The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of line from
these imported models of womanly personality--the stock feminine
characters of the current novelists, or of the foreign court poems,
(Ophelias, Enids, princesses, or ladies of one thing or another,)
which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted
by our men, too, as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought
after. But I present mine just for a change.
Then there are mutterings, (we will not now stop to heed them here,
but they must be heeded,) of something more revolutionary. The day is
coming when the deep questions of woman's entrance amid the arenas of
practical life, politics, the suffrage, &c., will not only be argued
all around us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.
Of course, in these States, for both man and woman, we must entirely
recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental,
feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the
imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and
melodramatic, not without use as studies, but making sad work, and
forming a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around
us. Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to
successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days. Nor is
this so incredible. I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in
which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise
meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple
of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by
luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth,
but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and
devout.
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