vitality to spare,--no reserved stock of force to draw
upon in cases of family exigency. She is exquisitely strung, she
is cultivated, she is refined; but she is too nervous, too wiry,
too sensitive,--she burns away too fast; only the easiest of
circumstances, the most watchful of care and nursing, can keep her
within the limits of comfortable health; and yet this is the
creature who must undertake family life in a country where it is
next to an absolute impossibility to have permanent domestics.
Frequent change, occasional entire breakdowns, must be the lot of
the majority of housekeepers,--particularly those who do not live
in cities."

"In fact," said my wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way
of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical
proportions that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she
strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so
much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into
proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she
is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into
reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing
as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most
of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or
the Venus of Milo.

"Once in a while our Italian opera-singers bring to our shores those
glorious physiques which formed the inspiration of Italian painters;
and then American editors make coarse jokes about Barnum's fat woman,
and avalanches, and pretend to be struck with terror at such
dimensions.

"We should be better instructed, and consider that Italy does us a
favor, in sending us specimens, not only of higher styles of musical
art, but of a warmer, richer, and more abundant womanly life. The
magnificent voice is only in keeping with the magnificent proportions
of the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows
without effort,--which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but
alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and
trilling,--a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich,
sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,--can come only with a
physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,--from a nature such as
the sun of Italy ripens, as he does her golden grapes, filling it with
the new wine of song."

"Well," said I, "so much for our strictures