Life’s light, without life’s warmth to cheer.”
Woman is constitutionally sympathetic. She delights, unbidden, to soothe the sorrows of the distressed. When that celebrated traveller, John Ledyard, approached the frontier of Poland, after his arbitrary detention in Russia, he exclaimed, “Thank heaven! petticoats appear, and the glimmering of other features.” Women are the sure harbingers of an alteration in manners. All succumb to their irresistible influence: the “divine ichor,” as Homer calls it, mounts the stolid brain, and intoxicates both rich and poor, philosopher and clown. Elsewhere he says, “I have observed among all nations, that the women ornament themselves more than the men; that wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest.” The adventurous traveller further remarks, “I never addressed myself in the language of decency and friendship to a woman, whether civilized or savage, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. With man, it has been often otherwise. In wandering over the barren plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the wide-spread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so; and, to add to this virtue, so worthy of the appellation of benevolence, these actions have been performed in so free and kind a manner, that if I was dry, I drank the sweet draught, and if hungry ate the coarse morsel, with a double relish.”
Park, the African traveller, experienced much kindness from females in the wilds of that country, and is no less vehement in their praise. The men robbed him, and stripped him, and left him to die; but the women pitied the fatigued and hungry man, and sang, as they prepared his food, a touching extempore melody, of which the refrain was, “Pity the poor white man, no mother has he.” Yes, as the poet has well sung:
“Woman all exceeds
In ardent sanctitude, in pious deeds;
And chief in woman charities prevail,
That soothe when sorrows or disease assail;
As dropping balm medicinal instils
Health when we pine, her tears alleviate ills,
And the moist emblems of her pity flow,