“... beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face ...
And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height ...
The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend,
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.”
—(“Poems of the Imagination”).
_Id._... “My hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by
every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.
There is so much for us yet to come, so much to be gathered, and
enjoyed. Not for you or me, now, but for our race, who will ultimately
use this magical secret for their happiness. Earth holds secrets enough
to give them the life of the fabled Immortals. My heart is fixed firm
and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer,
the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into
man’s existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their
glory.... He is indeed despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal
life of man. Not to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.”—R.
Jefferies (“The Pageant of Summer”).
7, 8.—“... _mould their dreams of love, with conscious skill
To human living types_ ...”
“Her Brain enlabyrinths the whole heaven of her bosom and loins
To put in act what her Heart wills.”
—William Blake (“Jerusalem”).
“These states belong so purely to the inner nature; are so deeply hidden
beneath the strata of what we call the inner life, even, that only
women, and of these, only such as have become self-acquainted, through
seeing the depths within the depths of their own consciousness, can
fully comprehend all that is meant in the words a ‘Purposed Maternity.’
I use them in their highest sense, meaning not the mere purpose of
satisfying the maternal instincts, which the quadruped feels and acts
from, as well as the human being, but the intelligent, artistic purpose
(to which the maternal instinct is a fundamental motive), to act in
harmony with Nature in producing the most perfect being which the powers
and resources employed, can bring forth.... It is probable that we
shall, ere long, arrive at truer views of maternity everywhere; and when
we do, I think it will be seen that the office has a sacredness in
Nature’s eyes above all other offices, and that she reserves for it the
finest of her vital forces, powers, susceptibilities, and means of every
sort.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 385; Vol. I.,
p. 93).
[It has been an intense delight to come upon these and the other words
and thoughts of Eliza W. Farnham; “blazes” or axe-marks of this previous
pioneer in the same exploration. It is only since completing the whole
of the verses that the writer has found the passages quoted from Mrs.
Farnham’s work, and deduces a not unnatural confirmation of the mutually
shared views, from the singular concord and unanimity of their
expression.]
8.—“... _supreme of form and will_.”
“The changes that have come over us in our social life during the past
two decades are, in many respects, remarkable, but in no particular are
they so remarkable as in the physical training and education of
women....
“The results of this social change have been on the whole beneficial
beyond expectation. The health of women generally is improving under the
change; there is amongst women generally less bloodlessness, less of
what the old fiction-writers called swooning; less of lassitude, less of
nervousness, less of hysteria, and much less of that general debility to
which, for want of a better term, the words ‘_malaise_’ and ‘languor’
have been applied. Woman, in a word, is stronger than she was in olden
time. With this increase of strength woman has gained in development of
body and of limb. She has become less distortioned. The curved back, the
pigeon-shaped chest, the disproportioned limb, the narrow feeble trunk,
the small and often distorted eyeball, the myopic eye, and puny
ill-shaped external ear—all these parts are becoming of better and more
natural _contour_. The muscles are also becoming more equally and more
fully developed, and with these improvements, there are growing up
amongst women models who may, in due time, vie with the best models that
old Greek culture has left for us to study in its undying art.”—Dr.
Richardson (“The Young Woman,” Oct., 1892).
_Id._—“... prophetic scenes,
Spiritual projections ...
In one, the sacred parturition scene,
A happy, painless mother births a perfect child.”
—Walt Whitman (“Autumn Rivulets”).
_Id._... “I am so rapt in the beauty of the human form, and so
earnestly, so inexpressibly prayerful to see that form perfect, that
my full thought is not to be written.... It is absolutely
incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable
to the exclusion of deformities.... When the ambition of the multitude
is fixed on the ideal form and beauty, then that ideal will become
immediately possible, and a marked advance towards it could be made in
three generations.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp.
32, 151, 131).
_Id._...
“‘The Gods?’ In yourselves will ye see them, when Venus shall favour
your love,
And man, fitly mated with woman, believes that his love is divine:
When passion shall elevate woman to something so holy and grand
That she—the ideal enraptured—shall ne’er be a check upon Man,
Then the children they bear will be holy, and beauty shall make them her
own,
And man in the eyes of his neighbour will gaze on the reflex divine
Of the God he inclines to in spirit—or trace in each feature and limb
The lines which the body inherits from souls which are noble and true.
Would thou couldst feel in deep earnest, how beautiful God will be then,
When we see Him as Jove or Apollo in men who inspire us with love,
As Juno and Venus the holy, in women who know not the mean,
And feel not the influence cruel of hardness and self-love and scorn.
Would thou couldst once know how real the presence of God will become,
How earnest and ever more earnest thy faith when thyself shall be great,
And from the true worship of others thoult learn what is holy in them,
And rise to the infinite fountain of glory which flows in us all.”
—C. G. Leland (“The Return of the Gods”).