Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/154

 The feminine is the mother of the masculine, and the latter still draws nourishment from the breast of the former. The tenderness and affection of woman, her mild prophetic eye, her finer instincts, exert an influence on man from which he is never weaned. So that in this sense the Umbilical cord is never cut, though the apron-string may be. Her oracular nature still broods over man. His wisdom, compared with her fertile and dewy instinct, is like the lightning which issues from the bosom of the cloud.

Woman is a nature older than I, and commanding from me a vast amount of veneration, like Nature. She is my mother at the same time that she is my sister, so that she is at any rate an elder sister. I cannot imagine a woman no older than I. Methinks that I am younger than aught that I associate with. The youngest child is more than my coeval.

My most intimate acquaintance with woman has been a sisterly relation, or at most a catholic virgin-mother relation,—not that it has always been free from the suspicion of a lower sympathy. She has [106]