Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/326

 setting up housekeeping with her gifts. But no woman is fine enough to persuade Nature to grant her exemption from the pain of love. There will always be exceptions,—an Olympia Morata, a Cassandra Fédélé, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara Barton,—natures of great constancy, who are absorbed in scholarship, poesy, or good works, with a temperament that has an even graciousness toward all men, and just pauses short of honoring one exclusively. Or, perhaps, the genius of such women was the gradual rally of time around an early disappointment, whose story never will be told, when something baffled a first love,—as the pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign substance that has intruded into its retreat, slowly coats it all over with nacre, till beauty incorporates the secret ill. Man covets it, but can never fix the date when the trouble of a fine soul began to revenge itself so nobly.

Still, it gives us pleasure when the best gifts are surprised, captured, seized away to consecrate privacy and become a fount of noble inheritance. Their publicity shall thrill and elevate a later age.

"When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, you seek for the lofty spring of nobleness, and find it far off in the dear breast of some mother, who melted the snows of winter, and condensed the summer's dew into fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man in all the city streets."

Or if, in middle life, some truth, some moral, claims a woman's hand, and offers second marriage, men will gladly listen to a tone whose grave, sweet temper,