The True Woman | Page 5

moments are to all of priceless value. Whoever meets this want is a boon from God. No matter what the complexion, nor how the features seem: soul meets soul. The heart feels a new life. The union is formed. _Call it affinity, or what you will_, they love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold. This includes home sympathies and household wisdom. Such fellowship makes of home a joy, and of toil a delight. When first the joy is reached, a foretaste of heaven is enjoyed. "For it is the one rift of heaven which makes all heaven appear possible; the ecstasy of hope and faith, out of which grows the love which is our strongest mortal instinct and intimation of immortality."
Women are as conscious of this feeling as are men. There are times when women meet their counterpart. The nature they long for and seek after with unutterable longing, is before them. Finding it, they recognize their lord, under whose protection they take shelter, and to whose rule they submit, because of love which masters and controls them. The heart cries out for a person--not for things. Spirit desires spirit; soul yearns for soul. It is the genius of woman to be electrical in movement, intuitive in penetration, and spiritual in tendency. She excels not so easily in classification or recreation as in an instinctive seizure of causes, and a simple breathing out of what she receives, that has the singleness of life, rather than the selecting and energizing of art. More native is it to her to be the living model of the artist, than to set apart from herself any one form in objective reality. More native to inspire and receive the poem than to create it. In so far as soul is in her completely developed, all soul is the same; but in so far as it is modified in her as woman, it flows, it breathes, it sings, rather than deposits soil, or furnishes work; and that which is especially feminine, flushes in blossom the face of the earth, and pervades, like air and water, all this seeming solid globe, daily renewing and purifying its life. Such is the especial feminine element which man desires as a helper, and which is suited to him, and which compels him to exclaim, "O, my God, give it to me for mine!"
It is said, "A woman will sometimes idealize a very inferior man, until her love for him exalts him into something better than he originally was, and her into little short of an angel; but a man almost invariably drops to the level of the woman he is in love with. He cannot raise her; but she can almost unlimitedly deteriorate him." This was true of Adam. Eve, sinning, brought him to her level. Why this should be, Heaven knows; but so it constantly is. We have but to look around us, with ordinary observation, in order to see that a man's destiny, more than even a woman's, depends far less upon the good or ill fortune of his wooing than upon the sort of woman with whom he falls in love.
Before a man loves, he is under obligations to himself, to his future, and to the world, to ask himself, Is this woman suited to me? Will she help me to fulfil my mission? Does she supply my want? Can I recognize her as God's gift to me? If Yes, then he is right in loving; for
"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch, And win or lose it all."
A woman, writing of woman, has truly said, "There are but two ways open to any woman. If she loves a man, and he does not love her, to give him up may be a horrible pang and loss; but it cannot be termed a sacrifice: she resigns what she never had. But if he does love her, and she knows it, and if she loves him, she has a right, in spite of the whole world, to hold to him till death do them part. She is bound to marry him, though twenty other women loved him, and broke their hearts in loving him. He is not theirs, but hers; and to have her for his wife is his right and her duty." "And in this world are so many contradictory views of duty and exaggerated notions of light, so many false sacrifices and remunerations, weak even to wickedness, that it is but fair sometimes to uphold the right of love,--love sole, absolute, and paramount,--firmly holding its own, and submitting to nothing and no one, except the laws of God and righteousness." Well and truthfully spoken. Lift up