Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
going. They guessed aright, “To see your mother.” “Yes,” said he, “she is ninetytwo,
but has good eye-sight still, they say. I’ve not seen her these forty years, and I
thought I could not die in peace without.” I should have liked his picture painted as
a companion piece to that of a boisterous little boy, whom I saw attempt to declaim
at a school exhibition.
O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last. [William Cowper]
He got but very little way before sudden tears shamed him from the stage.
Some gleams of the same expression which shone down upon his infancy,
angelically pure and benign, visit man again with hopes of pure love, of a holy
marriage. Or, if not before, in the eyes of the mother of his child they again are
seen, and dim fancies pass before his mind, that woman may not have been born
for him alone, but have come from heaven, a commissioned soul, a messenger of
truth and love.
In gleams, in dim fancies, this thought visits the mind of common men. It is
soon obscured by the mists of sensuality, the dust of routine, and he thinks it was
only some meteor or ignis fatuus that shone. But, as a Rosicrucian lamp, it burns
unwearied, though condemned to the solitude of tombs. And, to its permanent life,
as to every truth, each age has, in some form, borne witness. For the truths, which
visit the minds of careless men only in tful gleams, shine with radiant clearness
into those of the poet, the priest, and the artist.
Whatever may have been the domestic manners of the ancient nations, the
idea of woman was nobly manifested in their mythologies and poems, where she
appeared as Sita in the Ramayana , a form of tender purity, in the Egyptian Isis , of
divine wisdom never yet surpassed. In Egypt, too, the Sphynx , walking the earth with
lion tread, looked out upon its marvels in the calm, inscrutable beauty of a virgin’s
face, and the Greek could only add wings to the great emblem. In Greece, Ceres and
Proserpine , signicantly termed “the goddesses,” were seen seated, side by side.
They needed not to rise for any worshipper or any change; they were prepared for
all things, as those initiated to their mysteries knew. More obvious is the meaning
of those three forms, the Diana , Minerva , and Vesta . Unlike in the expression of
their beauty, but alike in this,—that each was self-sucing. Other forms were only
accessories and illustrations, none the complement to one like these. Another might
indeed be the companion, and the Apollo and Diana set o one another’s beauty. Of
the Vesta, it is to be observed, that not only deep-eyed deep-discerning Greece, but
ruder Rome, who represents the only form of good man (the always busy warrior)
that could be indierent to woman, conded the permanence of its glory to a tutelary
goddess, and her wisest legislator spoke of Meditation as a nymph.
In Sparta, thought, in this respect as all others, was expressed in the characters
of real life, and the women of Sparta were as much Spartans as the men. The
Citoyen, Citoyenne, of France, was here actualized. Was not the calm equality they
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