Eternal feminine

“ There was, not long ago, called to her eternal home, a young woman, who, by the sweet gentleness, the heroic generosity and the unspotted fidelity of her whole life, deserves an exalted place on the roll of feminine chivalry and saintliness. ”

“ It is the woman who sells herself in the street. And who is this, with upturned eyes of fathomless love, the radiant paleness of ecstasy transfusing her countenance, heaven flooding her soul, the world a forgotten toy beneath her feet? It is the woman who, in silence and secrecy, gives herself to God. So capacious of extremes is the feminine spirit. ”

“ And, whether she has become consciously religious or not, she is still, basically, a believer in immortality, for she has served it with her whole being. She looks on death totally unafraid, wondering perhaps what the Creator who has made her life such a marvel is like on an even closer view.
This, then, is the idealized picture of the truly feminine woman. While granting that the plane of maturity she has achieved is rather too exalted for most women to attain, I have given her to you for some very concrete reasons. ”

“ And yet, with a faithful heart, she suffers this indignity and, looking up from underneath this weight, she offers to the powers that crush her down the holiest sacrifice that one can give.
O spirit of the age, like flowers of Heaven, Thy fragrance will not die, but live eternal; And woman shall, some holier, happier day, Attain her highest glory in the world. ”

“ In so far as soul is in her completely developed, all soul is the same, but in so far as it is modified in her as Woman, it flows, it breathes, it sings, rather than deposits soil, or finishes work; and that which is especially feminine flushes, in blossom, the face of earth, and pervades, like air and water, all this seeming solid globe, daily renewing and purifying its life. Such may be the especially feminine element spoken of as Femality. ”

“ What would have become of it, had there been no feminine faith and love to receive and nurture it into the tree of life? May that grace which has so worked upon the heart of woman, and raised her from bondage, and given her a new throne on earth, work among us, and redeem our daughters from the snares of the world. ”

“ Through ancient grim conceptions of the Absolute as Father, there has gradually been infused some later and brighter dream of infinite tenderness—some all-transfiguring hope created by the memory of Woman as Mother; and the more that races evolve toward higher things, the more Feminine becomes their idea of a God. ”

“ Think of a young, beautiful, and delicately nurtured female, giving up not only the world, with its vanities and its pleasures, but all comfort, all companionship, all feminine employment, not denied to the nun of the strictest order. She renounced them all to live in seclusion, silence, and perpetual dread; for what but a cruel death could have awaited her had her secret been discovered save when dying. ”

“ Not at all, we wish to give her a sphere, not to take her from any place she likes to fill; to give her a chance to exercise those wonderful, those divine faculties that God has wrapped in the feminine mind, in the woman's heart. ”

“ For all women there is something nobler than to be recognized as the queen of heaven. Let woman be content to be what God made her, to fill the sphere God appointed for her, in unselfishness, and humbleness, and purity, rejoicing in God her Saviour, content that He had regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden, and rejoicing that God has honored the characteristics regarded as feminine, which she possesses, and which she may use for the glory of God and the good of the race. ”

“ Everything harsh or degrading melts away from the requirement when thus looked at. It is a joy to serve where the heart is engaged, and that is eminently true of the feminine nature. For [338] its full satisfaction, a woman’s heart needs to look up where it loves. ”

“ I shuddered at the thought of breathing the same vital element. He who had broken a mother's heart must be a fiend, worthy of eternal abhorrence.
"If you live to years of womanhood," said my expiring mother, "and your heart awakens to love, as alas for woman's destiny it will, then read my life's sad experience, and be warned by my example."
Sad prophetess! Death has consecrated thy prediction, but it is yet unfulfilled. When will womanhood commence, on whose horizon the morning star of love is to rise in clouded lustre? ”

“ Well, this woman is a last duchess, misunderstood, unhappy; a woman with a hungry soul, a woman eager for life and all it holds, a woman who should have been a guardian angel with a flaming sword above the gates of Eden! ”

“ And in the heart of the maid there grew and strengthened the desire and the will to be as that woman of her dream, whose beauty was as music under the moon, and in all reverence beloved of her troth-plight, Flame. Thus are women ever, in their deep need to be in all ways that they may, the desired of their lord. ”

“ In one day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. ”

“ Is it the creed that makes the natures of you women so beautiful, or is it the nature of woman that gives the beauty to the creed? Is it not so with any other idea that women espouse? with any other cause that they undertake? Is it not so with anything that they spend their hearts upon, toil for, and sacrifice themselves for? Do I see any beauty in your vows except such as your life gives to them? I can believe it. I can believe that if you had never taken those vows your life would still be beautiful. ”

“ At no time in the history of woman do we find even the smallest indication of a parallel phenomenon; the profound and tragic dualism of the Middle Ages—one result of which was the spiritual love of woman—passed her by without touching her. In the feminine soul conflict apparently results not in tragedy and productivity, but in morbidness and hysteria. ”

“ In all mythology, in all the symbolic poetry of the older times, in all the traditions of the ages, when love, devotion, religion—any tender sentiment of heart or grace of spirit which was born of gentle affections—was symbolized, delineated, mythologically embodied, painted, or sculptured, it was always under the form of woman. We know that the world now is pretty well upside down, and that nothing remains just as it ought to be; but the true woman is still devotion, affection, love. ”

“ The knowledge that she must have to complete her womanhood the woman should have gained only from the life of her dreams—the life that is beyond that old, old, open door through which she could not pass alone. In the companionship, sympathy, strength, protection, and love, of that one who was to cross with her the threshold of the door that God set open in the beginning, she should have gained the knowledge of life that would ripen her girlhood into womanhood. ”

“ The revelations of the feminine heart are the more beautiful and welcome, because the typical woman is purer, more unselfish, more consecrated, than the typical man. Through her ardent self-revelations our ideals of sanctity are maintained. ”

“ Till God the cunning harp hath broken.
I would—but deeper things than these
With woman’s lot are wove;
Wrought of intenser sympathies,
And nerved by purer love.
By the strong spirit’s discipline,
By the fierce wrong forgiven,
By all that wrings the heart of sin,
Is woman won to heaven. ”

“ It is time to change the scene,—to contemplate the Virgin, as she has been exhibited to us in the relations of earthly life, as the mere woman, acting and suffering, loving, living, dying, fulfilling the highest destinies in the humblest state, in the meekest spirit. ”

“ Dreams of women! Visions of the ecstasy of first love, ideals and aspirations, palpitating, holy, the young man's impassioned dream of The Woman, the Only Woman, the notion and conception that the man of nature and of talent and of keen imagination sleeps upon and follows and seeks and seeks and follows all his life, from boyhood to the grave—where were they then? ”

“ Many of them hold places of honor and power. These women of a primitive age, who stand at the portals of the young world luminous and smiling, or draped in the stately dignity of antique goddesses, still retain the distinction of classic ideals. They look out from the misty dawn of things with veiled faces, but we know that love shone from their soft eyes, and words of wisdom fell from their rosy lips. ”

“ Yet the letters and memoirs of the women of that time, light and frivolous as they are, reveal a depth of sadness, a desolation of spirit, a weariness of life,—destitute as many of them are of all aspiration after an immortal hope,—that tells us how indispensable to woman's nature are the hopes and consolations of religion. Love was at that time the object of woman's existence,—a love that, with our standard of morals, leaves a stain as well as a wound ”

“ It grew more and more dense until it assumed the form of a woman—a mist-woman, shadowy, faint, yet luminous with a soft, unearthly glow, and beautiful as an angel with spiritual face, and slender, beckoning hands. ”

“ A woman of the world, over whose graceful form, her personality even, convention invariably threw her mantle—but a woman for all that—with a passion burning beneath the crust of worldly sang-froid—with heart attuned to feel every quiver, every sensation of joy and of pain. A woman who loved with every fibre in her—who had the supreme gift of merging self in Love—of giving all, her soul, her heart, her mind and every thought—a woman who roused every chord of passion in a man's heart—the woman whom men adore! ”

“ After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women. The future holds the little women for me in the lives I am yet to live. And though the stars drift, and the heavens lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I, under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her mate. ”

“ Outward hearing may misguide us, but internal knowledge cannot err.’ ‘Women, indeed, had the honor of first publishing the resurrection of the God of love—why not again the resurrection of the spirit of love? ”

“ You will be called to attend a dying woman,—you are called, already is the messenger here. A woman's soul is trembling upon the threshold of eternity. If you are alone with her when that soul takes wing, my spirit will instantly take its place—and your skill will do the rest. Accomplish the resurrection of that body and secure our further communion. ”

“ And slowly she lifted her glance to mine; and never before had I felt the full glory of those eyes, the full melody of that deep voice.
And so, I end as I began, as life begins and ends—with a woman. In a woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span between—the business, profession, career—how colorless, how meaningless it would be but for her! ”

“ It shone from the quiet grey eyes,—as, over the head of the man who knelt before her, they looked out of the picture—with an expression of the sublime surrender of a woman's whole soul to an emotion which, though it sways and masters her, yet gives her the power to be more truly herself than ever before. ”

“ Your capabilities fit you for one field of labor, mine fit me for another. We have all to build an altar. I have built mine, and laid thereon my tenderest feelings, the yearning desire of the woman-nature to be loved. I know that this mysterious yearning which God has planted with his own hand in woman's heart will, if left unsatisfied, cast a shadow over her life; that however strong, however self-reliant a woman may be, her heart reaches out for something to complete her happiness. But the giant will can strengthen the trembling, faltering heart. ”

“ But if she be not a woman of the world, then God help her on her tear-wet pillow, or before her slowly-dying fire as she thinks of that hand-pressure. It is enough to last her all her life, she thinks—and yet, should it not come again? ”

“ But, when the goddess' work is done, The woman's still remains. ”

“ I realise that somehow I must make her pity me, must awake in her that guardian angel which exists in every woman. Only in that way can I break down the barrier of her pride and arouse the love latent in her heart. ”

“ With the merging of earthly passion into that Love which is God's breath, she—the pure and selfless woman, God's most perfect work on earth—became as God, and knew what was good and what had been evil. ”

“ She is with Him at the manger, with Him in His flight and exile, with Him in all the years of His hidden life, with Him at the marriage feast, with Him when He hangs on the cross. To a woman He first appears when He has risen from the dead. And when He is no longer visible on earth the hearts of women follow after, seek and find Him in the unseen world, where what is pure and fair is forever so; where no shadow of change or evil can fall upon the face of love. He revealed woman to herself, revealed her to man. ”

“ Thy woman's heart of silent worship brought,
But a fresh childhood, heavenly truth to meet,
With love, and wonder, and submissive thought.
Oh! for the holy quiet of thy breast,
Midst the world's eager tones and footsteps flying! ”

“ To woman's whole nature appealed that life of self-sacrifice, of love, and of willing service that has created a new Heaven and a new earth. From the foot of the Cross there arose and went out into the world a womanhood that did not demand, or claim, or threaten, or arrogate; a womanhood renouncing, yielding, loving, and, therefore, conquering. ”

“ Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. ”