the gaze of
millions.

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the
places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the
sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior,
instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility,
or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous
deportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our
American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I
esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. A
certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise
to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly let her be as
much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous
reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical
nature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served.
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into
heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva,
Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upward
path, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists
than that which their feet know. But besides those who make good in
our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not
women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with
courtesy; who unloose our tongues and we speak; who anoint our eyes and
we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls
of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in
these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and
will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was it
Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental
force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after
day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her.
She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into
one society: like air or water, an element of such a great range of
affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where
she is present all others will be more than they are wont. She was a
unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her.