"I have thought it right to say all this to you, since I feel it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear that I must lose you. If your heart turn from me, I shall still love you; and I could no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had not spoken out."
What a noble pattern in that letter for us all! The electric power of her womanhood, which claimed the inmost being of every one with whom she came in contact, I can best express in the words of Emerson:—
"She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. She had drawn to her every superior young man or woman she had ever met; and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy. She extorted the secret of life which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow, and thus she had the best of those she saw. She lived in a superior circle; for people suppressed all their commonplaces in her presence. Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companion, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives."
When we remember this wealth of sympathy and appreciation, is it not sad to hear her say, no one ever gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a full confession?—that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would no doubt be tedious to such as she conversed with?
A bitter reproach to us women, certainly. What better could we do than listen, while she embellished her thought with all wealth and variety possible? And I quote the saying, because hers are not the only noble lips which have a right to repeat it. Could we but be patient listeners! In that way, we might educate powers of expression, and become possessed of wealth of which we have very little idea. What does such a saying record,—her egotism or our selfishness, her insatiable demand or our bankruptcy? We may well confess to mortification when we read; but it is not felt for her. Very beautiful is the conception of this Memoir of Margaret, this triune testimony of independent minds. We should be more grateful for the analytical skill shown in Emerson's contribution, did it not bear witness to power, rather than appreciation. We see, though he could not, what Margaret missed in her friend. She could not exempt the finest thinker she knew from the customary tribute; but he could not pay her in current coin,—only in some native ore, which it cost her much to make available at need. Some time may women write the lives of women! Why not warm thy scalpel, O philosopher! out of regard to what was once tender, quivering, human flesh? Rumor and prejudice carried the news of Margaret's faults far enough while she was living: what we need now is to send on the same wave the most abundant and satisfying proof of her goodness and genius. When great men speak of her, they should speak grandly, and find for what vulgar natures must misconceive, the noble and generous interpretation. I do not mean that SHE would have shrunk from the boldest statement of the truth. It was in her to invite it. "She could say," says Emerson, "as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, he appreciates me;" and he refers this saying to the "mountainous me" of hereditary organization, italicizing the offending monosyllable. But, in Margaret's mind, the emphasis lay quite as often on the word appreciates; and the statement was of a psychological fact, a superiority to vulgar prejudice, which laid some claim to her generous estimate in return. Ah! when those we love are gone for ever, their faults drop away, like the garment, which was of the earth, earthy; but to great and noble words, to heroic and womanly living, God has given a power of blessing far beyond the grave. We lost her at a moment when we could ill bear it,—when, instructed by the noble sympathies of Mazzini, softened by her own sweet and tender ministrations in Italian hospitals, revealed at length in loving beauty by a wife's and mother's experience, she might have come home the woman she had often made us dream of. We see the shadow of it all in that little picture which once hung on the walls of the Boston Athenæum; and, God willing, we shall yet encounter the glad reality beyond the reach of tempests, beyond the need of wreck, lifted into true deserving of so great a privilege on the broad ocean of an Infinite Love!
Florence Nightingale is no exception in the history of her sex, only a consummate flower of its daily bloom. Ever since the commencement of the Christian era, whole armies of women have devoted themselves, not for a few years only, like Florence Nightingale, but for their whole lives long, to the same painful duties,—women who organized their bands with an efficiency and thoroughness, felt to this very day, and which made them the competent instructors of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. The holiest vocation fails to instruct the unprepared mind. The soil of the nineteenth century is fallow; but in the year 385 a saintly woman traversed those same Crimean shores. Of her it was written:—
"She was marvellous debonaire and piteous to them that were sicke and comforted them, and served them right humbly, and gave them largely to eat, such as they asked; but to herself she was hard in her sickness and scarce, for she refused to eat flesh, how well she gave it to others, and also to drink wine. She was oft by them that were sicke, and she laid the pillows aright and in point, and she rubbed their feet, and boiled water to wash them; and it seemed to her that the less she did to the sicke in service, so much the less service did she to God, and deserved the less mercy; therefore she was to them piteous, and nothing to herself."
The Church canonized this woman, who carried her own substance to the work in which the British Government sustained Florence Nightingale so many centuries later; but the public mind was not prepared, so the world has never rung to the name of Santa Paula.