THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,How shall men grow?”

Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain naïveté, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much at the mercy of such associates.

On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed towardthe East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing warm and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened the way. By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was strained from the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to lassitude.

“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”

“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success! Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It beats electric lights all hollow.”

“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know. I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m going home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when you’re not home so much.”

“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.

With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter over his own excess, and in tones heralds usedin the days of Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.

To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory—all this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no pleasure without an end—that end being money.

The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand. But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something. He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is thefirst step toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.

This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?

The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is impervious to true American influences.

Our old American teachings!—for instance, the estimate of the greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever—that, it was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material things to living. “That citizen who lives without labor, verily how evil a man!”—’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, and such sentiments as this of Euripides dominated our democracy.

But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of an idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of immigrants, the European conception of work’s inherent ignobleness has grown to strong hold.

“Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,” “Ἔργον δ ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the present day among genuine Americans.

Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite “go,” optimism, and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as these types by the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism really lies—but it must be with their greater spiritualization and greater moral elevation for the future.

In order to give her praises a lustre and beauty peculiar and appropriate, I should have to run into the history of her life—a task requiring both more leisure and a richer vein. Thus much I have said in few words, according to my ability. But the truth is that the only true commender of this lady is time, which, so long a course as it has run, has produced nothing in this sex like her.Bacon, of Queen Elizabeth

Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des weiblichen Geschlechts ist in dem monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht zu beseitigende statistische Nothwendigkeit.Gustave Schönberg

Throughout our fair country there has long been familiar, in actual life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as the New England woman.

When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred and fifty years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded, rosy-cheeked, full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her physical and mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and influenced by our electric climate, a differentiation began, an unconscious individualizing of herself: this was far, far back in the time of the Pilgrim Mothers.

In this adaptation she developed certain characteristics which are weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of saints in heroismand self-devotion. Just what these qualities were, and why they grew, is worth considering before—in the bustle of the twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her primitive and elevated spirit—she has passed from view and is quite forgotten.

In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests of Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always been most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the church and school were in simpler days, and still at times are—even to our generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its hour-glasses—the powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From these sources the larger part of herself, the part that does not live by bread alone, has been nourished.

It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But, with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard walls things dearest to a woman’s soul,—a pure and sober family life, a husband’s protective spirit, the birth and growth of children, neighborly service—keenly dear to her—for all whose lives should come within touch of her active hands, and an old age guarded by the devotion of those to whom she had given her activities.

To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman ever bore in mind with calmness—a secluded ground, shaded by hemlocks or willows, where should stand the headstone marking her dust, over which violets should blossom to freshening winds, and robin call to mate in the resurrection time ofspring, and in the dim corners of which ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet mould to meet the summer’s fervency.

Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was indefatigable in what Plato calls women’s work, τὰ ἔνδον. She rose while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her household, and eat not the bread of idleness. In housekeeping—which in her conservative neighborhood and among her primary values meant, almost up to this hour, not directing nor helping hired people in heaviest labors, but rather all that the phrase implied in pioneer days—her energies were spent—herself cooking; herself spinning the thread and weaving, cutting out and sewing all family garments and household linen; herself preserving flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she added the making of yeast,candles, and soap for her household, their butter and cheese—perhaps also these foods for market sale—at times their cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of as fine a color and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which the wife of immortal Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams herself testifies that she made her own soap, in her early days at Braintree, and chopped the wood with which she kindled her fires. In such accomplishments she was one of a great sisterhood, thousands of whom served before and thousands after her. These women rarely told such activities in their letters, and rarely, too, I think, to their diaries; for their fingers fitted a quill but awkwardly after a day with distaff or butter-moulding.

These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and routine, and they would have permitted her—an untiring materialist in all things workableby hands—to go many ways in the wanderings of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with the Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all things having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood, she had but one mental path.

The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per omnia sæcula sæculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or to publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by sermons and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was offered. On Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was warned by these teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her childhood she had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she should ever be examining head and heart to escape everlasting hell-fire, and that she shouldendure so as to conduct her devoted life as to appease the anger of a God as vindictive as the very ecclesiasts themselves. No escape or reaction was possible.

The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and sensitive is evident. The sole way open to her was the road to introspection—that narrow lane hedged with the trees of contemplative life to all suffering human kind.

Even those of the community whose life duties took them out in their world, and who were consequently more objective than women, even the men, under such conditions, grew self-examining to the degree of a proverb, “The bother with the Yankee is that he rubs badly at the juncture of the soul and body.”

In such a life as this first arose the subjective characteristics of the New England woman at which so many gibes have been written, so many flings spoken; at which so many burly sideshave shaken with laughter ἄσβεστος. Like almost every dwarfed or distorted thing in the active practical world, “New England subjectivity” is a result of the shortsightedness of men, the assumption of authority of the strong over the weak, and the wrongs they have to advance self done one another.

Nowadays, in our more objective life, this accent of the ego is pronounced irritating. But God’s sequence is apt to be irritating.

The New England woman’s subjectivity is a result of what has been—the enslaving by environment, the control by circumstance, of a thing flexible, pliant, ductile—in this case a hypersensitive soul—and its endeavor to shape itself to lines and forms men in authority dictated.

Cut off from the larger world, this woman was forced into the smaller. Her mind must have field and exercise for its natural activity and constructiveness.Its native expression was in the great objective world of action and thought about action, the macrocosm; stunted and deprived of its birthright, it turned about and fed upon its subjective self, the microcosm.

Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the men, through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-blooded and daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful muscle by the call of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the siren voice of the cities; and also through the loss of men in war—that untellable misery—these less fortunate women—the unmarried—have in all New England life been many. All the rounding and relaxing grace and charm which lie between maid and man they knew only in brooding fancy. Love might spring, but its growth was rudimentary. Theirlife was not fulfilled. There were many such spinners.

These women, pertinacious at their tasks, dreamed dreams of what could never come to be. Lacking real things, they talked much of moods and sensations. Naturally they would have moods. Human nature will have its confidant, and naturally they talked to one another more freely than to their married sisters. Introspection plus introspection again. A life vacuous in external events and interrupted by no masculine practicality—where fluttering nerves were never counterpoised by steady muscle—afforded every development to subjective morbidity.

And expression of their religious life granted no outlet to these natures—no goodly work direct upon humankind. The Reformation, whatever magnificence it accomplished for the freedom of the intellect, denied liberty and individual choice to women. Puritanismwas the child of the Reformation. Like all religions reacting from the degradations and abuses of the Middle Ages, for women it discountenanced community life. Not for active ends, nor of a certainty for contemplative, were women to hive together and live independent lives.

In her simple home, and by making the best of spare moments, the undirected impulse of the spinster produced penwipers for the heathen and slippers for the dominie. But there was, through all the long years of her life, no dignified, constructive, human expression for the childless and husbandless woman. Because of this lack a dynamo force for good was wasted for centuries, and tens of thousands of lives were blighted.

In New England her theology ruled, as we have said, with an iron and tyrannous hand. It published the axiom, and soon put it in men’s mouths, that theonly outlet for women’s activities was marriage. No matter if truth to the loftiest ideals kept her single, a woman unmarried, from a Garden of Eden point of view and the pronunciamento of the average citizen, was not fulfilling the sole and only end for which he dogmatized women were made—she was not child-bearing.

In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the perturbations and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb endurance, which the humanity about them, and even that of our later day, could not comprehend, and commonly translated into apathy or unsensitiveness. The legendary fervor and devotion of the saints of otherdays pale before their self-denying discipline.

But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval faith, the applause of contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration and enthusiasm as a “holy person,” the modern sister lived in her small world very generally an upper servant in a married brother’s or sister’s family. Ibsen’s Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in speaking of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then prevailing sentiment, “You don’t suppose I let her want for anything. Oh, no; I think I may say I am a good brother. Of course, she lives with us and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough for her dress, and—what can a single woman want more?... You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some steady-going person like her whom one can put to anything that may turn up.”

Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence—“superfluous women;” that is, “unnecessary from being in excess of what is needed,” women who had not taken husbands, or had lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the use of the word “female”—meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,” a woman—which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it forever from polite usage.

In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a being suchas the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation. Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned as immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression of the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature, not markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing woman, and far from positively feminine.

All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine.Her religion was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and foul.

In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals, has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life—and increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led the world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth is she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex—whereshe is most femininely and self-effacinglyit.

It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in this circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of the New England woman’s subjectivity, her unconscious self-consciousness, and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that has attracted the attention of the world, caused its wonder, and led to its false judgment of her merit.

Social changes—a result of the Zeitgeist—within the last two generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the “sphere” of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism has to a degree been taking their place. While, on the other hand,—one may say this quite apart from construing the galvanic twitchings of a revived mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as real life—there have also come conceptions of the libertyand dignity of womanhood, independent or self-dependent, beyond those which prevailed in the nunnery world.

A popular feeling has been growing that a woman’s sphere is whatever she can do excellently. What effect this will have on social relations at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions another chivalry may spring! What irony of history if on New England soil!! Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying women less than men for the same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women the drudging details,—necessary work, indeed, but that to which no reputation is affixed,—and giving to men the broader tasks in which there is contact with the world and the result of contact, growth, may ultimately react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser.

The sparseness of wealth, the meagrenessof material ideals, and the frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have never allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the people has been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their geniality, like their sunshine, has always had a trace of the northeast wind—chilled by the Labrador current of their theology. Native wit has been put out by narrow duties. The conscience of their theology has been instinctively for segregation, never for social amalgamation. They are more solitary than gregarious.

We should expect, then, an abruptness of manner among those left to develop social genius—the women—even among those travelled and most generously educated. We should expect a degree of baldness and uncoveredness in their social processes, which possibly might be expressed by the polysyllable which her instructor wrote at the endof a Harvard Annex girl’s theme to express its literary quality, “unbuttoned”—unconsciously.

When you meet the New England woman, you see her placing you in her social scale. That in tailor-making you God may have used a yardstick different from the New England measure has not yet reached her consciousness; nor that the system of weights and measures of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls “the half-baked civilization of New England” may not prevail in all towns and countries. Should you chance not to fit any notch she has cut in her scale, she is apt to tell you this in a raucous, strident voice, with a schoolma’am air in delivery of her opinion. If she is untravelled and purely of New England surroundings, these qualities may be accented. She is undeniably frank and unquestionably truthful. At all times, in centuries past and to-day, she would scorn suchlies as many women amazingly tell for amusement or petty self-defence.

It is evident that she is a good deal of a fatalist. This digression will illustrate: If you protest your belief that so far as this world’s estimate goes some great abilities have no fair expression, that in our streets we jostle mute inglorious Miltons; if you say you have known most profound and learned natures housed on a Kansas farm or in a New Mexico cañon; nay, if you aver your faith that here in New England men and women of genius are unnoticed because Messrs. Hue and Cry, voicing the windier, have not appreciated larger capacities, she will pityingly tell you that this larger talent is supposititious. If it were real, she continues, it must have risen to sight and attracted the eye of men. Her human knowledge is not usually deep nor her insight subtle, and she does not know that in saying this she is contradicting the law of literaryhistory, that the producers of permanent intellectual wares are often not recognized by their contemporaries, nor run after by mammonish publishers. And at last, when you answer that the commonest question with our humankind is nourishment for the body, that ease and freedom from exhausting labor must forerun education, literature, art, she retorts that here is proof she is right: if these unrecognized worthies you instance had the gifts you name, they would be superior to mere physical wants.

If you have longanimity, you do not drive the generality closer; you drown your reflections in Sir Thomas Browne: “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.... Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that standremembered in the known account of time?”

Her narrow fatalism, united with the conservatism and aristocratic instincts common to all women from their retired life and ignorance of their kind, gives the New England woman a hedged sympathy with the proletarian struggle for freer existence. It may be lack of comprehension rather than lack of sympathy. She would cure by palliations, a leprosy by healing divers sores. At times you find her extolling the changes wrought in the condition of women during the last seventy years. She argues for the extension of education; her conservatism admits that. She may not draw the line of her radicalism even before enfranchisement. But the vaster field of the education of the human race by easier social conditions, by lifting out of money worship and egoism,—this has never been, she argues, and therefore strenuously insists it never will be.

Her civic spirit is Bostonesque. A town’s spirit is a moral and spiritual attitude impressed upon members of a community where events have engendered unity of sentiment, and it commonly subordinates individual idiosyncrasies.

The spirit Boston presents includes a habit of mind apparently ratiocinative, but once safely housed in its ism incredulously conservative and persistently self-righteous—lacking flexibility. Within its limits it is as fixed as the outline of the Common. It has externally a concession and docility. It is polite and kind—but when its selfishness is pressing its greediness is of the usurious lender. In our generation it is marked by lack of imagination, originality, initiative. Having had its origin in Non-conformity, it has the habit of seeing what it is right for others to do to keep their house clean—pulling down its mouth when the rest of the worldlaughs, square-toeing when the rest trip lightly, straight-lacing when the other human is erring, but all the time carrying a heart under its east-wind stays, and eyes which have had a phenomenal vision for right and wrong doing—for others’ wrongdoing especially; yet withal holding under its sour gravity moral impulses of such import that they have leavened the life of our country to-day and rebuked and held in check easier, lighter, less profound, less illuminated, less star-striking ideals.

It is a spirit featured not unsimilarly to the Lenox landscape—safe, serene, inviting, unable in our day to produce great crop without the introduction of fresh material—and from like cause. A great glacier has pressed on both human spirit and patch of earth. But the sturdy, English bedrock of the immaterial foundation was not by the glacier of Puritanism so smoothed, triturated, and fertilized as was Berkshire soil bythe pulverizing weight of its titanic ice flow.

This spirit is also idealistic outside its civic impulses,—referring constantly to the remote past or future,—and in its eyes the abstract is apt to be as real as the concrete. To this characteristic is due not only Emersonism and Alcottism—really old Platonism interpreted for the transcendental Yankee—but also that faith lately revivified, infinitely vulgarized, as logically distorted as the pneuma doctrine of the first century, and called “Christian Science.” The idealism of Emerson foreran the dollar-gathering idealism of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy as the lark of spring foreruns the maple worm.

This idealism oftenest takes religious phases—as in its Puritan origin—and in many instances in our day is content with crude expression. Of foregone days evidence is in an incomplete list—only twenty-five—of Brigham Young’swives, some of whom bore such old New England patronymics as Angell, Adams, Ross, Lawrence, Bigelow, Snow, Folsom. May a fleeing of these women to Mormonism be explained by their impatience and heart-sickness at their unsexing social condition and religious spirit?—with the admitting to the great scheme of life and action but one sex and that the one to which their theocratic theologians belonged?

Speculations of pure philosophy this New England woman is inclined to fear as vicious. In dialectics she rests upon the glories of the innocuous transcendentalism of the nineteenth century forties. Exceptions to this rule are perhaps those veraciously called “occult;” for she will run to listen to the juggling logic and boasting rhetoric of Swamis Alphadananda and Betadananda and Gammadananda, and cluster about the audience-room of those dusky fakirs much as a swarm of bees flits in May.And like the bees, she deserts cells filled with honey for combs machine-made and wholly empty.

Illuminated by some factitious light, she will again go to unheard-of lengths in extenuating Shelley’s relations to his wives, and in explaining George Eliot’s marriage to her first husband. Here, and for at least once in her life, she combats convention and reasons upon natural grounds. “I don’t see the wickedness of Rudolph,” said one spinster, referring to the tragedy connecting a prince of Austria and a lady of the Vetchera family. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have followed his heart. But I shouldn’t dare say that to any one else in Boston. Most of them think as I do, but they would all be shocked to have it said.”

“Consider the broad meaning of what you say. Let this instance become a universal law.”

“Still I believe every sensible manand woman applauds Rudolph’s independence.”

With whatsoever or whomsoever she is in sympathy this woman is apt to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could be no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by introspective and subjective pondering, has for her own actions abnormal size and activity. It is always alert, always busy, always prodding, and not infrequently sickened by its congested activity. Duty to those about her, and industry for the same beneficiaries, are watchwords of its strength; and to fail in a mote’s weight is to gain condemnation of two severest sorts—her own and the community’s. The opinion of the community in which she lives is her second almighty power.

In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his Florilegium—“A sympatheticwife is a man’s best possession.” She has mental sympathy—a result of her tense nervous organization, her altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty, justice, and right.

In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force and depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue, reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak, waist normal, and hips undersized.

She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her relaxation, and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating air imparts. This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her elbows set in an angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the Cantabrigian man. In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a sympathetic copying, of an admirable norm; but it is graceless in petticoats. As she stepsshe knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. More often she toes in than out.

She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations has entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New England it could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it, that a woman may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many beefsteaks.

Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair inclines to the ash shades.

Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous communities, where salaries are and an assured future, is a stereotypedsmile. In more uncertain life and less fortunate surroundings, her countenance shows a weariness of spirit and a homesickness for heaven that make your soul ache.

Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on lofty duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or flirting, or a femininely accented camaraderie with men—such as the more elemental women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and New York enjoy. She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty of St. Louis who declared, “You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a time!” when asked if she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport. This New England woman would, forsooth, take no dash in Aurovulgus. But falling by chance among vulgarities and iniquities, she guards against the defilement of her lips, for she loves a pure and clean usage of our facile English speech.

The old phase of the New England woman is passing. It is the hour for some poet to voice her threnody. Social conditions under which she developed are almost obliterated. She is already outnumbered in her own home by women of foreign blood, an ampler physique, a totally different religious conception, a far different conduct; and a less exalted ideal of life. Intermixtures will follow and racial lines gradually fade. In the end she will not be. Her passing is due to the unnumbered husbandless and the physical attenuation of the married—attenuation resulting from their spare and meagre diet, and, it is also claimed, from the excessive household labor of their mothers. More profoundly causative—in fact, inciting the above conditions—was the distorted morality and debilitating religion impressed upon her sensitive spirit. Mayhap in this present decay some Mœra is punishing that awful crime of self-sufficingecclesiasticism. Her unproductivity—no matter from what reason, whether from physical necessity or a spirit-searching flight from the wrath of God—has been her death.

... ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρηΖεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, ...τοῖς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπων βίοτον καὶ ἤθε’ ὀπάσσαςΖεὺς Κρονίδης κατένασσε πατὴρ ἐς πείρατα γαίης·—χαὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες—ἐν μαχάρων νήσοισι παῤ Ὠχεανὸν βαθυδίνην,—ὄλβιοι ἡρωες· τοῖσιν μελιηδέα καρπὸν—τρςὶ ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.Hesiod

Under bloudie Diocletian ... a great number of Christians which were assembled togither to heare the word of life ... were slaine by the wicked pagans at Lichfield, whereof ... as you would say, The field of dead corpses.Holinshed

Upon the broad level of one of our Litchfield hills is—if we accept ancient legend—a veritable Island of the Blessed. There heroes fallen after strong fight enjoy rest forever.

The domination of unyielding law in the puny affairs of men—the unfathomableness of Mœra, the lot no man can escape—comes upon one afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate! “ἅπαντα τíχτει χθὼν πάλιν τε λαμβáνει,” cried Euripides—“all things the earth puts forth and takes again.”

But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here been wiped away—here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming unison with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to your very eyes—andalmost intoxicates you with its life and joy. Through its day-translucence crows cut their measured flight and brisker birds flitter, and when the young moon shines out of a warm west elegiac whippoorwills cry to the patient night.

Neither volcanic ashes nor flood, whirlwind nor earthquake—mere decay has here nullified men’s efforts for congregated life and work. The soil of the hill, porous and sandy, is of moderate fertility. Native oaks and chestnuts, slender birches and fragrant hemlocks, with undergrowths of coral-flowering laurel, clothe its slopes. Over its sandstone ledges brooks of soft water treble minor airs—before they go loitering among succulent grasses and spearmint and other thirsty brothers of the distant meadows.

Nearly two hundred years ago pioneers of a Roundhead, independent type—the type which led William of Orange across the Channel for preservation ofthat liberty which Englishmen for hundreds of years had spoken of as “antient”—such men broke this sod, till then untouched by axe or plough. They made clearings, and grouped their hand-hewn houses just where in cool mornings of summer they could see the mists roll up from their hill-locked pond to meet the rosy day; just where, when the sun sank behind the distant New York mountains, they could catch within their windows his last shaft of gold.

Here they laid their hearths and dwelt in primitive comfort. Their summers were unspeakably beautiful—and hard-working. Their autumns indescribably brilliant, hill-side and valley uniting to form a radiance God’s hand alone could hold. Their winters were of deep snows and cold winds and much cutting and burning of wood. The first voice of their virid spring came in the bird-calls of early March, when snow melted and sap mounted, and sugar maples ransyrup; when ploughs were sharpened, and steaming and patient oxen rested their sinews through the long, pious Sabbath.

Wandering over this village site, now of fenced-in fields, you find here and there a hearth and a few cobbles piled above it. The chimney-shaft has long since disappeared. You happen upon stone curbs, and look down to the dark waters of wells. You come upon bushes of old-fashioned, curled-petal, pink-sweet roses and snowy phlox, and upon tiger lilies flaunting odalisque faces before simple sweetbrier, and upon many another garden plant which “a handsome woman that had a fine hand”—as Izaak Walton said of her who made the trout fly—once set as border to her path. Possibly the very hand that planted these pinks held a bunch of their sweetness after it had grown waxen and cold. The pinks themselves are now choked by the pushing grass.

And along this line of gooseberry-bushes we trace a path from house to barn. Here was the fireplace. The square of small boulders yonder marks the barn foundation. Along this path the house-father bore at sunrise and sunset his pails of foaming milk. Under that elm spreading between living-room and barn little children of the family built pebble huts, in these rude confines cradling dolls which the mother had made from linen of her own weave, or the father whittled when snow had crusted the earth and made vain all his hauling and digging.

Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in the chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy children, popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with knitting and spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittingsand burnished tools for the spring work. Outside the stars glittered through a clear sky and the soundless earth below lay muffled in sleep.

Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not far away were stores of merchant supplies. But of these houses no vestige now remains. Where the post-house stood the earth is matted with ground-pine and gleaming with scarlet berries of the wintergreen. The wiping-out is as complete as that of the thousand trading-booths, long since turned to clay, of old Greek Mycenæ, or of the stalls of the ancient trading-folk dwelling between Jaffa and Jerusalem where Tell-ej-Jezari now lies.

The church of white clap-boards which these villagers used for praise and prayer—not a small temple—still abides. Many of the snowy houses of old New England worship pierce their luminous ether with graceful spires. But this meeting-house lifts a square, centralbell-tower which now leans on one side as if weary with long standing. The old bell which summoned its people to their pews still hangs behind green blinds—a not unmusical town-crier. But use, life, good works have departed with those whom it exhorted to church duty, and in sympathy with all the human endeavor it once knew, but now fordone, in these days it never rings blithely, it can only be made to toll. Possibly it can only be made to toll because of the settling of its supporting tower. But the fact remains; and who knows if some wounded spirit may not be dwelling within its brazen curves, sick at heart with its passing and ineffective years?

Not far from the church, up a swell of the land, lies the burying-ground—a sunny spot. Pines here and there, also hemlocks and trees which stand bare after the fall of leaves. But all is bright and open, not a hideous stone-quarrysuch as in our day vanity or untaught taste makes of resting-places of our dead. Gay-colored mushrooms waste their luxurious gaudiness between the trees, and steadfast myrtle, with an added depth to its green from the air’s clarity, binds the narrow mounds with ever-lengthening cords.

But whether they are purple with the violets of May or with Michaelmas daisies, there is rest over all these mounds—“über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’.” Daily gossip and sympathy these neighbors had. The man of this grave was he who passed many times a day up and down the path by the gooseberry-bushes and bore the foaming milk. He is as voiceless now as the flies that buzzed about his shining pail. And the widow who dwelt across the road—she of the sad eyes who sat always at her loom, for her youthful husband was of those who never came back from the massacre of Fort William Henry—she to whom thisman hauled a sled of wood for every two he brought to his own door, to whom his family carried elderberry wine, cider, and home mince-meat on Thanksgiving—she, too, is voiceless even of thanks, her body lying over yonder, now in complete rest—no loom, no treadle, no thumping, no whirring of spinning-wheel, no narrow pinching and poverty, her soul of heroic endurance joined with her long separate soldier soul of action.

The pathos of their lives and the warmth of their humanity!—however coated with New England austerity. Many touching stories these little headstones tell—as this:

“To the memory of Mrs. Abigail, Consort of Mr. Joseph Merrill, who died May 3rd, 1767, in the 52 year of her age.”

A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one’s lot. Mr. Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side,his villagers, and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens, coarse-handed from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and cattle. While he listened to sermons in the white church down the slope, his eyes were often heavy for need of morning sleep; and many a Sunday his back and knees ached from lack of rest as he stood beside the sharer of his fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple memorial warms the human heart one hundred and thirty-eight years after his “consort” had for the last time folded her housewifely hands.

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