it, working rather about the fancy than winding around the heart. Bulwer is too fond of sentiment-hunting to become a true painter of woman. His philosophy is too obtrusive. We see the crushing, and whirling, and rolling, and rushing of the mental machinery, and have no eyes for the unequal results. Still his Madeline, Alice, and Ione will be long remembered, and would be always remembered were they not so like machines, wound up to work upon a motive. Moore is the poet of Passion. His women are the slaves of the lover rather than of the feeling. They are all on fire with love, but they have no self-communion. It is the worship of the senses, not of the soul, and is therefore robbed of the immortality which belongs only to the purity of Truth. For Beauty dies, and with it Passion, but Love lives on for ever. Byron has described woman as a hero speaks of a conquered country. She is a beautiful ruin. You think of the glorious freshness that once dwelt there. The Destroyer has scattered the fire of the hearth, has thrown down the urn from the altar. They stand like the dismantled fortresses of a ravaged land, dishonoured and alone. His Zuleika, his Theresa, his Haidée, his Gulbeyaz, his Ianthe, his Gulnare, are all beautiful, his Medora the most beautiful of all; but they are all fitter for the Seraglio of the Moslem than the Home of the Christian. The Dawn and Death of Passion in Byron were worthy him. The "Mary" of his bright youth, when he was so much wiser than experienced, when he knew innocence to be of all virtues the maidenliest, and purity the manliest. She made the bright hour in his day that here and there lit up with regretful thought in his after existence those burning records of disappointed love-his Dramas and his Tales. After this there were many Adas; no Myrra, until the last year or two of his melancholy life-for the mirth of lust is the saddest music in the world. Ere the world's curtain fell around him, the Italian Countess-poor beside the pure English girl-but still a thousand times better than he sought or wrought for, came as the spirit which God always sends to redeem Genius-witness the ten thousand Dead. She drew the wassail cup from his hand, and plucked off the fool's mask, made him think and feel again, and gave him Greece for his shroud. How meanly ought we to think of ourselves when we see the boy, whose mind was full of the patriotism of Wallace and the chivalry of Douglas-treading their hills and making echo ring with their voices, yet living afterwards, content with slothful Venice for his couch. Wordsworth, the patriarch of living poesie, has lived so in the calm of thought, has lain down his heart so entirely in his home, that we knew nothing of his Ideal. Happy in his realizing where almost every other Bard has only sung and suffered, he has exchanged the Lyre for the Organ. His briefest song is as a sacred voluntary, emphatic with some world-wide truth. That he thought nobly of woman, the heroine of his "White Doe" tells us; that he knew their sufferings, the "Mourner" in the Excursion, makes us well assured. But his life has been blessed beyond that of all who carry the passionate heart of poetry, and the sun goes on gilding his white hair, that nor care, nor sorrow has ever thinned or ruffled. Cowper's women are good young ladies. We except his Poem to "his Mother" which deserves a niche anywhere. Crabbe-when will the English read him ?-the true poet of the Poor-so solemn and so fearless-has many a Domestic picture which all women should make their study. It would make our Patronesses! of Charitable Institutions a little wiser. It would do more. It would make society one great charitable Institution. His women, dark as the shadow flung round them-are true-real. We scarcely know where to detach one from a group. We ask you to read, without selecting, all. There is no minstrel's phrazing in his lay. Provençal and Troubadour he despises, his music is of the even tread of the clerical staff, harmonizing with the sable coat that went with him into his poetry of action. Burns deserves a word from us, for although he has left no elaborate description of the sex, surely his glorious ballads-an age's best heir-loom and woman's dearest chronicle-will make his heroines immortal as long as sweet voices have the power to soothe us. Others have now arisen. Dickens, Thackeray, Carleton. The first does not understand women. Mrs. Dombey is, to speak gently, a very painful failure. His little Nell is a woman-child, a very beautiful portrait and not unreal, but still very far from giving us any idea of the sex. Madeline Bray is perhaps the nearest approach to a living woman. Kate Nickleby is just virtue in black, and Ruth Pinch scarcely better than a " Domestic Drama" relievo. Thackeray, who is more of a poet than he thinks himself, has immortalized himself by his Becky Sharp, which is both new and true, and evidences the most careful and kindly study. Carleton we place very high. His "Clarionet" has scarcely a rival for pathos in the language, and woman's tenderness and truth were never better painted. There are hundreds of other authors, amongst them many ladies who have chosen the sex to portray. We cannot further select from the mass. Of women themselves, as describing themselves, we may say-as in Domestic life-in conversing of their own sex-they always fail. Woman has no higher-no more neglected duty to learn than her duty to Woman. Man has done more to wrong her through her treachery to herself than by any other advantage. Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austin-even the so-called Poets-for we do not separate them, but call all Poets. Mrs. Hemans, Joanna Baillie, Hannah More, L. E. L., give us glimpses of her nature we should perhaps scarcely discover without them. But in these snatches of light from the boudoir or the closet, there is not enough anywhere to make one character. We ascend the scale again to our first group, Byron, Burns, Moore, Bulwer, Scott, James, Shelley, SHAKESPEARE. To suggest their relative merits, we adopt this idea. We should say Byron gives us the night of Passion, in which we see the light of beauty by the flash that heralds its destruction. Burns always throws over her the freshness of the morning, whilst Moore reminds us of the evening of the Passion, his poetry like the setting of the sun, gilding everything with one feeling--with one idea the ideal of the voluptuary. Bulwer's creatures glimmer forth in the half-conscious twilight, robbed of their grossness by the vapouring of their philosophy, but bereft of their reality from the same unfortunate cause. Scott always paints Woman in the noon-tide of her existence. If the sky be clouded and the storm gathers, it is still noon. Even in his deepest gloom, there is so much of the distinctness of sunlight that we never think of any substantial darkness hanging upon them. The Bride of Lammermoor is ever watching the sunbeams glide through her chamber-neither melancholy nor madness assuming its blackest veil. In this James somewhat resembles Scott; the sunshine of James, however, diffused as it is over all his works, is the sunshine of the woods and fields, not like Scott's playing round the busy crowd or lighting up the stirring city. Shelley, although like Byron, one of the nightwatchers of Existence, makes woman the purifier, not the polluter of his soul-her influence shedding upon his night of frenzy the gentle moonlight of her passionless sympathy. NO. IV. P VOL. II. Now Shakespeare seems to us as much the Poet of all seasons, as of all climes. His Viola has all the elasticity and purity of the dawning: his Juliet all the warmth and fervour of early noon with Imogen we can trace the melancholy of Evening's autumn with Desdemona we can image forth the fast coming night. What an immense gulf does there not seem to be between Ophelia and his Lady Macbeth, and yet which of the links that connect them has he disregarded ? With him he has made love-as has been truly and finely said, "The business of her life." Not that word-love which is the counterfeit of the passion, but the sterling coin of duty, care, and kindness. Thus to look at Woman is to make her our "ministering angel." And this is her true-her high vocation. Her life, if truly rendered, is all love. From the very threshold of Existence the baby girl entwines herself around the mother's heart by the mute prophecy of Memory; how, when the little eyes look up in childish innocence, how the mother thinks upon the time when she looked thus upon her mother's face and thendoth she not think of the hour to come when her girl's eyes will look upon a dearer face, when with the tenderness of passion she will lay herself--heart, life, and soul-upon the protection of another's bosom. Aye--Love is the business of a Woman's life. She is to Man the treasury of his gladness and the grave of his cares. Over his darkest hours she flings the light of her affection, and in his happiest moods-what so joyous as the sympathy of her smile. It is she, who with the early dawn mingles her prayer with his, prays not only with him—but for him-In Milton's magnificent line -Worships God in him. It is she, who in the graceful offices of life, tends his hearth, serves at his table, watches his steps and waits upon his wants! it is she whose eye is the first to smile upon his cradle and the last to weep upon his grave. And gloriously hath Shakespeare pictured her. In the very plenitude of her truth and her devotion-with all her faith and constancy with all her delicacy, and all her enduring strength of mind. There is no love like Woman's. Thus the greatest of all Poets painted it 'ere twenty Summers had shone upon him: Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove : Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken: It is upon this principle-of Woman's entirety of Faith, that Shakespeare's Female characters are nearly all moulded. In these creations giving proof that the Sex never inspires us with more delight and esteem than when engaged in the endearing exercise of the Social and Domestic Virtues. If the Utilitarian of the day asks for an argument to oppose his boasted theory of Woman's co-partnership with Man in the ambitious struggle of the external world, let him read Shakespeare. Woman is not for the high-road of life-for the broad stage of vulgar applause. The Creator hath given her a frame of the most exquisite beauty, not that she should minister to our necessities in the colliery or the factory, not that she should pamper our luxuries or enervate our minds in the ballet or in the brothel, but that she should be a creature of light and joy unto man, making his fireside holy, his life-path pleasant, and his death-bed happy. And what have we made her? She, who should be our companion, confidant, and comforter, what is she to us? Poor, poor Woman! To see thee in the murky, miserable mine chained round the waist to carry fuel for thy master's pleasure, for thy lord's existence; to see thee in the wretched garret or the damp cellar, earning the starving wages of thy heartless hirer for clothing thy destroyers: to see thee at the loom, the work-table, or the drag-chain, shut out from God's light that Heaven may send no reproach upon thy slavery to Man. We cannot believe but that He who fashioned thee in so delicate and loveable a mould permits this wrong only that Man may in the end be taught his bitter lesson and reap the fruit of his blind tyranny, and that from the tears of his repentance shall spring up Earth's flowers again-its Women-in the fulness of their beauty, in the dignity of their Divine Mission. But even then, with her form rounded with health, and her eye beaming with gladness, think not to place her on the pedestal of science, or in the arena of philosophy. She is made for the home of our hearts, not for the theatre of our ambition, and is more sacred as the lover, wife, or mother, than in any other position in life. |