Women And Men - free ebook by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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Women And Men

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

62 chapters

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62 chapters

I. Introductory

I. Introductory

In beginning a series of modest papers under this rather ambitious title, I am reminded that, comprehensive as it seems, the phrase is in One respect very recent. It is only within a century or so that the Two sexes have been habitually addressed together. The phrase “Women and men,” or its more common form, “Ladies and gentlemen,” or that other form, “Gentlemen and ladies,” which the late Mr. Emerson habitually used, is a comparatively modern thing. Before the advent of Christianity we should n

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II. Outside Of The Shelter

II. Outside Of The Shelter

Many years ago, in April, 1859, Harriet Martineau wrote an article on “Female industry,” in the Edinburgh Review, and stated very forcibly the wholly changed conditions of women's labor since the days when “Adam delved and eve span.”She called attention to the simple fact that a very large proportion of English women now earn their own bread, and that upon this changed condition the whole question must turn. “A social organization,” she said, “Framed for a community of which half staved at home

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III. The Shadow Of The Harem

III. The Shadow Of The Harem

We sometimes hear surprise expressed that woman has contributed so little to the masterpieces of the world in science, art, literature. To me the wonder is always the other way— that she has produced anything in that direction at all; and this for the plain reason that the shadow of repression, which is the bequest of the Oriental harem, still hangs over her. That she has always been at a great disadvantage in training or education is also true, but it is a secondary matter. The real disadvantag

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IV. The Woman Of Influence

IV. The Woman Of Influence

Mr.Worth, the eminent Paris dress-maker, telegraphs to the Boston Sunday Herald that the great and pressing need of the age is a Woman of Influence, somewhere or other, to set the fashions. In default of this, he has, after exhausting his genius upon a new dress, to use various indirect devices to bring it into vogue. If One thinks what a beautiful work of art a lady's dress may be, when wealth and Worth have done their best for it, and what an appalling product mere wealth without taste can dev

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V. The Swing Of The Social Pendulum

V. The Swing Of The Social Pendulum

The newspapers are constantly satirizing a tendency to Anglomania which is said to prevail just now in American society, or at least in a few cities and watering-places along the Atlantic shore. It is not habitually mentioned that this is but a swing of the same pendulum which seemed, Twenty years ago, to be swinging the other way, and carrying us away from everything English and towards everything French. The same pendulum has been steadily vibrating, indeed, ever since the foundation of our go

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VI. The Creator Of The Home

VI. The Creator Of The Home

There took place lately near my house Two of those instantaneous deaths which are commonly called tragic, but which seem to me the most enviable mode of passing away from earth. Two maiden ladies had for many years led their blameless lives together in a modest cottage quaintly situated in the sharp angle of Two streets, and made picturesque in summer by the flowers and vines that were devoutly tended by its occupants. They had long eked out their modest income by taking a few boarders, and had

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VII. Vacations For Saints

VII. Vacations For Saints

“It is so tiresome,” said once a certain lady of my acquaintance, “To be a saint all the time! There ought to be vacations.”And as it was once my pleasant lot to be the house-mate of a saint when enjoying One of these seasons of felicity, I know what my friend meant by it. The saint in question was One of the most satisfactory and unquestionable of her class; she was the wife of a country clergyman, a woman of superb physique, great personal attractiveness, and the idol of her husband's large pa

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VIII. Maiden Aunts

VIII. Maiden Aunts

That admirable patriot, John A. Andrew, the War Governor of Massachusetts, was emphatically a man of impulses, and he never used a phrase more impulsive and more questionable than when, in speaking of the single women of his own State, he characterized many of them as being “Anxious and aimless.”He did not mean the remark as ungenerous, but it was founded on a common error that has since been disproved. In his time it was generally assumed that the great plurality of women over men in some of ou

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IX. On One's Relationship To One's Mother

IX. On One's Relationship To One's Mother

Those who recall the days when Artemus Ward gave lectures may remember Low he glided from behind the curtain noiselessly, dressed in solemn black, looking like a juvenile undertaker, and proceeded without a smile to crack the gravest jokes over the head of his young pianist. This tuneful youth, he explained, was paid Five dollars a week “And his washing,” and he was thoroughly domestic in his style of playing, having even composed those touching melodies of home life, “Is it raining, mother dear

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X. The Flood-Tide Of Youth

X. The Flood-Tide Of Youth

To One who returns in middle or later life, like myself, to dwell in some college town where the First years of youth were spent, there is something that may fairly be called tremendous in the presence of that flood-tide of youth which surges forever through the streets. It is at First dismaying, then interesting, and at last quite absorbing in its fascination. The new-comer soon finds that he has in a manner to hold himself firm against it as against an incoming sea. To say that he feels insign

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XI. “But Strong Of Will.”

XI. “But Strong Of Will.”

In One of Whittier's finest ballads he gives a touch of feminine character worth considering in a world where so many of the young or foolish still hold it to be the perfection of womanhood to be characterless. The phrase is to be found in “Amy Wentworth,” One of the few of his ballads which have no direct historical foundation, but simply paint a period. The scene is ]aid in the proud little colonial town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with its high-bred ways and its stately ante-Revolutionary t

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XII. Marketable Accomplishments

XII. Marketable Accomplishments

I once knew of a young man who had a methodical mind and a large acquaintance among young women. He used to keep their names in a book, with memoranda of their accomplishments— noting carefully which could dance well, which could embroider prettily, which make sponge-cake, which drive a horse; so that, should there be a social demand for either of these gifts, it could be supplied. A similar variety of attainments is found in the nursery ballad about the Three ships that came sailing by with a p

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XIII. “Chances.”

XIII. “Chances.”

The head of a great collegiate institution for women once told me of receiving a visit from a titled Englishman, who examined with much interest all the departments. Finally, taking her aside with an air of mystery, he said that there was One question which he greatly desired to ask her. On her assenting, he said, “This is all very interesting, but I really want to know what influence it is found to have upon their future lives, don't you know.”She was pleased at the question, and at once procee

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XIV. The Daughters Of Toil

XIV. The Daughters Of Toil

The time has come when the watering-places are mainly deserted, their banquet-halls unoccupied, their bar-rooms closed, their dancing-halls silent; while all the innumerable small dealers and showmen who clustered in their neighborhood have put away their wares, if they still have any, in boxes; have secreted their gains, if they have made any, in their pockets; and have disappeared-whither? Their destination seems as inscrutable as that of the birds of summer, and we only know that, like the bi

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XV. The Empire Of Manners

XV. The Empire Of Manners

How delightful it is, when about to be shut up for a week or Two on board ship, or in a country hotel, with a party of strangers, to encounter in that company even One person of delightful manners, whose mere presence gives grace and charm, and secures unfailing consideration for the rights and tastes of all! “I have once beheld on earth,” says Petrarch, in his 123d sonnet, “Angelic manners and celestial charms, whose very remembrance is a delight and an affliction, since it makes all things els

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XVI. Unreasonable Unselfishness

XVI. Unreasonable Unselfishness

When some eloquent clergyman preaches a sermon on unselfishness so powerful and searching that, as his hearers say, “It goes right down into every pew,” the melancholy fact remains that the person it hits is apt to be just the person who needs it least, and who would be more benefited by a moral discourse tending in just the other direction. Or when the lecturer on Ethical Culture handles the same theme in an equally ardent manner, rebaptizing the old-fashioned virtue under the modern name of “A

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XVII. Women's Influence On Literary Style

XVII. Women's Influence On Literary Style

We are fortunate in having from One of the masters of French literature, Fontenelle, a felicitous statement of what women had contributed up to his time, through men, in the formation of literary style; and though the statement was made more than a century ago, and made for Frenchmen, it still has in it much truth for all manner of persons. Fontenelle, it should be remembered, died in 1757, within a month of completing his Hundred years, and without the slightest impairing of his vivacity and ke

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XVIII. The Single Will

XVIII. The Single Will

In an interesting paper on “Marriage and the family,” by Hermann Lotzc, lately translated by Professor Ladd, of Yale University, there may be found some very liberal views, for a German, in regard to marriage. He readily admits that “Nothing but the ancient depreciation of the female sex could lead to the thought of a Patria potestas (paternal authority), which ascribed to the father the unconditional right over the child's life and death.”He defines marriage as being a complete surrender of per

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XIX. On A Certain Humility In Americans

XIX. On A Certain Humility In Americans

It has always seemed to me that Lowell's paper on the condescension of foreigners should be followed by One on the humility of Americans. It may be that we do not make that quality obtrusive when travelling abroad, for there we are frequently stung and goaded out of this fine constitutional trait. “My dear young lady,” said the kind English clergyman to a certain American traveller in Europe, “Let me urge you not to make use of that word unless you are willing to be known as an American.”“But su

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XX. “Quite Rustic.”

XX. “Quite Rustic.”

There lies before me a letter from One of those women who are doing more, as I sometimes think, to mould the future of America than any other class of women, or than any men; They are the higher grade of teachers in the high-schools, academies, and colleges of our Western States. They are as well trained, intellectually, for the most part, as their sisters of the Eastern States, have quite as often had the advantages of foreign travel; and derive from the life of newer communities, and from the

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XXI. The Toy Of Royalty

XXI. The Toy Of Royalty

Hawthorne frankly acknowledged that he was glad to have been in England before people had done playing with the toy of monarchy. There is something doubly amusing in seeing the efforts of American official personages to give proper reception to the type of royalty lately arrived from the Sandwich Islands-something which may almost be called the toy of a toy, bearing the same relation to the European plaything that is borne by the strange dolls of the Aleutian Islands to the elaborate French or G

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XXII. Women's Letters

XXII. Women's Letters

“Would you desire,” says De Quincey in his “Essay on style,” “At this day to read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque from idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition, steal the mail-bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting.”This he goes on to demonstrate, he himself writing in that involved and elaborate style of which he was so fond— a sort of Coleridge-and-water, or perhaps One light say, Coleridge-and-air-full of clou

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XXIII. The Independent Purse

XXIII. The Independent Purse

Where I asked what change would make most difference in the happiness of married pairs, it would not be hard to answer. The change would not relate to the laws of divorce, whether loosened or tightened; it would not even he in conceding to women the right of the separate boudoir, though it has always seemed to me that it would enhance the dignity and delicacy, and therefore the happiness, of wedded life, if every woman had an apartment of which she might turn the key, even against her husband, a

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XXIV. Breaking And Bending

XXIV. Breaking And Bending

It is not many years since there prevailed in some parts of this country a method of discipline which would now be generally held barbarous even among the most conscientious parents. It was held to be an essential part of a child's training that as soon as its will was developed up to a certain point, it should be as definitely and distinctly broken as you break a plant upon its stalk. Instead of avoiding or postponing such a necessity, the parent fearlessly met the occasion, and was— for even t

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XXV. Exalted Stations

XXV. Exalted Stations

An accomplished English writer, endeavoring to explain to Americans, as many have done before him, how it is that educated men in England do not feel aggrieved at giving precedence to persons of mere hereditary rank, gives a curious illustration of the very habit criticised. He says that “No sensible Englishman ever sees in it a want of real consideration for himself.”The hosts simply employ a convenient rule, he says: the titled guests follow the order of their rank; but the person held in the

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XXVI. Finer Forces

XXVI. Finer Forces

Any One whom the railway bears rapidly through One American village after another, between Eight and Nine o'clock on some stormy winter morning, is sure to see occasionally through the windows a figure so typical that it seems to recur in every hamlet or suburb. It is that of a woman, usually young and slender, clad in water-proof cloak and India-rubber boots, and pressing on with rapid steps through the storm. She may or may not be fresh and fair, but she seldom fails to have a firm and resolut

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XXVII. A House Of Cards

XXVII. A House Of Cards

It is a curious thing that the advent of a Conservative ministry in England should have brought with it a series of illustrations of the obsoleteness and decay of the House of Lords. Mr. Gladstone, the foremost statesman of England, once declined an earldom. On the other hand, Sir Stafford Northcote was transferred from the House of Commons to the House of Lords, in order to lay him on the shelf, and the process was described in the newspapers as “Sir Stafford's snub,” and as being “Kicked upsta

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XXVIII. Mice And Martyrdom

XXVIII. Mice And Martyrdom

That fine old Anglo-American or Americano-Englishman, R— S— , used to tell at his dinnertable in London this story of a very celebrated English general. The military hero was once dining with Mr. S— , when a stray mouse was seen running to and fro, looking for a hiding-place. With One spring the general was on his chair; with another, on the table. Amid much laughter the host rose and proceeded in the direction of the mouse. “Oh! Stop, S- ,” shouted the man of war; “For Heaven's sake don't exasp

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XXIX. The Organizing Mind

XXIX. The Organizing Mind

There goes through the Post-office in early summer an immense interchange of views in respect to summer boarding-places in the country. It is safe to say that in One-half of these letters there appears, First or last, a remark like this: “The man of the house is not very efficient; it is his wife who carries it on.”In One case it was the man himself who frankly admitted the precise state of things to me, and volunteered the following commentary: “The reason is, you see, that it is my wife who ha

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XXX. The Search After A Publisher

XXX. The Search After A Publisher

Every literary man expects to receive every week or Two a letter, generally from a woman, containing some sentences like the following: I have lately written Two stories for the— which, to my great disappointment, were returned. Could you not recommend me to some paper where such stories would be accepted? I think, comparing them with even the literature of the best magazines and papers, that they will not fall below it much. I have some longer stories that I think might be accepted by some pape

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XXXI. Men's Novels And Women's Novels

XXXI. Men's Novels And Women's Novels

It is a curious fact that Paris, to which the works of Jane Austen were lately as unknown as if she were an English painter, has just discovered her existence. Moreover, it has announced that she, and she only, is the founder of that realistic school which is construed to include authors so remote from each other as the French Zola and the American Howells. The most decorous of maiden ladies is thus made to originate the extreme of indecorum; and the good loyal English-woman, devoted to Church a

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XXXII. Women As Household Decorators

XXXII. Women As Household Decorators

It once happened to me to spend a day or Two in a country-house where the different rooms gave unconscious object-lessons to show the gradual change of taste in household decoration. One room-the sitting-room of an elderly invalid-represented what might be called the iron age of furnishing; everything was dark mahogany and hair-cloth; there was not a chair or a sofa on which you could retain your seat without a struggle, so polished and so slippery were they all. The walls were hung with dark po

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XXXIII. Voices

XXXIII. Voices

An exceedingly well-informed young woman said to another, in my hearing, the other day, “Do you not think that there is something in a voice?”It was my impulse to answer, “There is everything in a voice.”What is beauty, symmetry, or grace in man or woman if, the moment the lips part, there issue sounds so discordant that they drive you away like the harsh scream of a peacock? If we travel in the dark by stage-coach or sleeping-car, we instantly form an opinion of every person around us whose voi

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XXXIV. Social Superiors

XXXIV. Social Superiors

Mr. Brander Matthews lately quoted, at a discussion held in New York as to the working of republican government, an early statement by Lowell, which seems to me to contain a brief epitome of the whole matter, and to be too good to forget. Lowell said (I quote from memory), “If it be a good thing for an English duke that he has no social superior, I think it can hardly be bad for an American farmer.”It reminded me of a saying by a classmate of mine, so fond of England and so ashamed of his own co

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XXXV. The Secret Of The Birthday

XXXV. The Secret Of The Birthday

In a late treatise on American literature, while the year of birth is carefully given for each male author, the same fact is systematically omitted in the case of women. If any class of women might be supposed free from the affectation of more youth than belongs to them, it is the sisterhood of the pen, inasmuch as to them the increase of years usually implies a more assured position and a better income. Yet on inquiring of a friend who makes books of reference professionally, I am assured that

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XXXVI. The New Theory Of Language

XXXVI. The New Theory Of Language

In a late number of Science August 27, 1886. a new theory of the utmost interest is brought forward by One of the most eminent of American philologists, Horatio Hale. It forms the substance of an address given at Buffalo, New York, in his capacity as vice-president of the anthropological section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He thinks that it solves One of the scientific questions that seemed most hopeless; and the solution has peculiar interest as showing how the m

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XXXVII. Trust Funds

XXXVII. Trust Funds

The laws and the courts have much to say about “Trust funds;” but is not almost all the property owned by women really a Trust fund, in the sense that they usually intrust it to somebody, without pretending, or seeking, or even desiring to know anything about it for themselves? Their comfort and the usefulness of their lives, the health and prosperity of their children, may depend upon that property's being well cared for. If they keep house, they feel themselves responsible for the proper prese

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XXXVIII. A Plea For The Uncommonplace

XXXVIII. A Plea For The Uncommonplace

In that mine of symbolic wisdom, “Alice in the Looking-glass,” Humpty Dumpty claims that he received a certain gift as an “Unbirthday present.”When Alice asks an explanation of the phrase, he points out that an unbirthday present is given to you on the days when it is not your birthday; and that this is far better than a birthday present, because you have but One birthday in a year, and you can get a great many more presents by celebrating the other Three hundred and sixty-four days. In that “Ca

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XXXIX. Children On A Farm

XXXIX. Children On A Farm

No doubt the primary and essential use of barns is for children to play in; and we might go still farther and say that One chief use of farms is as out-door nurseries and school-rooms for the same little people. The farm in question must of course be One where the air is good, the drainage sufficient, and, above all, the farmer good-natured. He must be generous about his barn, not particular about his hay-loft, tolerant as to hen-roosts and raspberry-bushes, but secluded and reserved as to the d

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XL. Who Shall Fix The Value?

XL. Who Shall Fix The Value?

In looking over various letters from women who seek employment, and especially literary employment, I find most of them to be tinged with this delusion, that those who produce anything for the market have the right to require somebody to take it, and at a price to be fixed by the maker. It would, no doubt, be very convenient to many of us if this were true— if somebody were provided whose clear duty it was to take the potatoes we raise, or the poems we write, at whatever price we set upon them.

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XLI. A Woman's Enterprise

XLI. A Woman's Enterprise

I had a call the other day from a lady below middle-age who wished to consult me about some business arrangements that had become necessary for her. Instead of having become entangled in financial difficulties— which is, I am sorry to say, the condition of most of those of her sex who come to me for such consultations-she was embarrassed by too much success. She was, it appeared, a married woman from some interior town in New England, who had inherited from her father several pieces of property,

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XLII. City And Country Living

XLII. City And Country Living

The newspapers are circulating a curious statement by Mr. Grant Allen— who is understood to be a Canadian by birth and an Englishman by residence— to the effect that Americans do not like country life, and that those who are able to do so flee from the rural regions as if there were a pestilence there. This is a curious caricature of the real facts-almost as curious as when the same writer finds something melancholy in the dandelions and violets, the asters and golden-rod, along our roadsides, a

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XLIII. The Humor Of Children

XLIII. The Humor Of Children

That is a surprising remark lately made by One who is usually a very acute observer, Mr. C. D. Warner, to the effect that children under Twelve have commonly no sense of humor. No doubt these young things vary, like their elders, in temperament. Some of them are, from the cradle, as devoid of all capacity for fun as a travelling Englishman; but if there is One quality which I should attribute, in normal cases, to very young children, it is the sense of humor. You presuppose it inevitably in your

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XLIV. Parochialism

XLIV. Parochialism

We are gradually clearing ourselves, in America, from the lingering spirit of colonialism. The change is fortunate, but even the civil war has not yet rid us of what may be called Parochialism, or what would be called in Germany Particularism— the impression that we are citizens of this or that commonwealth, or region, or city, instead of claiming allegiance to the Great Republic. The habit proceeds largely, no doubt, front the vast size of our land, which even railroads and migratory habits can

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XLV. On Visiting The Sick

XLV. On Visiting The Sick

It is a curious fact, and One not quite creditable to the good-sense of the human race, that the One duty which is sure to devolve on everybody First or last is so often ill done. Everybody, from the roughest frontiersman to the most luxurious city-bred woman, is pretty sure, in the course of years, to be called on to visit some person who is ill. having been brought, through circumstances, somewhat in contact with invalids, I have never ceased to be astonished to see how poorly, on the whole, w

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XLVI. The Fear Of Its Being Wasted

XLVI. The Fear Of Its Being Wasted

It is a curious whim this, which returns every now and then, that the higher education of women should be discouraged because “In case of marriage it will all be wasted.”It is One of the bugbears which Mary Wollstonecraft thought she had demolished, and Margaret Fuller after her; but it bears a great deal of killing. Those who still bring it up show how little importance they really attack to those functions of marriage and parentage about which they are continually talking. If they really rated

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XLVII. The Nervousness Of Men

XLVII. The Nervousness Of Men

The physiologistst tell us that nervousness is the peculiar attribute of women. May not this be because it is usually men who write the books of physiology ; so that women might say, like the lions in Aesop's fable, that if the other party had been the painters the case would be different? It would be worth while to consult the wife of some musical enthusiast, for instance, who has carried his art to such a point that it causes him and everybody else more pain than pleasure— the man who must hav

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XLVIII. The German Standard

XLVIII. The German Standard

At a private discussion lately held among persons interested in collegiate and other education it seemed to me that there was too general a deference to German standards. It was assumed, in particular, that schools for young children must necessarily be far better if taught by university-bred men, as in Germany, than if taught t by young women, as in this country. To all this I should demur. No man in America ever studied the German systems of common-school instruction more faithfully than Horac

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XLIX. The Missing Musical Woman

XLIX. The Missing Musical Woman

There is just now a revival of the anxious inquiry after an eminent composer of music among women. Mr. Upton, in a book upon the subject, and Mr. Upton's numerous critics, are all discussing the matter with eager interest, and give a great many ingenious reasons for what is, to careful students of the intellectual history of woman, a very simple affair. Such students are usually brought to the conviction that the difference between the sexes in point of intellect is not a question of comparative

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L. The Brutality Of “Punch And Judy.”

L. The Brutality Of “Punch And Judy.”

Whenever the season of picnics and children's excursions draws near, I feel disposed to renew my protest against a performance which has only crossed the Atlantic within some Twenty years, and which has in some inexplicable way crept into decent society. I mean “Punch and Judy.”It is an exhibition only fitted to be shown, as it seems to me, before the children of prize-fighters or cock-fighters. It is something that could only have originated, in its present form, among a race of very coarse fib

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LI. Why Women Authors Write Under The Names Of Men

LI. Why Women Authors Write Under The Names Of Men

The dapper clerk, Mr. Chuckster, in the “Old Curiosity shop,” is quite dissatisfied when Kit Nubbles is proved innocent of theft; and remarks that although the boy did not happen to take that particular Five-pound note, he is no doubt always up to something or other of that kind. It is in this way that critics of a certain type contrive to console themselves, when a woman has done a good thing in literature, by pointing out the number of good things she has not yet done. To be sure, Miss Mary N.

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LII. The Discipline Of Dolls

LII. The Discipline Of Dolls

It is a very instructive fact that Two of the best mothers I know-and mothers, it must be added, on the largest scale— have had their preliminary training solely through the charge of dolls. I visited lately the nursery of One of these mothers, arranged as the collective play-room of Six children under Ten— there being also Three older offspring who have graduated from this play-room, and are in a manner launched into the world outside. In this room everything is provided by wholesale-whole frei

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LIII. Santa Claus Agencies

LIII. Santa Claus Agencies

No One seems as yet to recognize that if Santa Claus is to continue in the field, he absolutely needs agents and auxiliaries. With the increasing wealth of the community and the growing complications of shopping, the mere ordinary preparation of Christmas presents is becoming a very arduous matter. For many well-to-do households, especially in the suburbs of large cities, it absorbs an alarming amount of time and strength, even endangering, in many cases, health itself. The Christmas trade, whic

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LIV. Kerenhappuch

LIV. Kerenhappuch

Nearly Fifty young women received their degree of A. B. a few weeks since at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The Boston Daily Advertiser, in mentioning this fact, makes a proper criticism on the trivial names often borne by the young ladies who appear oh the list. Unfortunately it goes too far in its form of statement, and with that hastiness which sometimes marks even masculine journalists, launches a boomerang that recoils upon the favored youth of its own pet institution, Harvard U

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LV. American Love Of Home

LV. American Love Of Home

It is common to say that love of home does not exist in America— that it is not a supposable quality in a nation founded on immigration, and only kept contented by constant migration. Nothing is easier than to misunderstand people, even whole races at a time. We insist on saying that Frenchmen, for instance, have no love of their home because they call it Chez moi, forgetting that this Moi identifies the abode with its proprietor far more unequivocally than the English word. You may speak of som

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LVI. More Thorough Work Visible

LVI. More Thorough Work Visible

It is beginning to be plain that with the Treat advance in the education of women, during the last Thirty years, there is already a marked advance in the grade of their intellectual work. At a late meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, In Buffalo, New York, nearly every section offered among its scientific papers some contribution from a woman. In the section of Anthropology, the paper that excited most interest was that of Mrs. Nuttall Pinart on Mexican inscription

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LVII. Christmas All The Time

LVII. Christmas All The Time

“Papa,” said a certain little girl of my acquaintance, on the 26th of last December, “Why can't it be Kismas all the time?”It seemed to revive a similar meditation that arose in her mind on the morning after her birthday, when she asked where her birthday was gone. On the day succeeding Christmas this melancholy inquiry certainly seemed a very natural reflection. That day of delight-the early waking, the matutinal stocking, the decorated house, the gathering of kindred, the successive presents,

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LVIII. The Victory Of The Weak

LVIII. The Victory Of The Weak

The late Sidney Lanier, poet, critic, and musician, was a man of so high a tone in respect to refinement and purity that he might fitly be called the Sir Galahad of American literature. The man who, while already stricken with pulmonary disease, could serve for many months in the peculiarly arduous life of a Confederate cavalryman had some right to an opinion as to what constitutes true manhood, and his criticism on certain recent theories in this direction are peculiarly entitled to weight. In

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LIX. A Return To The Hills

LIX. A Return To The Hills

Thoreau always maintained that summer passed into autumn at a certain definite and appreciable instant, as by the turning of a leaf. In like manner those who direct their course in early summer towards the hilly regions of New England are commonly made aware at some precise and definite moment that they have come within the atmosphere of the hills. It is usually after they have left the main railway track, and are switched off upon some little branch road, with stops so frequent that if, at any

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LX. The Shy Graces

LX. The Shy Graces

The question is sometimes asked, and even reformers occasionally ask it of themselves, What is to become, in the years when women are educated at college and emancipated from control, of the shy graces that adorned the savage woman? There is a certain delicate charm that seems historically inseparable from an humble and subordinate condition. We find it in the uncivilized woman everywhere, among the rudest Cossacks or Hottentots. Who that has seen a tribe of Indians untouched by contact with the

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Index A

Index A

(Titles of chapters are given in capital letters.) Abbott, H. C. De S., 286. Academy, French, originated with women, 86. Accomplisiments, marketable, 60. Adam, 7. Adams, Abigail, 114. Adams, John, 114. Aeschylus, 44. Agassiz, Louis, 96. Alcinous, 9, 11. “Alice in Wonderland” quoted, 132; “In the Looking-glass,” 192. Allen, Ethan, quoted, 303. Allen, Grant, quoted, 212. Alumni, Society of Collegiate, 232, 235. American love of home, 281. Ampere, J. J., 248. Andersen, H. C., 265. Andrew, J. A., 38

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Advertisements The Bazar Book Of Decorum

Advertisements The Bazar Book Of Decorum

The Care of the Person, Manners, Etiquette, and Ceremonials. Pp. 282. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. “ A very graceful and judicious compendium of the laws of etiquette, taking its name from the Bazar weekly, which has become an established authority with the ladies of America upon all matters of taste and refinement. The Dwelling, the Nursery, the Bedroom, the Dining-Room, the Parlor, the Library, the Kitchen, the Sick-Room. Pp. 280. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. “A sensible book, and a most valuable One.... We con

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