More recently, Maria Brooks, called in "The Doctor" Maria del Occidente, burst upon the world with "Zophiel," that splendid piece of imagination and passion which stands, the vindication of the subtlety, power and comprehension of the genius of woman, justifying by comparison, the skepticism of Lamb when he suggested, to the author of "The Excursion," whether the sex had "ever produced any thing so great." Of our living and more strictly contemporary female poets, we mention with unhesitating pride Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. Hewett, Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Welby, Alice Carey, "Edith May," Miss Lynch, and Miss Clarke, as poets of a genuine inspiration, displaying native powers and capacities in art such as in all periods have been held sufficient to insure to their possessors lasting fame, and to the nations which they adorned, the most desirable glory.
It is Longfellow who says,
——"What we admire in a woman,
Is her affection, not her intellect."
The sentiment is unworthy a poet, the mind as well as the heart claims sympathy, and there is no sympathy but in equality; we need in woman the completion of our own natures; that her finer, clearer, and purer vision should pierce for us the mysteries that are hidden from our own senses, strengthened, but dulled, in the rude shocks of the out-door world, from which she is screened, by her pursuits, to be the minister of God to us: to win us by the beautiful to whatever in the present life or the immortal is deserving a great ambition. We care little for any of the mathematicians, metaphysicians, or politicians, who, as shamelessly as Helen, quit their sphere. Intellect in woman, so directed, we do not admire, and of affection such women are incapable. There is something divine in woman, and she whose true vocation it is to write, has some sort of inspiration, which relieves her from the processes and accidents of knowledge, to display only wisdom in all the range of gentleness, and all the forms of grace. The equality of the sexes is one of the absurd questions which have arisen from a denial of the distinctions of their faculties and duties—of the masculine energy from the feminine refinement. The ruder sort of women cannot comprehend that there is a distinction, not of dignity, but of kind; and so, casting aside their own eminence, for which they are too base, and seeking after ours, for which they are too weak, they are hermaphroditish disturbers of the peace of both. In the main our American women are free from this reproach; they have known their mission, and have carried on the threads of civility through the years, so strained that they have been melodiously vocal with every breath of passion from the common heart. We turn from the jar of senates, from politics, theologies, philosophies, and all forms of intellectual trial and conflict, to that portion of our literature which they have given us, coming like dews and flowers after glaciers and rocks, the hush of music after the tragedy, silence and rest after turmoil of action. The home where love is refined and elevated by intellect, and woman, by her separate and never-superfluous or clashing mental activity, sustains her part in the life-harmony, is the vestibule of heaven to us; and there we hear the poetesses repeat the songs to which they have listened, when wandering nearer than we may go to the world in which humanity shall be perfect again, by the union in all of all power and goodness and beauty.
The finest intelligence that woman has in our time brought to the ministry of the beautiful, is no longer with us. Frances Sargent Osgood died in New-York, at fifteen minutes before three o'clock, in the afternoon of Sunday, the twelfth of May, 1850. These words swept like a surge of sadness wherever there was grace and gentleness, and sweet affections. All that was in her life was womanly, "pure womanly," and so is all in the undying words she left us. This is her distinction.
Mrs. Osgood was of a family of poets. Mrs. Anna Maria Wells, whose abilities are illustrated in a volume of "Poems and Juvenile Sketches" published in 1830, is a daughter of her mother; Mrs. E.D. Harrington, the author of various graceful compositions in verse and prose, is her youngest sister; and Mr. A.A. Locke, a brilliant and elegant writer, for many years connected with the public journals, was her brother. She was a native of Boston, where her father, Mr. Joseph Locke, was a highly accomplished merchant. Her earlier life, however, was passed principally in Hingham, a village of peculiar beauty, well calculated to arouse the dormant poetry of the soul; and here, even in childhood, she became noted for her poetical powers. In their exercise she was rather aided than discouraged by her parents, who were proud of her genius and sympathized with all her aspirations. The unusual merit of some of her first productions attracted the notice of Mrs. Child, who was then editing a Juvenile Miscellany, and who foresaw the reputation which her young contributor afterwards acquired. Employing the nomme de plume of "Florence," she made it widely familiar by her numerous contributions in the Miscellany, as well as, subsequently, for other periodicals.
In 1834, she became acquainted with Mr. S.S. Osgood, the painter—a man of genius in his profession—whose life of various adventure is full of romantic interest; and while, soon after, she was sitting for a portrait, the artist told her his strange vicissitudes by sea and land; how as a sailor-boy he had climbed the dizzy maintop in the storm; how, in Europe he followed with his palette in the track of the flute-playing Goldsmith: and among the
Antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,
of South America, had found in pictures of the crucifixion, and of the Liberator Bolivar—the rude productions of his untaught pencil—passports to the hearts of the peasant, the partizan, and the robber. She listened, like the fair Venetian; they were married, and soon after went to London, where Mr. Osgood had sometime before been a pupil of the Royal Academy.