"Oh, what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices! Whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her will I follow," says Walt Whitman.
If you have ever loved a woman and you care to go back to May-time and try to analyze the why and the wherefore, you probably will not be able to locate the why and the wherefore, but this negative truth you will discover: you were not won by logic. Of course you admired the woman's intellect—it sort of matched your own, and in loving her you complimented yourself, for thus by love and admiration do we prove our kinship with the thing loved.
But intellect alone is too cold to fuse the heart. Something else is required, and for lack of a better word we call it "personality." This glowing, winning personality that inspires confidence and trust is a bouquet of virtues, the chief flower of which is Right Intent—honesty may be a bit old-fashioned, but do not try to leave it out.
George William Curtis and Starr King had a frank, wide-open, genuine quality that disarmed prejudice right at the start. And both were big enough so that they never bemoaned the fact that Fate had sent them to the University of Hard Knocks instead of matriculating them at Harvard.
I once heard George William Curtis speak at Saint James Hall, Buffalo, on Civil-Service Reform—a most appalling subject with which to hold a "popular audience." He was introduced by the Honorable Sherman S. Rogers, a man who was known for ten miles up the creek as the greatest orator in Erie County. After the speech of introduction, Curtis stepped to the front, laid on the reading-desk a bundle of manuscript, turned one page, and began to talk. He talked for two hours, and never once again referred to his manuscript—we thought he had forgotten it. He himself tells somewhere of Edward Everett doing the same. It is fine to have a thing and still show that you do not need it. The style of Curtis was in such marked contrast to the bluegrass article represented by Rogers that it seemed a rebuke. One was florid, declamatory, strong, full of reasons: the other was keyed low—it was so melodious, so gently persuasive, that we were thrown off our guard and didn't know we had imbibed rank heresy until we were told so the next day by a man who was not there. As the speaker closed, an old lady seated near me sighed softly, adjusted her Paisley shawl and said, "That was the finest address I ever heard, except one given in this very hall in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine by Starr King."
And I said, "Well, a speech that you can remember for twenty-five years must have been a good one!"
"It wasn't the address so much as the man," answered this mother in Israel, and she heaved another small sigh.
And therein did the good old lady drop a confession. I doubt me much whether any woman will remember any speech for a week—she just remembers the man.
And this applies pretty nearly as much to men, too. Is there sex in spirit? Hardly! Thoreau says the character of Jesus was essentially feminine. Herbert Spencer avers, "The high intuitive quality which we call genius is largely feminine in character." "Starr King was the child of his mother, and his best qualities were feminine," said the Reverend E. H. Chapin.