what it has been in its bloom. I was then
unconscious of its value, which was probably augmented by my ignorance."

That she understated her personal charms, the concurrent admiration of
contemporary men and women fully attests. Her physical beauty was
marvelous, and when great men were subjected to its influence, to the
imperial functions of her intellect, and to the persuasions of an
organization exceedingly spiritual and magnetic, it is no wonder that
her influence, domestic woman, housewife, as she always was, became so
effectual over them.

Let me here warn my hearers not to forestall this woman in their
judgments. She was not a manlike female. No better wife ever guided her
husband anonymously by her intuitions, or assisted him by her learning.
In the farm house and in the palace she was as wifely and retiring as
any of the excellent women who have been the wives of American
statesmen. Every one knew her abilities and her stupendous acquirements,
and she felt them herself, but, notwithstanding, she never would consent
to write a line for publication and avow it as her own, and never did,
until that time when her husband was an outlaw, when her child was torn
from her, when she herself stood in the shadow of the guillotine, and
writhed under the foulest written and spoken calumnies that can torture
outraged womanhood into eloquence. She then wrote, in twenty-six days,
her immortal Appeal to Posterity, and those stirring letters and papers
incident to her defense, from which some extracts have been here
presented. She was mistress of a faultless style. Her command over the
resources of her language was despotic. She could give to French prose
an Italian rhythmus. She had wit and imagination--a reasoning
imagination. She was erudite. Probably no woman ever lived better
entitled to a high position in literature. But she never claimed it. She
holds it now only as a collateral result of her defense in the struggle
in which her life was the stake, and in which she lost. She says:
"Never, however, did I feel the smallest temptation to become an author.
I perceived at a very early period that a woman who acquires this title
loses far more than she gains. She forfeits the affections of the male
sex, and provokes the criticisms of her own. If her works be bad, she is
ridiculed, and not without reason; if good, her right to them is
disputed; or if envy be forced to acknowledge the best part to be her
own, her character, her