within that nothing
is left to absorb sympathy or distract attention from those around.
Such a woman was my Aunt Mary. Her placidity was not so much the
result of temperament as of choice. She had every susceptibility of
suffering incident to the noblest and most delicate constitution of
mind; but they had been so directed that, instead of concentrating
thought on self, they had prepared her to understand and feel for
others.
She was, beyond all things else, a sympathetic person, and her
character, like the green in a landscape, was less remarkable for
what it was in itself than for its perfect and beautiful harmony with
all the coloring and shading around it.
Other women have had talents, others have been good; but no woman
that ever I knew possessed goodness and talent in union with such an
intuitive perception of feelings, and such a faculty of instantaneous
adaptation to them. The most troublesome thing in this world is to
be condemned to the society of a person who can never understand
anything you say unless you say the whole of it, making your commas
and periods as you go along; and the most desirable thing in the
world is to live with a person who saves you all the trouble of
talking by knowing just what you mean before you begin to speak.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman’s moral influence.]
“That word _delicacy_ is a charming cover-all in all these cases,
Florence. Now, here is a fine, noble-spirited young man, away from
his mother and sisters, away from any family friend who might care
for him, tempted, betrayed, almost to ruin, and a few words from you,
said as a woman knows how to say them, might be his salvation. But
you will coldly look on and see him go to destruction, because you
have too much delicacy to make the effort—like the man that would not
help his neighbor out of the water because he had never had the honor
of an introduction.”
“But, Edward, consider how peculiarly fastidious Elliot is—how
jealous of any attempt to restrain and guide him.”
“And just for that reason it is that _men_ of his acquaintance cannot
do anything with him. But what are you women made with so much tact
and power of charming for, if it is not to do these very things that
we cannot do? It is a delicate matter—true; and has not Heaven given
to you a fine touch and a fine eye for just such delicate matters?
Have you not seen, a thousand times, that what might be resented as
an impertinent interference on the part of a man comes to us as a
flattering expression of interest from the lips of a woman?”
PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY.
[Sidenote: Selfishness.]
That kind of woman can’t love. They are like cats, that want to be
stroked and caressed, and to be petted, and to lie soft and warm; and
they will purr to any one that will pet them,—that’s all. As for love
that leads to any self-sacrifice, they don’t begin to know anything
about it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Intuition.]
Now Grace had that perfect intuitive knowledge of just what the
matter was with her brother that women always have who have grown up
in intimacy with a man. These fine female eyes see farther between
the rough cracks and ridges of the oak-bark of manhood than men
themselves.
DEACON PITKIN’S FARM.
[Sidenote: The New England wife-mother.]
New England had of old times, and has still, perhaps, in her
farm-houses, these women who seem from year to year to develop in
the spiritual sphere as the bodily form shrinks and fades. While
the cheek grows thin and the form spare, the will-power grows daily
stronger; though the outer man perish, the inner man is renewed day
by day. The worn hand that seems so weak yet holds every thread and
controls every movement of the most complex family life, and wonders
are daily accomplished by the presence of a woman who seems little
more than a spirit. The New England wife-mother was the one little
jeweled pivot on which all the wheel-work of the family moved.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Suppression.]
It was not the first time that, wounded by a loving hand in this dark
struggle of life, she had suppressed the pain of her own hurt, that
he that had wounded her might the better forgive himself.
AGNES OF SORRENTO.
[Sidenote: True beauty.]
“A beautiful face is a kind of psalm Which makes one want to be good.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Forcing a daughter.]
“After all, sister, what need of haste? ’Tis a young bird yet. Why
push it out of the nest? When once it is gone you will never get it
back. Let the pretty one have her little day to play and sing and
be happy. Does she not make this garden a sort of Paradise with her
little ways and her sweet words? Now, my sister, these all belong to
you; but, once she is given to another, there is no saying what may
come. One thing only may you count on with certainty: that these dear
days when she is all day by your side and sleeps in your bosom all
night are over,—she will belong to you no more, but to a strange man
who hath neither toiled nor wrought for her, and all her pretty ways
and dutiful thoughts must be for him.”
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
[Sidenote: Beautiful old age.]
Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful, downy softness,
suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was
parted smoothly back from her high, placid forehead, on which time
had written no inscription except “Peace on earth, good will to men,”
and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving, brown eyes;
you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to
the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman’s
bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why
don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Exaction.]
It is a great mistake to suppose that a woman with no heart will
be an easy creditor in the exchange of affection. There is not on
earth a more merciless exactor of love from others than a thoroughly
selfish woman; and the more unlovely she grows, the more jealously
and scrupulously she exacts love to the uttermost farthing.
PALMETTO LEAVES.
[Sidenote: Character.]
A flower is commonly thought the emblem of a woman; and a woman
is generally thought of as something sweet, clinging, tender, and
perishable. But there are women flowers that correspond to the forest
magnolia,—high and strong, with a great hold of root and a great
spread of branches; and whose pulsations of heart and emotion come
forth like these silver lilies that illuminate the green shadows of
the magnolia forests.
POGANUC PEOPLE.
[Sidenote: “Turn about.”]
“Oh, land o’ Goshen, Dolly, what do you mind them boys for?” said
Nabby. “Boys is mostly hateful when girls is little; but we take our
turns by and by,” she said, with a complacent twinkle of her brown
eyes. “I make them stand ’round, I bet ye, and you will when you get
older.”
MY WIFE AND I.
[Sidenote: Woman’s spiritual power.]
My mother was one of that class of women whose power on earth seems
to be only the greater for being a spiritual and invisible one. The
control of such women over men is like that of the soul over the
body. The body is visible, forceful, obtrusive, self-asserting; the
soul, invisible, sensitive, yet with a subtile and vital power which
constantly gains control, and holds every inch that it gains.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Orderliness.]
Like a true little woman, she seemed to have nerves through all her
clothes, that kept them in order.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Woman and Christianity.]
The motherly instinct is in the hearts of all true women, and sooner
or later the true wife becomes a mother to her husband; she guides
him, cares for him, teaches him, and catechizes him, all in the
nicest way possible.... As for the soul-life, I believe it is woman
who holds faith in the world,—it is woman behind the wall, casting
oil on the fire that burns brighter and brighter, while the devil
pours on water; and you’ll never get Christianity out of the world
while there’s a woman in it.
WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS.
[Sidenote: Woman’s mission.]
“That’s what you women are for—at least such women as you. It’s your
mission to interpret differing natures—to bind, and blend, and unite.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Real conversation.]
That fine, skillful faculty of analysis and synthesis which forms the
distinctive interest of feminine conversation.