(_Last of the Parentheses_.)
Yes, that was my last walk with the _schoolmistress_. It happened to be
the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young woman,
who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor, and she was
provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the school-mistress that I
walked with, but--Let us not be in unseemly haste. I shall call her the
schoolmistress still; some of you love her under that name.
----When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side, there
was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I pitied our
landlady. It took her all of a suddin,--she said. Had not known that we
was keepin' company, and never mistrusted anything partic'lar. Ma'am
was right to better herself. Didn't look very rugged to take care of a
family, but could get hired haälp, she calc'lated.--The great maternal
instinct came crowding up in her soul just then, and her eyes wandered
until they settled on her daughter.
----No, poor, dear woman,--that could not have been. But I am dropping
one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile on my face
all the time.
The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out of
flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen
and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there
is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of
putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air
from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. _Laus Deo_] There
comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even
than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were
made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent
bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its
fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked
out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent
walls;--her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no
riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book
of Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a
torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call
Civilization!
Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain, overdressed,
mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young person, whoever you
may be, now reading this,--little thinking you are what I describe, and
in blissful unconsciousness that you are destined to the lingering
asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such multitudes worthier than
yourself. But it is only my surface-thought which laughs. For that
great procession of the UNLOVED, who not only wear the crown of thorns,
but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray,--under the snowy
cap, under the chilling turban,--hide it even from themselves,--perhaps
never know they wear it, though it kills them,--there is no depth of
tenderness in my nature that Pity has not sounded.
Somewhere,--somewhere,--love is in store for them,--the universe must
not be allowed to fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the
small, half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons
seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our
dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their
God-given instincts!
Read what the singing-women--one to ten thousand of the suffering
women--tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature is in
earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough lying in the
next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate stones at their head
and feet, for whom it was just as true that "all sounds of life assumed
one tone of love," as for Letitia Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning
said it; but she could give words to her grief, and they could
not.--Will you hear a few stanzas of mine?