ter, and
the wonderful book is ended. Surely, it tells its own moral; and we,
who have woven into short measure the tissue of its relations, need not
appear either as the apologist of a very exceptional woman, or as the
vindicator of laws inevitable and universal, the mischief of whose
violation no human knowledge can justly fathom. The world knows that the
life before us is no example for women to follow; but it also knows,
we think, that she who led it was on the whole an earnest and sincere
person, of ardent imagination and large heart, loving the good as well
as the beautiful, even if often mistaken in both,--and above all, honest
in her errors and their acknowledgment. Gross injustice has, no doubt,
been done her. The creations of her powerful fancy have been taken for
images of herself, and the popular mind, delighting to elevate all
things beyond the bounds of Nature, has made her a monster. It is clear,
we think, that those who have represented her as plunged headlong in a
career of vice and dissipation, the companion of all that is low and
trivial, have slandered alike her acts and her intentions. Like the
rest of us, she is the child of her antecedents and surroundings. Her
education was as exceptional as her character. Her marriage brought no
moral influence to bear upon her. Her separation opened before her a new
and strange way, never to be trodden by any with impunity. Yet we do not
believe, that, in the most undesirable circumstances of her life, she
ever long lost sight of its ideal object. We do not doubt that her zeal
for human progress, her sympathy for the wrongs of the race, and her
distrust of existing institutions were deep and sincere. We do not doubt
that she was devoted in friendship, disinterested in love, ardent in
philanthropy. She has seen the poverty and insincerity of society; she
has quarrelled with what she calls the shams of sacred things, the
merely conventional marriage, the God of bigotry and hypocrisy, the
government of oppression and fraud; but she ends by recognizing and
demanding the marriage of heart, the God of enlightened faith, the
government of order and progress. Responding to the dominant chord
of the nineteenth century, she strove to exalt individuality above
sociality, and passion above decorum and usage. Nor would she allow any
World's Congress of morals to settle the delicate limits between these
opposing vital forces, between what we owe to ourselves and what we owe
t