Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/268

 XXI

JULIA WARD HOWE

RS. HOWE long since won from the popular heart a tribute, rendered to her ardent human sympathies, her inborn love of freedom, and her patriotism, sustained and unfaltering through the nation's darkest hour. The critics also have delighted to honor one who looks in her heart and writes; and whose writings, though woman-like utterances of inner life and thought, have little subjectivity of a morbid or sentimental kind.

A poet of such achievements and intent has passed beyond the period of gentle appreciation and tender, nursing regard. She has earned the right to fair and independent criticism. We may now estimate her merits and defects. If she has left undone those things which she ought to have done, they who tell her so will, perhaps, inspire her with motives for new and better methods in her chosen work.

It is thought that in music, literature, the arts of painting and sculpture, as well as in all mechanical processes, women, with their swift, natural facility, arrive at a certain excellence much more rapidly than men, but that beyond this point they often lack the [254]