Surely, here, with this body and this constitution rivalling that body and that constitution, I am doomed to an inferiority more slavish and scarcely less painful than that I have left behind. For identity of career, identity of powers. Nature does nothing inductively; does not fit the parts of her scheme to each other experimentally; works at the centre, in the sublime repose of certainty, and lets facts, experiences, possibilities at the circumference take care of themselves. She has made man to dominate this kingdom which he calls his, else should I have had my share in it from the first. Wherein she has differed me from him, she has also differed my real kingdom from his. To stop him, I require as much and no more than man possesses. What is over in kind would place me in false relations with the objective; what is more in degree would imperil my subjective peace—what is less would try me by the measure another is made for, and leave me in the shadow projected by him. Nor would the standards which prevail here harmonize with my spiritual more happily than the activities with my corporeal nature. Could I work for outward success only, or chiefly, subordinating aspiration to what stifles aspiration? Would riches satisfy me? Would actual power over men, ecclesiastical, civil, or social? Could I live for ambition, and sit down unapproved of my better life to enjoy its achievements? Would the acquisition of knowledge and its employment as a means of worldly power, distinction, and advantage satisfy the inner hunger which longs for the truth, the light, the harmony of highest heavens? In short, would so much of the flesh as I could gratify, so much of the world as I could conquer, so much devil's service as I could cover up with any patched robe of decency, drawn tight, stretched to its utmost reach, satisfy me? Truly not. Not here then is Beulah, and I must journey on.
Again, whither? This time whither my own nature leads. I have learned this by experience, that leadership for me lies not without, but within myself. So much is gained, and now once more for movement. Gather up the effects—all that we have brought with us out of the past: it will find use. For woman has been woman so far as she has been anything, and the aromas of that high estate have hung and still hang about her. Bear them along. The finest effluence of her life in the first century of our era, as in this last, was love. Mary then bore the Christ; other Mary's loved him. Woman was first in his life, and last in it. When the bearded magi adored, she loved; she was the illustrator of his teachings, the repository of his hopes for their future realization. Bring all those memories, visions, yearnings, trusts, faiths—dreams of the good, never yet seen but by the inner sight of the woman-soul,—along, and let us set out for Beulah. Its blooming fields and fair mountains lie dim but sweet on the distant horizon. We will go over and possess them—a kingdom of our own. Why have we waited so long in bondage and darkness? Why submitted to the heaped-up wrongs of the ages? Patience very excellent: once admit the idea of a scheme, and some parts must necessarily arrive in the afternoon. Development presupposes the delay or withholding of things not yet developed. By the law of climax, these are not the unimportant parts. Woman's sovereignty has been long deferred, because of the preparation necessary for it. A John the Baptist must precede the Christ in the wilderness. Fiends robed and sceptred, once reigned over fiends clothed in skins and armed with broadsword and battle axe. To-day a gentleman, or gentlewoman can sit secure on any throne of Christendom. While we congratulate ourselves, let us not deny that the Tamerlanes, the Alarics, the Napoleons have had their share in the intermediate work of preparation.
Not always, as it seems to us, do the swiftest and clearest methods find favor with these hard-pressed worthies, but rather such methods as they can employ; and in time, as we see, the work gets done.
Take our planet in the condition in which its first proprietor found it on his arrival, and you will see that the improvements would be a heavy item in transactions with a real-estate broker for it. Liberal governments established—Canton, Paris, London, New York built—grain fields, mills, patent offices, world's fairs, electric telegraphs, ocean steamers, iron-clads, Central Park, show a long road travelled, and much rough, terrible, fearful work done by the way—work which has developed a condition for the exercise of the fine sovereignty of woman's pure, gentle, loving, harmonious nature—road which leads by divine intention to her empire. If the hand which has opened it has been red at times, let us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the Thermopylæ—if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf, when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages—to whose harvest we are drawing nigh.
The sceptre of Supreme Use on the earth is to the hand that is sovereign for that use. In its day every other power is subordinate to that, for it is the nature of sovereignty to be unitary, whether lodged in an idea or a person. It is because of this that personal sovereignty has been indispensable to human progress. Nothing could reign over the strong, undeveloped, turbulent brute life of the early and middle ages but the tremendous will and self-love of a man great according to his time—Charlemagne, Peter of Russia, Henry of Navarre.
And shall we complain that a development is slow which began with a Soudanese, a Papuan, and gives us now a Ruskin and an Emerson—that a career is tedious which opened, if you please, on Ararat, and has trailed its waxing splendors up to the Free American States—the libraries, the art galleries, the penetrating humanities which characterize the nineteenth century? For one, I cannot. Beulah has stood adjourned from Eden till now—wisely, needfully adjourned; and woman will enter its boundaries gratefully and gracefully, as a queen waited for and desired: grateful for the gift to the One who gave it in the Great Distribution—graceful in the reception of a right from him whose ages of struggle have made smooth her road to it.
What will she be therein? What will her life be? I close my eyes to the Actual around me, and I see her in that high land whose plains spread above the mountain peaks that surround us here. I see a creature whom the poets have sung, the artists have painted and chiselled, and the common heart of mankind has longed for, prayed for, and, in its hours of high communion, has trusted and believed in with the utter faith of a child in its mother's love. I see a being whom the pure, divine Imagination, the eye of God dimmed in man, has foreseen.
I see her not a dream—not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring, very real, very practical embodiment of the poet's ideal, with new powers and relations illustrating its harmony in and fitness for the world that is purified and sanctified by its presence. There to my eye
'Her shape arises:
She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever;
The gross and soiled she moves among do not make her gross and soiled;
She knows the thoughts as she passes—nothing is concealed from her;
She is none the less considerate or friendly therefore;
She is the best beloved—it is without exception—she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear;
Oaths, quarrels, hiccupped songs, proposals, smutty expressions, are idle to her as she passes;
She is silent—she is possessed of herself—they do not offend her;
She receive them as the laws of nature receives them—she is strong;
She, too, is a law of nature—there is no law stronger than she is.'
I look beneath, the ethereal drapery of qualities in which the prophetic imagination has clothed her, and central to them all I find a new phenomenon—the latest of the ages—True womanhood. From this proceeds the veiled glory hitherto seen but by poet's eye—not far hence to be felt and known of all. For it is no longer the vision of a distant and dim land, separated from this actual present by a fathomless abyss. Out of the yawning chasm that has divided that from this there rise to-day, clear, shining, visible to open eyes, the everlasting pillars of truth, which will shortly bridge it and make broad the road thither, so that neither he who walks straight with exact step between the pales of science, nor he outside wending, heedless, with wide-wandering eyes and feet who stumbles along, shall miss it.