Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/98

94 and so on indefinitely—“I do not like learned young women: they puzzle me.” So they do; puzzle him very much. I once heard a silly young man, full of self-conceit and his father's claret, say, “I had rather have a young woman ask me to waltz, than to explain an allusion in Dante.” Very likely: he had studied waltzing, and not Dante. And his mother, full of conceit and her own hyson, said, “I perfectly agree with you. My father said that women had nothing to do with learning.” Accordingly, he gave her none, and that explained the counsel.

Then, too, foolish men no longer young say the same thing, and seek to bring down their wives and daughters to their own poor mediocrity of wit and inferiority of culture.

I say this intellectual calling is not popular. I am sorry it is not; but even if it were, it is not wholly satisfactory—it suits but a few. In the present stage of human development there are not many men who are satisfied with a merely intellectual calling; they want something practical, as well as speculative. There are a thousand practical shoemakers to every speculative botanist. It will be so for many years to come. There are ten thousand carpenters to a single poet or philosopher, who dignifies his nature with song or with science. See how dissatisfied our most eminent intellectual men become with science and literature. A professor of Greek is sorry he was not a surveyor or engineer; the president of a College longs to be a Member of Congress; the most accomplished scholars, historians, romancers, they wish to be collectors at Boston, consuls at Liverpool, and the like, longing for some practical calling, where they can make their thought a thing. Of the intellectual men whom I know, I can count on the fingers of a single hand all that are satisfied with pure science, pure art, pure literature.

Woman, like man, wants to make her thought a thing; at least, wants things to work her pattern of thought upon. Still, as the world grows older, and wiser, and better, more persons will find an abiding satisfaction in these lofty pursuits. I am rejoiced to see women thus attracted thitherward. Some women there are already who find an abiding satisfaction in literature: it fills up their leisure. I rejoice that it is so.