A very remarkably superior woman, but without quick, external perceptive faculties to give her insight into character, mistook a handsome, unprincipled brute for a man and gentleman. What she endured for six months after her marriage could not be written. When she found herself enciente, for the sake of the child she sought refuge with an humble friend at a distance from her unhappy home. Being pinched for means, she earned money by her needle, endeavoring, at the same time, to banish from her memory the recollection of her late cruel experience.
Day after day this regal woman sat sewing with Elizabeth Browning’s poems open on a chair beside her committing to memory the most interior of those religious strains as she stitched, stitched in the solitude of the low-roofed cottage by the river. No exhilarating rides on horseback, such as had been her wont, no genial, social company, no brisk walks and happy communion with nature, were possible in her peculiar circumstances. She must forego the healthy, harmonious, external life of her past, and live solely within the inmost chambers of her soul.
At two years old the little girl born of these untoward conditions was lovely, large-eyed, thoughtful, considerate, and tender in her ways as any lady. “Where are your wings, Mary?” said a gentleman who noticed the radiant face at the mother’s garden gate. For these seemed only necessary to prove her a seraph.
Alas! to her mother’s infinite sorrow, she very soon departed to more blissful realms. The constantly repressed emotions of her mother, and her sedentary life, had caused an imperfect action of the lungs, and a low vital tone generally. Grief shortens the breathing as joy expands the lungs. Little Mary was extremely narrow-chested, with sloping shoulders, and hence quite unable to supply sufficient sustenance for so very large a brain, whose weight she bent under, and died, shortly after completing her second year, of acute hydrocephalus.
[BEAUTY.]
Beauty of form and feature should not be, as it is now, exceptional. It should be the rule. And there will come a time when parents will be held as much responsible for an ill-favored, ungainly child, as they are beginning to be for their dishonest or vicious children.
The English nobility are celebrated the world over for personal beauty and elegant manners. What cause or causes lie back of this significant fact?
So far as manners are concerned, we know that they are the result of generations of culture, confirmed by generations of use. They suppose leisure and good manners for company, as Emerson has suggested. The bustle and hurry of the work-a-day-world afford no room for polished manners, and only when co-operation shall have taken the place of our present wasteful and cruel competition, shall we have time for graceful living. Hard labor and worry will in time wear out the most charming and inbred politeness.
With regard to the personal beauty of the class alluded to, let us turn to its past—the past of this hereditary nobility. The blood which held courage, self-respect, and the ability to control others, deserved in a sense the deference and admiration it commanded. Then, as these qualities, in themselves and their retroactive effects, favored the production of the more masculine and striking forms of beauty, that type was repeated through successive generations until in the later times it has been modified by the increasing deference to human rights, and refined by intellectual and moral culture. The hereditary transmission of superior personal traits was the more certain because the wife of the lord was a lady, and the wife of the duke a duchess, and as lady and duchess, they believed that the very marrow in their bones excelled in worth that of every man and woman ranking below them in the social scale. And this saved them from the belittling consciousness so debasing to their children, that, as women, they were inferior to men.