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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
shrink, because, if they express themselves on such subjects with sucient force
and clearness to do any good, they are exposed to assaults whose vulgarity makes
them painful. In intercourse with such a woman, he had shared her indignation at
the base injustice, in many respects, and in many regions done to the sex; and been
led to think of it far more than ever before. He seemed to think that he might some
time write upon the subject. That his aid is withdrawn from the cause is a subject
of great regret, for on this question, as on others, he would have known how to sum
up the evidence and take, in the noblest spirit, middle ground. He always furnished
a platform on which opposing parties could stand, and look at one another under
the inuence of his mildness and enlightened candor.
Two younger thinkers, men both, have uttered noble prophecies, auspicious
for woman. Kinmont, all whose thoughts tended towards the establishment of the
reign of love and peace, thought that the inevitable means of this would be an
increased predominance given to the idea of woman. Had he lived longer to see
the growth of the peace party, the reforms in life and medical practice which seek
to substitute water for wine and drugs, pulse for animal food, he would have been
conrmed in his view of the way in which the desired changes are to be eected.
In this connection I must mention Shelley , who, like all men of genius, shared
the feminine development, and unlike many, knew it. His life was one of the rst
pulse-beats in the present reform-growth. He, too, abhorred blood and heat,
and, by his system and his song, tended to reinstate a plant-like gentleness in the
development of energy. In harmony with this his ideas of marriage were lofty, and
of course no less so of woman, her nature, and destiny.
For woman, if by a sympathy as to outward condition, she is led to aid the
enfranchisement of the slave, must no less so, by inward tendency, to favor
measures which promise to bring the world more thoroughly and deeply into
harmony with her nature. When the lamb takes place of the lion as the emblem of
nations, both women and men will be as children of one spirit, perpetual learners
of the word and doers thereof, not hearers only.
A writer in a late number of the New York Pathnder, in two articles headed
“Femality,” has uttered a still more pregnant word than any we have named. He
views woman truly from the soul, and not from society, and the depth and leading
of his thoughts is proportionably remarkable. He views the feminine nature as a
harmonizer of the vehement elements, and this has often been hinted elsewhere;
but what he expresses most forcibly is the lyrical, the inspiring and inspired
apprehensiveness of her being.
Had I room to dwell upon this topic, I could not say anything so precise, so
near the heart of the matter, as may be found in that article; but, as it is, I can only
indicate, not declare, my view.
There are two aspects of woman’s nature, expressed by the ancients as Muse
and Minerva. It is the former to which the writer in the Pathnder looks. It is the
latter which Wordsworth has in mind, when he says,
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